I’m sitting in the quasi-comfortable Southwest Airlines waiting chairs at Austin Bergstrom International Airport – big, imitation leather armchairs with outlets for all your electronic toys – watching people walk this way and that, to the gates that will lead them to the planes that will fly them to their destinations. A woman walks by, with a baby in a Baby Bjorn harness strapped on her front. The baby is about four or five months old, and is looking around, wide-eyed, at all the people that rush past.

“I remember that time,” I think. I had Diego strapped to one of those things during much of our first trip to Santo Domingo together, back in 2003. It occurs to me that, challenging though it was, that was a lovely time in life – a lovely “moment.”

Recently, by way of a two-day professional development session I attended, I made the acquaintance of a number of older parents with grown-up, or close to grown-up, children. This one’s in college, this one will be a senior in high school next year. The other one is about to make their mama and daddy grandparents for the first time.

“Wow,” I usually remark, “that must blow your mind.”

Almost everyone admits that time has flown to this point. The blink of an eye, one told me in heavily-accented “Texan.” She’s from a part of Texas I politely pretend to have heard of before.

Others say things like “You wake up one morning and they’re grown.” It’s the same idea.

Whatever the comment, I’m always left with a feeling of wishing time could slow down. But it’s not about that. It’s really about me taking care of myself and my business in a manner that allows me to be present in every single moment. As you might have noticed, I am prone to sentimentalism and “yearning.” I need to train myself (or get some help from someone else) to be better at being “in the moment,” as my acting teachers used to say.

“Waking up one day” implies sleeping through part of this journey. Life is too precious. I don’t want to sleep through it. So if you catch me “napping” (metaphorically speaking that is, as in missing out on key moments in my life and the lives of my kids), by all means, nudge, slap or pinch me. Just do whatever you can as my friend/family/loved one to help me enjoy every step of the way.

Eight years ago today, without really knowing what to expect in the slightest, J and I became parents for the first time.

J spent the day “nesting,” putting final touches on what had been our office and would now be the baby’s room. She was up on a step-ladder, stenciling friendly dinosaurs along the top of the wall when I came home a little earlier than usual from work, due to the exciting/terrifying news that she was officially In Labor.

“Contractions are getting closer together,” she said from her perch on the ladder.

She had been timing them all day, and now, in the late afternoon on a Friday, we made our way, with my mother-in-law on board, to the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center on West 14^th Street in Manhattan, ironically just across the street from the creepy apartment where I lived a sad, lonely existence ten years earlier, during my first failed attempt at marriage.

After dropping my wife and her mother off at the birth center, I found a place to park the car overnight, just in case. When I came back, J looked crestfallen.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked, holding back nightmare scenarios regarding fetal health and viability.

“It’s fine. The baby’s fine,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked again.

“I’m only one centimeter dilated,” she said. “They’re checking to see whether or not they can admit me.”

“What? But you’re in labor.”

I backed off, realizing I was arguing with the wrong person. Just as I was looking for someone to fight this out with, a midwife came through a door and said, “Okay, Jeanette, come right this way.”

They ran a few more tests, explaining that even though the contractions were coming closer and closer together, the cervix was nowhere near ready at its current dilation. They had sent women home in this situation. I muttered something about rush hour traffic, but the midwife cut me off, saying, “It’s fine. You can stay.”

So we “settled in” to what was a lovely little room. The Seton Center had gone to great lengths to create an atmosphere for their patients that felt far removed from what one thinks of when one thinks of a conventional hospital birth. There was a double bed, rather than the usual single. In addition, there were quilts and matching floral window treatments and a hot tub, to help the mother relax, and for the option of a water birth.

A couple of hours in to worsening labor pains, J began to express an interest in receiving some assistance with the pain in the form of an epidural. Obviously, this kind of place is set up for natural child birth, and the only way we’d be able to get an epidural would be by admitting J to the hospital two blocks south. The midwife explained all this to us in her hippie dippy way, and J chose to ride out the pains for a couple more hours.

Finally, at 10:17 pm on Friday, May 16, 2003, Diego Reyes Fuchs came swimming into a murky, warm tub in New York City. I got to cut the cord, my emotions pouring forth at the realization of what J and I had accomplished together.

