Sally Huggins Toner

There’s an app I installed on my phone today.  Why?  Because this kid who used to remember what every family member was wearing on her father’s birthday in 1979—her memory might be going, and she saw some pictures on Facebook that reminded her that this was an important week, a few times over.

I ended my 26^th year of teaching this week, my 20^th in the same school.  Our older daughter will enter her final year of college, and her younger sister her final year of high school, in the fall.  The oldest will turn 21, and her sister will turn 18.  Their parents will both turn 50 in the spring of 2020.

So many numbers.

Herndon High School, the alma mater of one child and the future one of another, held its graduation this morning.  The band that played at that graduation arrived back from Europe yesterday.  They returned from a trip commemorating the 75^th anniversary of D-Day.  They stood on the beaches. They met participants. They wore their uniforms and marched with their flags. They voiced their appreciation. I witnessed their own timehop in awe on social media.

I tell my students that numbers, in my view, are most important in context. Even this math flunkie understands that, at the highest level, the discipline becomes a philosophical exercise—an understanding of patterns and their repetition, their reverberation. It is the disruption of patterns that catches our attention. The slant rhyme of history, global and personal, that leaves us scratching our heads.

Four years ago today, that oldest daughter I mentioned, who was a proud member of that band that went to Normandy and just played at graduation this morning, took a trip to New York City for a flute lesson. That lesson would send her trajectory, her pattern, forward to attending college in that city, applying to grad school in performance next year—you get the idea. She also happened to be in Paris this week and met up with The Pride of Herndon at one of their performances.

Two years ago tomorrow, I had a lumpectomy to remove the remnants of a tumor. Even with my spotty memory, it’s hard to lose the voice of the tech who did my pre-surgery ultrasound: “Now where was the mass again? Oh, yeah. I see it. Ya know, that just looks like scar tissue to me.” Twenty years ago (the year I started at my present school), before clinical trials honed the effectiveness of chemo therapy, the mass most likely would still have been there, and I most likely, two years later, would not have been.

More numbers. More context.

Not to compare the significance of the Herndon Band’s trip to Normandy to my personal anniversary. Except to say that D-Day WAS personal. The band’s director, such an incredible teacher, role model, person, quoted one of the speeches given by her students at the ceremony on Omaha Beach.

“Did they have someone they loved as much as I love my sister?” one high schooler said of the soldiers who stormed the same beach that day in 1944.

Everyone’s individual timehop is personal. But no one’s timehop exists in a vacuum. Every one of us battles, and every one of us loves and is loved. So when I timehop to June 12, 2019, in what I hope is many years to come, it will be with gratitude for that love—the greatest thing in every generation.