Saturday, August 3, 2024

August 3-4, 2024: A Proudly Tearful Tribute

[For the next two weeks my blog will feature my annual Birthday Bests series, so by the time I share my next regular post, we will have dropped my older son Aidan off to start his first year of college. Do I need to say more about why I’m sharing a proudly tearful tribute post this weekend?!]

I’ve had the chance to pay tribute to my sons Aidan and Kyle quite a few times, both in this space (where each has now also contributed a great Guest Post!) and in my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. I’m not saying you’d necessarily be monsters if you didn’t check out those prior tributes to the two best dudes I know, but, well, why risk it? Check ‘em out and then come on back for more AmericanStudierDad tributes.

Welcome back! I could dedicate a year’s worth of posts to paying tribute to my sons and not come close to saying enough, so to keep things relatively focused (if not tear-free, obvi), I’ll just highlight one particular recent moment for each of them that exemplifies why they’re just the goddamn best:

--I won’t bore you with all the details, but my wedding day earlier this year turned out to be an exceptionally long and also impressively independent day for Aidan, as he was running in a track meet that evening but wanted to be part of as much of the wedding as possible. So he ended up embarking on a truly multi-step odyssey that involved a variety of means of transportation and a late-night quest for a way to charge his phone to get him the final few miles to his Airbnb (the first time he had ever spent a night entirely solo). When he did eventually get to that resting spot, as he subsequently told us the story, he decided to take a cool-down run to a nearby beach, where, and I quote, he “sat on a rock contemplating life.” If you didn’t just gasp aloud at that line’s and moment’s combination of cuteness and sweetness, I don’t know if we can be friends.

--Aidan’s the one heading off to college (sob), whereas Kyle just completed his junior year of high school—AKA the hardest year in high school (at least in both of their experience), as well as one of the most exhausting any of us could ever have. Many of those challenges culminated with the three AP exams Kyle took, after which things calmed down a bit. Or at least they should have, but he still had plenty to do even for those classes, including the very extensive Junior Issues Research Paper (JIRP) about Aidan’s version of which I wrote a bit in this column. Kyle would have been well within his rights to mail that one in a bit, but my amazingly dedicated and inspiring younger son did the opposite—choosing a topic that’s deeply meaningful to him (climate and environmental activism, through the specific lens of Electric Vehicles) and putting in truly exemplary work on it (including pulling one of his many junior-year all-nighters). I’ve said it before and I’ll damn well say it again—no one and nothing inspires me more than my sons, in these specific moments and in every part of their identities and lives.

Birthday Bests start Monday,

Ben


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