We removed the TV from the house five years ago. I stopped reading the daily news almost a year ago, and the only music coming into the house now is from radio streams that don’t run news. Which is why I had no idea there was a parade last Friday for kids finishing high school.

There’s one every year, from the main square to our favorite park, where my son and I walked in and ran straight into a few hundred teens celebrating the end of school.

I was them, twenty-something years ago. We were waiting to finish with the damned school and become adults. Whatever adulthood was, it had to be better than this torture.

While still in school, I heard numerous times something along the lines, “from the cradle to the grave, schooldays are the best we have," but being told something is not the same as being aware of it.

As years pass, the memory does most of the editing. It drops the bad days and polishes the good ones. By forty, you remember being seventeen as something better than it was, and you call that nostalgia.

Unfortunately, that’s the good part of the trap. The more devious part is that you lose the thing twice, once for being gone, and once more for the fact that you didn’t notice it while you had it. The second loss is the one that hurts more, because it’s the one you could have done something about.

Given the history with my knees, I think about this in terms of my legs.

I’m aware that I can walk. I’m grateful that I can still run. Not in a self-help way. Just in a noticing way. I’m reminded every Saturday at the market where I see older people watching who’s around them, stopping when someone moves fast so they don’t get bumped. They look scared. My guess is they’ve lost confidence in their bodies. The difference between them and me is time. One day, I’ll be the one on the lookout for fast-moving threats.

I’m not trying to pretend that future loss won’t hurt. It will. I have no idea how much it will suck to discover I can’t trust my own legs. But I think there’s a difference between losing something you had quietly enjoyed and losing something you’d ignored entirely.

Guess there will be a version where I’m seventy and I look back at this time of me, walking through that park, and think you were grateful, but you weren’t grateful enough. That’s probably true. The forty-year-old version of me has the same complaint about the twenty-year-old. There’s no point in the timeline where you were grateful enough.

The difference is between being ignorant, which guarantees ten out of ten grief, and being aware, which starts somewhere higher than zero because some of the experience is already banked.Maybe a four. Maybe a five. I don’t know. 30 more years and I’ll find out.

I’m not going to try to teach my son any of this. I can’t, and neither can anyone else. Either you rub off on someone enough that they absorb it without realizing it, or they find it on their own later. Or they never do.

I’ll just keep walking past the next group of seniors with him, and being aware that I can. He’ll see it or he won’t. Either way the awareness was the point for me, and he gets to find his own.