How We Let Go

My youngest son turned 18 today, an age of mythical privileges and responsibilities. When I was young but old enough to pay attention to things, turning 18 meant eligibility for the draft during the Vietnam War. And, in some places, it was the age at which a person could legally buy and consume alcohol. Later, and largely because it seemed important to those who could (and were) sent away to die, it was the age at which a person could vote. All 4 of my sons are now registered for the draft, one of those just-in-case formalities that runs counter to my belief pacifism that grows stronger the older I become.

So it goes, Vonnegut said, and indeed it does, though any more I'm not sure where it goes. I look at my son now and try to judge how ready he is for leaving home for college in just a few months. He admits no nervousness now, but perhaps he senses precursors to that churn in the belly that accompanies our greatest changes. Not long after high school graduation I was away to boot camp, and in my self-centered way I think that I was somehow more prepared for leaving home. Is he prepared? I wonder. Have I been good a good enough father that he has managed to learn what he needs to work through problems he will face on his own?

Then again, maybe these problems I anticipate are mine—he is prepared, but I am not. As we enjoyed birthday cake this evening, I wondered if my concern for him is born from the realization that I am losing control of him. For, in many ways, parenting seems to be partly based on control: "Don't eat that, but do eat this"; "Don't talk to me like that"; "Is your homework done?" The urge to control our children seems so strong, so necessary—yes, we must teach our children to be safe, to be "good" in all that word's definitions, to be prepared for the world they must face. But—and this is so difficult—we must also trust them and their ability to know the difference between the wise people and the foolish. Any "wisdom" I have has been acquired through an ever-growing highlight reel of mistakes, misplaced faith, false prophets, and poor decisions, but in the end I am better off for all that has gone wrong.

Is it easy to let go? Never. More sentimental than I can articulate or even acknowledge, I am in a constant battle of reassurance—that the kids are all right, and that I will be, too.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #8

Steven (mostly)


The youngest of us, Steven was probably the most accomplished even if he wasn't the surgeon Margie was. He had moved smoothly through college and various corporate environments in New York, Chicago, and London. Three years my junior, he had learned well from my mistakes and had developed into a well-balanced and respectable man. Though he must have known--and I must have told him--that for much of my youth I would have been happy if he had not joined our family, he seemed to never hold my sometimes outward dislike of against me. In some ways there are few things worse, more humiliating, than being forgiven by those we hate. He told me once that he had always admired me, but that he had also learned not to emulate me.

Now, he slept in the chair beside me. He was not snoring so much as purring. I looked out the window and wished I had his ability to sleep no matter the time or circumstance. When we had shared a room as boys, I would rise to visible jealous anger that he could sleep through the night when I battled insomnia. I probably would have been a better older brother if I had been able to sleep. His brown paper bag and can of beer were tilted loosely between his hands, and I pulled them gently from his fingers. The can was empty.

Years before, not long after he had returned from London, we were sitting in my parents' kitchen. I have forgotten if were were gathered for a holiday, but it might have been his first Thanksgiving home in awhile. I remember we had spent time looking through my mother's photo albums, and Steven lingered over pictures of the two of us hiking and fishing at Barney Lake in the eastern Sierra.

"Tell me," I said at some point, "what exactly do you do for a living?"

Steven laughed. "I sometimes ask myself the same question. But, I get paid for developing software. Actually, that's not true. These days I get paid for managing other people who develop software. For banks, sometimes for governments. We find ways to transfer money from one place to another."

"That's legal?" I asked.

"As far as I know. It's not even real money, though. It's all electronic--funds transfers, that kind of thing. Billions of dollars going from one place to another in less than a second."

I kept looking out the window at Colorado and wondered how I had missed so many steps along the way. I had started college and dropped out; I had been married twice but was now single; I had had good jobs but was now without one. Steven and Margie both seemed to have missed no steps, and their lives consisted of even and controlled movement forward. Years ago I was jealous of those two lives, and I often felt I was chasing my sister and being pursued by my brother. Steven had never said a thing, though, had never let on if my brushes with both law and early mortality had ever bothered him. "You don't have to be me," he had once said, and I was stricken with how this should've been something he heard from me and not the other way around. I knew it was his way of saying that he accepted me for whatever and whoever I was. We had at different times bemoaned our birth order: the overachieving oldest child pressured to lead the way; the often-lost middle child pressured from both sides; the carefree yet desirous-to-please youngest child.

The train car was filled with the quietness typical of after-meal contemplation. If they could, I knew, old men would be enjoying their cigars and brandy. I turned on the light above my seat and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I searched for something else from Ophelia, and I found several entries all in her fine script. With the tip of my forefinger I traced her signature and felt the depth of the pen stroke.

Steven had stopped purring. "You still here?" he muttered.

"I am," I said.

"Good," he said, and then he went back to sleep.

