I want to talk about children leaving home. Not running away from home, though that happens, or kicked out from home. But about the good moment when the time is right and off they go.
As it happens, my own 18-year-old son is getting ready to pack his suitcase and head to college in the fall. When I say pack his suitcase, I really mean it.
When he was born, one of his godfathers came over from London and gave the infant boy a beautiful, antique turn-of-the-century trunk, covered with faded steamer stickers and already filled with judicious presents for his leaving, such as Trumper's extract of limes and a little black book embossed with a gold title announcing that it was for the phone numbers of blondes and brunettes.
"He'll keep putting things he needs in here, and when he leaves home, he'll be ready," said the godfather, whose gift showed him to be both a romantic and a realist. He probably saw the light shining in our eyes at the baby's presence, and knew that he might need a nudge to get out - or rather that we would, to let him.
Well, the day has arrived, almost, and I won't pretend I like it.
The thought of his leaving home is almost unendurable for me. It's partly because we have a kind of all-day radio sports phone-in relationship. The morning usually begins with an exasperated conversation about Chelsea's latest episode of over-spending and the evening usually ends with another about the difficulties of ice hockey's Montreal Canadiens, our two shared sporting obsessions.
And now, I know, that long, continual conversation is ending. Soon, I'll call him on the phone and start: "Hey, do you see what Abramovich…" and he'll cut me short: "Dad, I got to run… Let me call you back?" Two or three days later, he will.
I suspect he will return one Christmas soon with an icy, exquisite, intelligent young woman in black clothes, with a single odd piercing somewhere elegant - ear or nose or lip - who will, when I am almost out of earshot, issue a gentle warning: "Listen, with the wedding toasts - could you make sure your father doesn't get, you know, all boozy and damp and weepy?" My son will nod at the warning.
I am blessed to still have his little sister at home, a 13-year-old who speaks a strange abbreviated Manhattan lingo. "Ily," for instance, means "I love you", which she utters at rapid machine gun-speed from her downturned head, while her thumbs are flashing over the keyboard of her phone, continuing text exchanges with five other 13-year-old girls.
She is like a cross between Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek and a Gatling gun, spitting out communications with the cosmos. But soon enough will come her message too: "C U ILY".
What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.
by Adam Gopnik, BBC | Read more:
Photo: Thinkstock
