My daughter got her first job a week ago, and her orientation began this afternoon. She’s 17, and I often find myself saying “she’s almost old enough for college and I’m still back in the delivery room.” This is how I really feel. If I think hard enough about it, it seems like she was born maybe a year ago. How 17 years can be compressed into such a short emotional sensation, I couldn’t tell you.

I picked her up after her orientation and she asked if we could pick up her friend Jen, because they usually attend Teen Group at our local library on Thursday evenings, and she got out early enough from her orientation that she still wanted to keep her regular weekly schedule. She’s been going to Teen Group for maybe a year, and it really seems like it’s helped her to be more social.

On the way to pick up her friend, my daughter got a text saying that she, Jen, was already on her way to the library on foot. These kids travel the length and breadth of our little town on foot, and probably know its shortcuts and back streets by now better than I do, and I have lived and worked here for almost three decades.

So my daughter asked me to just drop her off at the library and she would meet up with Jen there. Stopping at a red light 100 yards from the library, I asked if she wanted to get out and walk or wait for the light, as it’s a long light and it would probably be quicker on foot than to wait for the light. She said she’d wait for the light, because it’s too cold out to walk, which she was right about. It’s supposed to be about zero overnight tonight. Not as cold as it’s gotten this winter, but cold enough to bite at exposed skin.

As we waited at the light, my daughter looked to the left and shouted “There’s Jen!” I looked, too, and there was Jen, and a sizable group of other teenagers of every size, gender and clothing style. Darkness had already fallen and the cold was stinging, but this huge group of young people didn’t seem to notice. My daughter said a quick goodbye and bolted out of the car and across the street to where she was met with shouts and yelps and teenage screeches of delight. As one confident, uncaring mob, the boys and girls, these young men and women, my daughter and her friend and who knows who the rest of them were, they charged against the crosswalk light and moved as one to the library, laughing and smiling and yelling and running and young and alive and lovely with potential and life.

Me, 45 years of age, I waited for the green light, hooked a quick right and then another one and cut through the old Elm Street parking lot, where 25 years ago, as a young man, I would park my car and my own posse of bold and beautiful young friends — Steve, Craig, Eileen, who knows who else — we would walk in the biting cold and enter George’s Bar through the back and descend down the stairs and drink beer and listen to music and breathe in secondhand smoke and expect that the thrills of our wondrous youth would never fade.

They don’t fade, they just get passed on, like a hand-me-down blanket of life and joy that you can wrap yourself up in against the biting upstate New York winter cold, which can never hope to defeat the warmth found in a group of friends, laughing, charging ever forward, into the night, into the future.