“Enjoy!” she gallantly signed off.
hen we got back home from seeing off our son, Brian settled back in at the computer, his mind already on other things. I drifted around, picking up odds and ends Casey had left behind in his old room. The McGill calendar, with tick marks beside strange courses — soil sciences or the physics of music — he was hoping would be more “real” than history. I shoved the wooden case of crumpled tubes of oil paint back under his bed. He had the painter gene, all right (from his grandfather), but he probably wasn’t going to take that route. Music was more his thing, writing and playing it. But it wasn’t at all clear what route he would take. Which is normal, I thought, at twenty.I stowed the emergency-orange rain jacket I had bought him because he was always riding his bike home at 2 a.m., and wondered if I should hang on to his old address book, slightly curved from being carried in his back jeans pocket. You never know when I might need to track down his friends, I catastrophized. Downstairs, his guitar amp (built decades earlier by my brother) was still set up in the dining room. I wound the power cable around the handle and lugged the TV-sized amp down into the basement. No more home recordings for now.
A few days later, we got our first message, a group email to family and friends:
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2003 12:46:32
Subject: New Mexico
Hi there,
I am in Santa Fe and alive and well. Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico are beautiful! I spent my first night sleeping behind the airport Welcome to Las Vegas sign. Planes are loud. Vegas is bright all the time. I spent the whole next day trying to get out — hitchhiking to Zion National Park was not successful. Word to the wise, do not try to hitch out of Vegas and into Utah — bad combination.
“Sounds like he’s doing all right,” Brian remarked.
“What are you saying?” I yelped, face in my hands. “Our son just spent the night sleeping on the ground, behind the welcome to las vegas sign!”
“He’ll survive. Casey’s resourceful.”
The details came later. He had gotten off the plane thinking he could find a hostel, or perhaps somewhere to pitch his tent. But Vegas is not a town of grassy ditches. He took buses all over town, looking for the university (“Students, they live cheaply”), then a hostel, then a budget motel. But even the Super 8 cost an exorbitant $90. So, still wearing his overstuffed pack and cowboy hat, carrying his guitar, he made his way back to the airport, where he found a semi-secluded patch of gravel behind the welcome sign. He brushed his teeth and unrolled his sleeping bag. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, he decided against putting up his tent.
Desert nights, he discovered, can be cold. In the morning, he made his way to the outskirts of the city, where he stood by the side of the road for five hours without getting a ride. Then he went back into town and bought a bus ticket to Santa Fe.
And just when you think your job as a mother is winding down, the circuits all light up again.
was thirty-seven when Casey was born: a late entry into motherhood, but not unusual for my generation. Many of us postponed parenthood until the last possible minute, and I think that has been a factor in our tendency to, shall we say, over-invest in our kids. Just as they enter their twenties and begin adult life (or get down to postponing it), we are finally forced to contemplate the end of ours.As we move through our fifties and edge into our sixties, my peers can’t help but notice, despite hours at the gym, that some doors are closing; we probably won’t enter a triathlon, or win the Man Booker Prize, or invent a water purifier for Nigeria that costs two cents. But it’s still possible that our kids will! Our grip on youth and achievement finally starts to relax — only to fasten instead on our grown-up kids. “Whatever makes you happy,” we say about their chosen path. But they know what we really mean: “We’ll chip in for grad school, but not for the motorcycle.”
Although I knew my parents would always bail me out financially, I never had to ask them; a benign economy shone down on the young, and life was easy — perhaps easier than it ever will be again. In 1971, I could get by (and travel for months at a time) on the money I earned writing a freelance book review column for a newspaper. Quaint skills — roughly the equivalent of working as a blacksmith today. Or … being a narwhal impersonator. I can’t think of anything sufficiently arcane to convey just how obsolete my first job has become.
Astutely, my parents saw writing as a perilous pursuit. But what did they know? Our parents didn’t share our music, or our values. Many of us mistrusted the very concept of family, a bourgeois institution (we said) created to oppress women and shore up the patriarchy. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, begins the famous 1971 poem by Philip Larkin.
Hmmm. There’s still a smidgen of truth in this, but nobody seems to have come up with a better arrangement than family — regardless of the genders or sexual persuasions involved — for raising children, tolerating our fellow human beings, and helping one another through life. Family is a jalopy, not a Porsche, but it takes us down the road.
hile Casey was travelling, I hovered over my inbox, awaiting fresh bulletins. One morning, I logged in and found another group email:Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2003 17:11:24
Subject: Hello from Chiapas
