I lost my kid today.

This walking thing.

Alex went to the park with his "new best friend in the world," Riggs (I don't know) today. Instead of meeting me where I was waiting for him at the top of the track.

I was busily engaged in an adorable conversation with a gaggle of little girls who were magnetically drawn to Katherine in her stroller and wanted to touch her toes, point out to me that her pacifier had fallen out, ask me if Katherine was with a "K" or a "C" (this one was from a Catherine with a "C" who had a Cindy Brady lisp that made the braggy spelling of her own name extra adorable), and otherwise act like tiny women.

Suddenly I realized that all the walkers had passed while I chatted up Kat's admirers, and nary a scruffy-haired, yellow-polo-clad, oversize-backpack-toting kindergartner among them.

My irrational heart jumped into my irrational throat. You remember that Movie of the Week called I Know My First Name is Steven? It's been a running joke between my husband Steven and me for some years now. Anyway, that movie came to mind. Irrationally.

I got up and started back down the track toward the playground, scanning the area and continuing not to see him. The girls drifted away to their waiting moms like obedient children, except for one, the daughter of a former classmate of mine, who is much chattier and precocious than I remember her mother being. Then again, I wasn't exactly friends with her mother. No, VHHS alum, I ain't telling.

And this story has a rather anticlimactic conclusion, but thank God for that. Alex and Riggs were there, at the playground, playing with a dog, looking for caterpillars (Shelby's sad little corpse has been deposited in our front flower bed because Steven told Alex the thing had to be outside to build his cocoon, oy), and just generally being 5-year-old boys.

Which means that when I called Alex's name, he glanced up briefly from where he was kneeling to pet the dog, looked vaguely surprised to see me there, and said, "Oh yeah, I got something for you." Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out one of those burr thingies that fall off trees, only this one was green instead of brown like they usually are, after they die, I guess. I took it from his grubby little hand and thought about how hard it is, this business of letting the rope out. Bit by bit, I'm giving him more slack when sometimes all I want to do is reel it back in. I look down and he's not there and I panic. Sometimes even when he's safe at school I have that moment, that zingy !!!where'smykid!!! moment that sends irrational hearts into irrational throats.

But of course we had the inevitable talk about how I have to know where he is at all times, even if he was "just about to leave but [he] had to see the dog and then there was a caterpillar but [he] lost it. And can Riggs come over??"

I'm so glad he's making new friends.