I had just finished filling the last plate for breakfast and we sat down to dig in.
“Wow,” my daughter said. “This is the last weekend we’ll be together before Commissioning.”
I paused, coffee mug in mid-air. This would, in fact, be the last weekend we spend together before the mid-week Commissioning frenzy.
We had spent this weekend in Denver at Cate’s request. She wanted to get a few things in that she hadn’t been able to do during her five years in Colorado. So, we visited the Museum of Illusions, which turned out to be just a load of fun and the source of a lot of great pictures, went to her favorite boba tea place and spent way too much money at a place with those crane machines where you grab little plushies and try to extract them. We even managed a brisk walk in one of Denver’s city parks.
And like most of our weekends together, we lazed on the couch and watched South Park, and I played chef for dinner and breakfast. Despite all the chaos of military academy life – not to mention some of the disruptions in our personal lives – we had created something of a routine.
As I sat in the airport lounge at the Denver airport, I figured I had made about a dozen trips to Colorado in the past five years, many of them weekend visits. They were always quick turnarounds, arriving Friday evening and back at the airport after lunch on Sunday, but we didn’t try to jam in a lot of activity. Mostly, we just hung out. I would make breakfast or dinner, and we’d talk. Sometimes the subjects turned heavy, other times funny things we’d seen on Instagram.
As always with the Parade of Lasts, I cherished the moment, realizing things would soon no longer be the same. All the routines we’d developed over the past five years – the weekend visits, the summer adventures – they were about to be disrupted as we both set upon a new path.
By the end of the month, I will, for the first time in nine years, no longer be a military academy parent. And my daughter will no longer be a cadet. She will no longer be fretting over a class or a random room inspection and I’ll no longer be looking at the calendar, plotting my next flight to Denver.
Funny, we’ve been talking about Commissioning Week logistics for some time now, but as we cleaned up the breakfast dishes and mulled over some of the finer points, it really started to hit me. The end is near.
In a flash, I recalled dropping her at the Prep School in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and fretting over whether she’d make the varsity cheerleading team her sophomore year and switching roommates and the initial disappointment of not getting her first choice of jobs. And I remembered out time together, her brother joining us for a long weekend in the mountains on her first 96-hour pass when we came within 100 yards of a pair of moose, the AirBnB with the ping pong table and the other with the pinball machine, standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona and a madcap 28-hour cannonball run from Boise, Idaho to Detroit during a global IT outage.
Yet, the Parade of Lasts arrived here, the last weekend together. And now, there’s only one stop left – Setting foot on the grounds of the Air Force Academy as an academy parent, seeing her as a cadet for the final time.
New memories await, for sure, but things will never be the same.
My Kid The Cadet 