As always, my mother-in-law was a great support and calming presence. J’s brother and sister were wonderful visitors that night, as well.

J and I spent the night bonding with Diego, lying in that lovely room, talking to lactation specialists about “latching on” and pumping, and trying as best we could to comprehend just how much our lives had just been changed for ever.

At a local stoplight recently, I happened to look to my left, where the next guy was stopped just like me. And just like me, he rode alone in the front seat with a passenger in back. (I had my two, actually, heading to their final acting class at Zach Theatre, a “performance,” of sorts.) I did a double take, because instead of a baby or small child in the back seat, he was transporting a very old woman.

The other detail of this picture was that she had the exact same profile as her driver – a slightly hooked nose, and deep-set blue eyes. Both had mouths with thin lips, turned down in frowns. Both looked straight ahead, no words being exchanged between them.

Being the person I am, my mind began painting a scenario. I imagined this was the ride they’d known would someday come, when son had to put mother in the nursing home in Northeast Austin, the one just a couple miles further west from this very traffic light. Maybe the few things she still cared about — and that would fit in her little room in the rest home — had been stowed incautiously in the trunk of the car.

The notion saddened me, and I wanted something to happen to tear down the cliché I had created in my imagination. I wanted the woman to break up laughing, or for the two of them to start singing to the song on the radio that I couldn’t hear. I wanted one or both of them to look over and catch me staring and flip me the bird.

But the two of them just sat, looking forward, one identical profile behind the other, until the light turned green and I eventually lost track of which car was theirs, as we made our way west, down the long highway.

This morning I checked in, as I obsessively do, on Facebook. The location was Shadowglen Amenities Center and the activity was “taking my coffee black this morning. Cutting out the cream and sugar.”

I’ve got a new commitment to my health, thanks to the two-day Influencer training I just went through at work. I read the book a couple of months ago with my team and was impressed with it then, as I am now. One of those rare experiences that assisted me both professionally and personally. It helped me focus on ways I’d like to influence my “clients” at work, as well as those aspects of my life that need attention.

Specifically, I’ve decided to focus on losing weight. I’ve got a target weight and a date on which I plan to hit it. I’ve also broken it down into chunks. Instead of saying “15 pounds by October,” which is the actual goal, I’m going to call it “2 and a half pounds a month for six months.” Then it becomes a question of looking at the different things that affect that, like personal ability and motivation, along with social and structural factors. Most importantly, I’m trying to be aware of those “crucial moments” – anticipating when I could make one choice or the other. I’ve already had some successes with that one – the coffee being one example. It’s the crucial moment when I could either pour in the sugar or not. I chose not to.

This morning, when I was done with my journal and coffee, I could have taken the usual leisurely ride home, I instead made my way to the fitness center. There I had a full three sets on each machine, plus three sets of curls with the dumbbells, and finally a full set of stretches. It was the best workout I’ve had in a long while, and I’m feeling it in the arms tonight.

So, in the spirit of vital behaviors and crucial moments, I’ll take this one to turn off the television and get into my bed, avoiding that urge to eat junk food in front of Saturday Night Live.

This morning, as I put the cream and too much sugar in my coffee, after riding my bike over to the donut shop, I flashed back to the summer of 1984, when I followed my girlfriend’s dream to Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

While the majority of the summer population – a number that bloats by a factor of ten every year between Memorial Day and Labor Day – slept in, gearing up for cocktails, Tea Dances and beach time, I was getting up to go to work. I would get on my bicycle every morning and ride from our apartment at 8 Pearl Street, down Shank Painter Road to Route 6 and the MarSpec Warehouse, which supplied Marine Specialties, “Provincetown’s Most Unusual Shop,” and its mail order customers with everything from plastic lobsters to surplus German Mannlicher rifles from World War II.

I worked there as a shipping/receiving clerk. Even though I was not packing sandwiches and beers for the beach, the taste of the salt air was a treat on my lips. I absolutely loved the taste of that place.

Sue and I must have been quite a sight to see for the regulars there – this nubile young hetero couple who chose to come live in the middle of a seaside Bacchanal.

