Pancakes

As I've described before, I've been making pancakes (or french toast) on Sunday more or less my kids' whole lives. Natalie checked out on them a long time ago, claiming that the whole wheat in them was just wrong and that pancakes should be "fluffy" -- and I get that -- but a little healthiness to make mom happy is really a small compromise to enjoy a pure maple syrup delivery vehicle. With Graham moving into his apartment for junior year this week, perhaps never to live under the same roof with us again for a protracted period of time, today's pancakes feel a little like the end of an era.

Not that the pancakes themselves will stop flowing, far from it. I enjoy them too much myself. But the ritual of having kids eat them (or, with the kids' late waking hours, knowing that the kids will eventually eat them when they get out of bed) will be different.

Of course, this could just be typical old person "endism." It feels like as I transition towards where people are talking more and more about retirement and ailments and the like that we become ever more sensitive to mere hints of the end. Even the slight cooling we're experiencing here in what is after all early mid August, a cooling which should offer me only joy, bears with it instead tidings of the end of summer. Even though it's been by most measures a shitty summer, dominated by too much time spend in the hospital with Mary. But it has been nice to have Graham with us once more.