Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town
And they tell him,
Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”

The Saturday before Noah turned sixteen Beth and I participated in the Climate March. It was an exceptionally hot day for late April and I know climate’s not weather and it’s that kind of logic that makes people bring snowballs into Congress during debates about environmental legislation, but still… It seemed as if Mother Nature was making a point.

I didn’t take pictures, but Beth got some before I arrived. She had to be there early for work, so I met her there after taking June to her guitar lesson and then taking the guitar June dropped and broke at the bus stop to our local instrument shop to see if it could be repaired. Mike Kepka, the videographer Noah assisted at the Women’s March, also took some (his are the black and whites). For part of the time, we were marching near Mike and his family so we saw some of the same things.

It was a visually interesting march. People were dressed as polar bears and lobsters (“cooked by climate”) and carrots (“I carrot about climate change”) and a cow, to promote vegetarianism. There was also a big inflatable cow. I didn’t get close enough to see if there were explanatory signs for that one, but I did hear a woman on her cell phone giving someone directions by saying she was behind the cow, which for some reason struck both me and Beth as funny. There also was a big light blue bird made with sheets draped over a frame and smaller white birds on wires that seemed to fly over the crowd. At first I thought these were kites. These may have just been celebrations of nature. Whatever the reason, they were lovely.

People carried signs with statistics about climate change with citations carefully printed on the bottom. There were a lot of signs with pictures of the Earth with captions like “I’m with Her” or “There’s No Planet B.” I liked those.

The kids opted not to come with us. Noah was swamped with work and June’s getting choosy about what marches she attends.  She says she’d like to go to the LGBT one in June, so I hope the three of us or maybe even all four of us can go to that one. We have to pick and choose, too.  We skipped the Science March the weekend prior because two weekends of marching in a row seemed like a lot, and Beth’s union had a contingent in the Climate March, making it an easy choice. The turnout was good, maybe as high as 200,000, and people were spirited.

Truth be told, I was feeling more dutiful than inspired, but that’s okay. Duty’s important. It’s what will get us through the next three years and nine months when we get tired of writing letters and making phone calls and taking to the streets. I will admit I’ve slowed down since January and February, but I haven’t stopped. I’m determined not to stop.

When the march reached the White House, Beth and I peeled off rather than follow it to the Washington Monument. We stopped for a bathroom break at a public restroom in a park and to drink some much needed cool drinks and to rest our sore feet at Pret A Manger, and then headed home.

Noah and I usually cook dinner on Saturday nights but I was tired from marching and wanted to go out. I thought Thai would be nice. We used to have a tradition of going out for Thai the night before Noah’s birthday because Beth and I had Thai the night before he was born, but as schedules have gotten more complicated, it’s morphed into Thai sometime near Noah’s birthday. And in recent years Noah has decided he’s not crazy about Thai, so we left him at home working on a paper about the relationship of democracy and political satire while Beth, June, and I went out to celebrate his birth without him. I didn’t feel good about this, but he wasn’t in the mood to go out and it didn’t seem right to force him to come either.

He turned sixteen four days later. Cartwheels haven’t turned to car wheels yet, but Beth’s been investigating driving schools so he can learn to drive this summer. It was a low-key birthday, as his birthdays often are. I marked it by posting seventeen pictures of him on Facebook, one each from the spring or summer of every year from 2001 to 2017, (to keep the seasons in line with Mitchell’s lyrics, and to help me narrow my choices). He said his band class sang “Happy Birthday” to him. The teacher keeps track of all his musicians’ birthdays and does this for everyone, which I think is a nice touch. Otherwise it was a normal school day.

Noah requested a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, so Beth made it the night before. Dinner was egg noodles with broccoli, tofu, and Parmesan cheese, also at his request. He opened presents between dinner and cake. We got him a charger he doesn’t have to share, which should cut down on family friction, and a set of extra soft jersey sheets in light blue because the flannel sheets we got him for Christmas were an unexpected hit. There were also several iTunes cards from various relatives, totaling and impressive sum of money, a pair of green and white striped summer pajamas, and two Ursula LeGuin books, because Noah and I are reading the Earthsea Cycle.

Did you know this series didn’t stop with the trilogy LeGuin wrote in the sixties and seventies? I didn’t until we started reading it and I looked it up and was surprised to find there are now three more, written between 1990 and 2002, plus a recent short story, for now only available electronically. We checked the fourth book out of the library last month and I bought the fifth and sixth ones. If you love the old Earthsea books, these are very different in tone, but still interesting and fun. (I also bought a copy of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger because the Dark Tower series is next up for us and I don’t seem to have a copy, even though I have the rest of the series. I didn’t wrap it, though, because it’s not his to keep. I want a complete set.)

The day after his birthday, Noah took his first AP test, in Government. When we first found out the exam was the day after his birthday we felt sorry for him, but it turned out to be fortuitous. He’s been studying hard for it for a long time and didn’t feel the need to cram on his birthday. It also meant he had a half day of school on Thursday because kids who took the exam were excused from afternoon classes. We started Tales from Earthsea before June got home from school and he didn’t do any school work for the rest of the day. The next day he had a field trip to the Newseum, and only had to attend one class, so he got an extended post-birthday break. (One down note: He was surprised and indignant to see they were selling MAGA caps in the gift shop of a museum dedicated to the first amendment.)

On Saturday we went out again, this time with him, to his favorite Italian restaurant in Silver Spring. I tried to convince him to try the new Italian place in Takoma Park, but he said he’d prefer to “stick with what we know,” which is a very Noah sentiment. He got baked ziti, which is his favorite dish there. And Beth and I also chose our favorites—eggplant parmesan for Beth, spinach ravioli for me. June branched out, trying the minestrone and the mushroom ravioli. And with that, Noah’s birthday celebration was over.

I would care about climate change, and care deeply, even if I didn’t have kids. Kids aren’t the only motivator for activism, but they are a powerful one. After all, my kids have to live on this planet longer than I do. I want it to be habitable when they’ve each gone around the circle sixteen times, sixty times, and beyond.