While others were partying at night, I was working my second job, scooping gourmet ice cream into cups and cones for a mostly drunk clientele at “Glaceteria,” right next to the historic Town Hall building. Run by a surly French Canadian couple, it stayed open way too late each night, and catered to customers coming out of the closing bars and clubs on and around Commercial Street. I found that if I smiled shyly at the glassy-eyed men who ordered ice cream for themselves and each other, my tips would increase, at times exponentially.

Even though it was only a few blocks down Commercial Street from the Pearl Street place, Susan would sometimes express concern for my safety, due to how late I worked.

I brushed off her worry; it was a five minute walk home, if that. There were occasions, though, when, after closing up shop at 3 or so in the morning, my walk home was a bit eerie, particularly for a starry-eyed ingénue of 21 with feathered, sun-bleached hair and honey-tanned skin. I looked straight ahead in the direction of my destination, all the while occasionally aware of men doing things, to themselves and each other, in the shadows at the edge of my vision. To this day I’m not sure how much of this is real and how much is a product of my imagination. Even though it would be another year before the death of Rock Hudson, and another six until Magic Johnson’s historic announcement, people were very much aware of AIDS, so the all-night party that had been P-Town was a bit of an anachronism, even then.

Still, there was one night when I became aware of a figure in the shadows that began to move toward me as I made my way home. I quickened my pace, but each time I looked back, the figure was there, the same distance behind. When I finally made it upstairs to my apartment, I turned out all the lights and peeked out to see a man standing under a streetlamp, his features peppered by shadows, straining to get a better look at the Young Thing in the darkened window above.

He lost interest and wandered, stumbling, I now saw, up the street and out of sight. Eventually my heart slowed to its natural rhythms, and I was lulled to sleep by the sounds of the pre-dawn coastal morning.

Don’t jump to conclusions. Yes, I’m a bit of a dinosaur, not quite comfortable with all the technology by which I now find myself surrounded. And yes, I remember the days when I asked my students to hand in “typed” final drafts of their papers.

In the past ten years or so, as I’ve heard the discussion of “distance” or “on-line” learning go from a murmur to a roar, from a seldom-chosen option, to one that is now expected to save the world (or at least a lot of money), I have to admit to always having felt a bit uneasy about the concept. At first I’m sure it was just a case of Fear of the Unknown. But even now that I know a bit more about the topic — and granted, I need to learn even more — I still find myself unsure of the idea.

I wasn’t sure where this was coming from, until this morning, when I found myself in a meeting with some local district people, talking about dropout recovery. Distance Learning entered the discussion at one point, and my Edu-sense started tingling once again.

And then I understood where my misgivings were coming from.

It goes back to my days as a teacher at Satellite Academy High School, where I worked with some of the most disaffected, disappointed and generally disengaged students in the New York City school system. We didn’t succeed with all of them; many of them were too far gone, thanks to previous experience, by the time they got to us. Try as we might, we could not reverse the tide for those students, sadly.

But we did turn the tables for many. Our task was to reintroduce them to school and to convince them that there was a better way for them than what had failed for them previously.

So much of this was about people and relationships that it’s hard for me to imagine doing that work via the Internet. We needed to be in a room with our students. I wrote my graduate thesis on advisory, and called it (rather pretentiously, I now believe), The Magic Circle.

But that’s what it was. That’s really what the whole school was. It was about young people and adults sitting in the same room and looking at each other, confronting each other about what they could and couldn’t do. Arguing. Reaching compromise and consensus. For those of us – adults and students alike – who let Satellite work for us, it was a transformative experience, one that changed us for the better.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t trade it for all the Internet access in the world.

There may be some situations in which isolation on the Internet can be a good thing. I’ve seen it work first-hand, for example, using the Hallway Project, a model that has truants and classroom disruptors taken out of their regular classes and placed in highly individualized project-based work, with ample face time with a teacher/coach.

But those kids still need interaction. They need to be able to meet with their peers and talk about what excites them, disappoints them, challenges them and invigorates them. They need the Magic Circle that a good school should always provide.

I do see Distance Learning as a potentially positive evolution in schooling. My fear is that people – particularly the number crunchers – will try to use it as a panacea, to cure all the ills of public education.

For at-risk students and dropouts, isolation is not the answer. Put them in front of a computer screen for part of their day. But don’t deny them the benefits of human interaction in the process.