Ophelia's writing seemed to range from happy to quite sad. One entry toward the middle of the notebook entreated people to read James Joyce's story "The Dead." After several exclamation marks, she wrote: "This is only a small part of the story--out of context. Please read the entire story! This is one of Gabriel's passages..."

from "The Dead"

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasms, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

I wondered about this--about its meanings, about who Ophelia was and what she was trying to say. I looked at Steven's sleeping face and wondered if he would know, if he could tell me who James Joyce was. I felt nothing but admiration for my brother then, and I asked myself if I would ever tell him so.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #7

Leaving Grand Junction


We were, with a slight lurch, moving forward, moving west. The train seemed to pause slightly just as the station was behind us, and there was a slight moan from the other end of the observation car. Moans aside, we were moving.

"Not a place I want to return to," Steven said.

"A good place to leave," Margie said.

"There are worse places," my father added, always optimistic.

The observation car was full of much activity--the comings and goings of people who had been on the train for hours but who now apparently felt the need to move.

"I'm hungry," Dad said.

"We've got a seating time in the dining car," Margie said. "I reserved a table for all of us in about half an hour."

"I'll give up my seat," I said. "I'm not hungry."

"You might be later," Margie said.

"Then I'll eat later," I said.

"Dumb kids," Steven said. "I saw Cousin Mark downstairs. I'll ask him if he wants to join us." Mark was Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet's oldest child. He and I were close in age, but he was the learned type and had found reasonable success as a college professor and a writer. I admired him for the writing, and I wondered if he would be interested in the notebook. Cathy, his sister, would be joining the train in Salt Lake City where she lived with her Mormon family.

"You'll be missing a nice dinner," Dad said to me when Steven was gone.

"Don't humor him, Dad," Margie said.

Half an hour later they were all gone, eating in the dining car while I left the noisy observation car for my seat toward the rear of the train. Leafing through Rhodia, I saw how some people had taken the writing assignment quite seriously, while others seemed to have leaned toward graffiti. One entry, "Nebraska," was written in the same hand as others, and all were signed with the letters "MK."

Nebraska

There is nothing there.
But you have to see it to believe it.

Zephyr rolls hard and fast determined to leave Nebraska at night. With passengers flopped half asleep in all contorted positions, like refugees fleeing the park land of fields, broken by grain silos hiding missiles aimed at evil empires, lit only by Pepsi and Coca Cola machines glowing red and white and sometimes blue against filling stations. Don't lose a minute--just keep humping until Nebraska is done--until we've checked McCook, Holdrege, Hastings, Lincoln, and Omaha off our list of grudging stops. Ride on through the Nebraska corn husking and soy gleaning night. Cross the Missouri and ride on.

I liked it--for the mood as much as the words. I have driven across Nebraska, and it's a drive that never seems to end. It's one of the seemingly endless bad filmstrips among the country's 50 states' worth of travelogues. And something in it made me think of Peggy again, how she and I were young enough to see glamour in so many bad motels when we took to the road. We both enjoyed getting on the road a couple of hours before dawn and letting the day open up to us. Then we'd find someplace to sleep in the afternoon, sometimes simply parking our car in Walmart parking lots along with the RVs, and try to be driving again as the day ended. "How is all of this going to end?" Peggy once asked me on a road trip not long before we decided to divorce. I never answered that question, and she never asked it again.

When my siblings and father found me, they were full of food and happiness. "I brought you the leftovers," Margie said. "Half of a hamburger. Slightly cold by now."

I took the food from her. "Such a nurturer," I said. "Thanks."

Steven sat beside me. He belched, slipped his feet out of his shoes, and tilted his seat back. "People are going to think you don't like them if you keep avoiding everyone," he said. Margie and our father sat in front of us; Cousin Mark entered the car a few minutes later and sat a few rows behind us. He was reading a book as he walked by, and I doubted he'd even noticed us.

"I like everyone just fine," I said. I shut the Rhodia and watched what was left of Colorado pass by. We rode on.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #6

Waiting--Grand Junction


Peggy wrote poetry. Nearly every day she would jot individual lines on scraps of paper and now and then assemble those scraps. "Is it any good?" I once asked her.

She said she didn't know. "I'm young," she said. "I write poetry like someone who is young." I didn't know what she meant. I still don't.

Steven and Margie sat beside me. They'd come in through the station's front door, and each carried, literally, a brown paper bag. Steven offered me his bag. "You want a drink?"

I shook my head. "Dad's been sharing his flask. It's a bit less white-trashy than brown paper bags." I didn't offer them the flask itself.

Margie laughed and pulled her bag down to expose a Diet Pepsi. "It's your brother who's the white trash," she said. Steven showed me a can of Miller Genuine Draft.

"Where have you been?" I asked.

"We went walking," Steven said. "Up and down the streets. Not much to see around here. Kind of flat and dusty. We found a couple of body shops and a 7-Eleven. Where's Dad?"

"Back on the train, I think."

"He should've gotten a sleeping compartment," Margie said.

