"Yes," I said dryly as possible. "And it's such a mystery."
Another time recently when my wife and I came home, I was just about to call up the stairs--"we're back!"
Sigh.
Hardest to deal with is the simple fact he's just not here: the guy that'll sit and play a game of Yahtzee or cribbage every night at nine with his mother (who is a games-lover), or whisk us up some scrambled eggs for lunch while gabbing about corporate strategies at Amazon or the latest scandal at the NSA. Mr. Equanimity and cheer. Mr. Computer Facts and Know-it-mostly; none of that is here. And we miss it. We miss him.
Funny, barely six months ago (just before his high school graduation) what his mother and I missed most painfully was the little kid he had once been: I mean those years when he was small and dressed say in an oh-for-cute jeans jacket with snaps on the front you'd snap up and count them out loud for his mathematical enlightenment and then maybe he'd get back to clambering on the tires at the playground or talking non-stop about the hilarious adventures of Neenachuh, one of his merry band of imaginary otters. But now, now what what we really miss is the young man himself--just as he is: not the seedling or the sapling. Just the present tall tree.
Of course it's all fine. Sunnyside's adjusting, and from what we can tell the young man in his new collegiate abode is too. It's just that no change this big comes easy, especially when it's your own flesh and blood. And why after all should it come easy? The concerns of your heart naturally follow your flesh and bone. They speak that direction from the heart of prayer. For his happiness. For his peace.
His college is in Minnesota, and he made the trip himself, taking the train. Why didn't we take him in the car? Well in part for environmental reasons, but in part too because we felt that his move to college might serve as an opportunity for him to declare, simply by the act of traveling alone, the completeness of his crossing over from dependence into independence. It is a significantly different act: taking a young person to college to settle him in, or sending him off entirely alone to settle himself. We believed he was fully up to the challenge of the second choice. And so to say it again, he traveled there himself, taking along just two bags and a fiddle. The remainder of his things--seven boxes in all--we sent along UPS a few days before.
Labor day, the day of his departure, turned out breezy and warm. We arrived in plenty of time at the commuter station and made our way onto the platform, which coincidentally was brand new, having been opened to the public that very morning; in fact employees were directing people over to the platform, so that no one waiting at the old familiar place of departure would be surprised to find the train come and go without them. Not even all of the yellow caution tape from the construction process had been removed. Still attached to banisters and sawhorses, it blew around in the wind--dangling, snaking.
So there we were, the three of us, mother father son standing on the platform tasting the last bittersweet moments of life in the old dispensation. Plenty of folks waited with us, milling, gabbing: these were shoppers, museum-goers, folks wanting to take in a show. A few caps and blue jerseys signified Cubs fans. To our right on the platform two young women who looked like sisters consulted their hand-held devices like oracles. They were beautiful themselves and beautifully dressed, but let's face it the gravity of those puny screens bends every aura toward it, reminiscent of an open drain pulling on a rag. They were hunched. They were thumbing. Ah, to see a young person straight as a mast again! Where is it today: the spirit of youth, eager for destiny? For ports of genius and spice?
It cheers me that most young people today do not seem materially greedy. It heartens me too that so many of them sincerely seem to want to be of service to others. Still, considering the encroachment in their lives, of the digital upon the real, and the way that I literally run into some of them on the street (so immersed in thumbing their hand-helds that they pay no attention to where they are or who they are with) I wonder how many of them, strictly speaking, are having experiences. I mean of unfiltered life: the raw stuff, the nitty-gritty subway dirt. What exactly, when they grow old, will they remember with unmitigated thanks? What scent of what wild rose, or what aching look from what enchanted lover? What beautiful cheek upturned, drinking in what sun? On their deathbeds will they, as Blake is said to have done, sing hymns of praise? How many of them even know a hymn? Or will they consult their machines, their screens, and sing along?
I grieve these thoughts. I grieve them for my son's sake. Every generation, I know, has its challenges. My generation's challenge was to see beyond the need to make money and into the needs of others. So far as I can see, it has more or less failed at that. But the challenge for my son's generation is not to lose hold of reality itself. In the words of one student at the university here in Valparaiso:
The urge to constantly check your phone for emails, texts, Facebook updates, and tweets seems uncontrollable. I personally get fidgety if I do not check my email and texts every 10 minutes....Cell phones have created a wall between people and their lives.You see it doesn't stop: this torrent of information, this flood of distraction, this technicolor industrial fantasy engineered specifically to prevent you from thinking for yourself or smiling to yourself or talking to those around you or weeping inwardly or just looking around you now and again to savor the fruits of perception: all of which amounts to cultivating what folks used to call the soul!
And by soul I don't mean the ghostly thing that supposedly floats free of the body at death; I have no patience for that ancient Greek abstraction, that immensely damaging idea. No, what I mean by soul is that unequivocally-existing intangible self that includes history and memory and life experience and love and dreams and communion with others and with places. I mean the part of us that, if we were made of music--as it may be we in some way are--refers back to the Muse. I mean the portion of humanity in us that cannot be measured by tests or by any means at all except sympathetic reference to something like it (subjectively measured) within ourselves. I mean, in my boy, the sum of what he means to me. The sum of what I bless and behold with astonishment, wonder, and delight. I mean something like the Neenachuh of life.
None of the soul needs electronics for finding. Electronics however can certainly help us lose the soul.
The commuter station is called Dune Park. It lies on the south shore of Lake Michigan, and the platform faces north. So in front of us that morning lay the tracks, and beyond them a strip of prairie grasses, and beyond the grasses a small forest of oak, and beyond the oaks, if we could have seen it, Lake Michigan itself: one of the great gifts of nature. A steady warm breeze bowed the grasses that day and shook the leaves of the oaks like little silver dinner bells. On the lake there would have been waves; probably even a real surf.
I wished the three of us, instead of waiting there at the station for the uncertain future, had been down at the lakeshore watching the familiar waves and taking in their primordial sound. Already I missed my boy and oh already there was the train, coming to take him away, the light of its headlamp visible in the distance down the way. God forgive this necessity. This need to hand him over to a world so far from that surf, and from the ageless rhythms it represents. Truly those waves would feed his soul. And yet truly he has to go...
HB
(Until Tuesday the 15th!)
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