Tempus fugit

Just submitted our last Harvard tuition payment.  Wow. I knew it would go fast, but still it takes my breath away.  Weren't we just traipsing around the empty summer campus, catalogs and brochures in hand, trying to look like we knew where we were going?  Wasn't it recently we scurried up and down three flights of stairs with bags of first year college supplies, filling little plastic bins with necessities, making the comfiest bed possible with what we had to work with,  putting up countless removable hooks, flinging shrink wrap and boxes into the hall as we tried to do it all before Parent's Orientation and the not-so-subtle official send-off?  Didn't we just have our goodbye meal at that little Chinese restaurant, all of us looking sidelong at the other parents and new students who themselves were trying not to look at us?  Weren't we just on the plane back to LA, deconstructing every minute of the preceding days for the entire 6 hour flight?
Don't know, but it seemed to pass far too quickly for all the hoopla.  How could this fleeting period really be the momentous, character building, slowly unfolding epoch that it was for us when we were in college? From the parental sidelines it sure seemed like it was gone in a flash.
On the iron gate of a fancy private school in Sherman Oaks it reads...College begins at two.  If that's true, then maybe it hasn't been all that fleeting.  If you count the untold readings of Pat the Bunny, if you include making cupcakes decorated with M&M'S to learn the numbers, or factor in a gazillion volunteer hours spent in schools, if you consider the science fairs, lessons, art supplies and summer camps, if you add up the never ending spelling lists, teacher conferences, and last minute projects,  if you acknowledge the encouragement, inspiration, enthusiasm and...
Come to think of it, it's about time!