"We all should've gotten a compartment," I said. While the Amtrak seats were comfortable enough for sitting, they were only adequate for sleeping.

"What's with the notebook?" Steven asked.

I leafed through the Rhodia's smooth pages. "Dad found it. It's got stuff from train passengers. A mobile journal." I gave it to Margie when she held her hand out.

"A mobile journal," Margie said. "I kind of like that idea. You find anything good?"

"Haven't read much," I said. But I had read some, though I'd mostly searched for entries that had photographs or drawings. One photograph was of a long highway, with what appeared to be a dust storm in the distance. The photograph took up the top two-thirds of a page, and after it was a story titled "The Map-Reader." I liked that one--the idea of driving across the desert alone for hours and hours. But it was ideas like this that got often got between Peggy and me, too. And as I stared at the photograph, I found myself missing Peggy. "You'll always remember me," Peggy said on the our last day together as husband and wife. And she was right, too. We always do remember certain people even when they're the ones we seemingly should forget.

"You could write down your most personal feelings," Steven said.

Margie laughed. "He doesn't have personal feelings, remember?" She thumbed a couple of pages. "There's some interesting stuff. Looks like some kids got their paws on it--someone drew houses and trees with crayons." She handed it back. "If you can't think of anything to write, give it back to me. I'll write about our family's weird tradition of hauling dead relatives half-way across the country."

"Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were smart enough to get a sleeping compartment," Steven said.

"That's sick, Steven," Margie said.

We let the joke fade. I looked through the window to where the train was, where my father paced. He would appear on one side of the window, disappear on the other, and then reverse course. He finally stopped framed perfectly by the window, and he seemed to focus on several people who were boarding the train. It was the most movement I had seen in hours. "People are getting on the train," I said. My brother and sister didn't move, didn't even appear interested in leaving the station. "I'm going outside to see if something's happening," I said.

Outside, I asked my father if he'd heard any news. "No," he said, "but some of these people talked to a guy in a funny hat, and they talked to other people, and then the whole bunch of them got on the train."

"I'll go check inside," I said. "Maybe someone updated the chalkboard."

I had once spend an entire night in London's Victoria station. I'd missed my connection to Edinburgh, so I sat on a bench and dozed until dawn and the next train north. It was not the worst night I've spent alone, and I must have appeared sane and clean enough that nobody of authority bothered me. The timing turned out to be good, for if I had arrived in Scotland when I was scheduled to, I would not have met one of the few women I've known who could cause me to actually swoon.

The Grand Junction station was not one in which I wanted to spend even another minute, and I felt that luck had visited me because, according to the chalkboard, our departure time was just ten minutes away. I motioned to my sister and brother. "The train's leaving," I said, and they followed me outside.

"Where's Dad?" Margie asked.

Steven pointed upward. "On the train. The observation car."

Our father was sitting near a window and gesturing us to join him. "It's time to go," I said to nobody in particular.

"The engines are talking to one another," Dad said when we sat next to him.

"Family dynamics at their best," Steven said.

My father looked at me. "Where's my flask?"

Fictionus Interruptus

A year ago today I woke up in London and went to bed in Brussels. It was a wonderful day of adventure, of traveling to somewhere I had never been, of being mostly lost for a good amount of time. I had a different job then, one that had owned me for nearly a decade and provided me with ample vacation time for such adventures. Now, though, I have much less vacation available and must carefully allocate my days off throughout the year. The older I get, the more I would trade money for time off. With this in mind, it might be ironic that I traded both when I switched jobs....

I was lost for much of my time in Brussels, starting when I got on the correct local train after arriving by Eurostar but went in the wrong direction. When that local train stopped, everyone got off--I followed suit and found myself in a park dominated by a statue of Winston Churchill. Having no idea about where I was or where I should go, I simply loitered in the park until the sign sign on the same train changed to the name of the station I was looking for. I took that as a good omen, got back on the train, and 15 minutes later was at the stop near my hotel. Significant in this experience is a breakfast conversation I had with two women in London. They described a visit to Paris during which they were riding the metro when the train stopped at a station, the conductor announced something, and everyone got off the train. Speaking no French, the women decided that they should follow suit. They were not sure of where they were, but they eventually ended up where they were supposed to be. When I was on the right train in the wrong place in Brussels, I thought of their experience and simply did as they did.

I would return to England, given the chance. I would return today, in fact. I have brought this up in too many conversations with too many people, and the reaction I sometimes get is, "Why? You've been there twice--don't you want to see something new?" This is perfectly logical question, and perhaps it speaks to the truth that I perhaps I am not as adventurous as I'd like to believe. I suspect that my time in the navy plays a role in this: I traveled quite a bit, but drifted into assorted ports only every now and then, never staying longer than a few days. Age, too, has a role. With a good number of years on my back, new and completely different experiences are a bit harder to come by as I get softer and more settled in habit and responsibility. There is something very new about waking up in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar city and thinking, How do I get breakfast here? How do I get the shower to work? How do I get to Brussels?