It happened faster than I thought.

After a long stint of what I can only describe as indifference toward completing driver’s ed classes, Julia suddenly lit a fire under herself, accumulated the requisite number of hours required to finish the online class, and found herself on the driving portion of the schedule. Then, she drove, and within three days’ time, she was holding a certificate declaring her eligible to earn her permit.

Which she did, hours after completing the driving portion of driver’s ed. Kelly let her drive home.

I think I’d said end of summer, maybe end of the year. But here we are, mid-July (not even, really), and the kid has driven every day since. Her car, she likes to say—the MDX. She’s working on a name. Cherry is winning right now.

This all coincided with a run of hanging out with the boyfriend. First, it was dinner at his house, which he helped enable by picking her up from our house and then dropping her back off afterward. Then, it was hanging out at the downtown summer outdoor concert Friday night. Finally, it was movies. Annie tagged along, the kid sister equivalent of an election observer in a new democracy.

I am trying to find a spirit of abundance among all of this.

Of course, all of this is the most stereotypical thing that a Dad can go through—his daughter coming of age, blossoming into the world—and I am experiencing nothing extraordinary or unusual. I’m not sure what I am supposed to feel or what it normally feels like, but I can only describe it as a mildly dissociative blur, what I imagine a fish feels like when someone puts an electrified pole into a pond and clicks it on.

Last week, Annie packed off for a week of overnight camp—another emotional experience, yes, the kind that left even Kelly weepy when she watched the yellow school bus pull away from the drop-off pavilion. Meanwhile, Thomas spent the week on the Wilderness Trail with his buddy Linus.

So it was that Julia found herself an only child, even if only for a week. The house, of course, was desperately quiet, the hum-drum of three kids wholly muted. Julia worked at the rafting company a couple of days. It rained a bit. The dogs lolled around on the couches like Salvador Dali paintings. Jules and I had dinner together a couple of nights, and often before bed, she would climb between Kelly and me, and the three of us would lie there, eyes up at the ceiling fan spinning.

She relished the time with us, and if nothing else, that gave me hope. She knows, or at least I think she knows. As much as a 15 year-old can know (as much as I remembered knowing), she knows.

Back when I was an English teacher, I remember the sudden realization that part of the unique privilege of my position was that I could see an arc that the students themselves might not be able to see. This was, admittedly, not a finely-honed skill. It was simply the result of being a little older than they were, a little more familiar with the patterns. Where they had innocence, I had experience*.

It was arrogant and presumptuous of me to think I knew where their lives were heading. I did not. But I had a vague sense, and some of those vague senses have turned out to be right, even if others were dead-wrong.

I cannot make any similar kind of presumptions about our own children—we are far too close. It’s too hard to see the arc. We are, all of us, walking backwards into the future, aware of the years behind us but unable to see much more of what’s to come than a peek over the shoulder.

Abundance. What more is there to do than smile? To shake my head in wonder of it all, and keep walking—ever aware of what I know inevitably happens, glorying in the blessing that it might happen at all.

*AUTHOR’S NOTE: I hope that whomever taught me William Blake appreciates the reference.