My Life A.D. (After Drop-off)

I’d heard the horror stories.

I’d heard about moms who sob all the way home and who drink themselves into Merlot-induced stupors every time they walk by their college freshman’s empty bedroom.    

Trust me.  No one is more surprised than this girl that I’m not one of those moms.

Our goodbye was relatively easy.  We left his dorm room for the last time under the premise of locating both the laundry and the mail rooms.  We found the laundry room in the basement, precisely where one would expect a laundry room to be.  We walked out onto the sidewalk, huddled together as “Russell-party-of-four,” and knew without speaking that we weren’t really going to traipse around campus looking for the mail room.  That was just an excuse to get outside. 

It was time.

I hugged my too tall, too thin son and tried to think of a Really Important Thing To Say.  I had nothing.  I’d said it all already.

I told him I loved him and I may have said, “Promise me you’ll eat,” because I always say that.  He hugged me back.  He probably promised, as he always does.  And I turned to go. 

In true Kara fashion, I led our Russell-party-of-three the wrong way, in the opposite direction of where we’d parked.  When Mark (or maybe it was Brian) tugged at my arm to correct me, I muttered “just keep walking” under my breath, mostly because I needed the long-dreaded moment to be over, but also because I figured Kevin did, too. 

I don’t know if he watched us leave.  If he did, I hope he had a little laugh at our expense.

When we finally circled our way around to the correct parking lot, Brian put his arm around me and told me I’d done a good job.  He didn’t mean “You raised him well and he’s ready for this.”  He meant only that I didn’t make a blubbering idiot of myself in front of the other families on the quad.  Still, I chose to accept the unintended compliment. 

I’d done a good job.  We’d done a good job. 

The ride home was also easier than I’d anticipated.  Mark drove the lead car in our diminished caravan and Brian and I rode together behind him.  I cried only when we crossed state lines.  Somehow Mark knew this, and my phone rang both times.  “Doing ok?” he asked.  “Yep,” I answered, and I was telling the truth.  Aside from the dull ache in my heart, I was alright.

It’s been almost three weeks since we left him on campus, and while I miss him terribly, I’m still doing alright. I’ve tried to follow the advice everyone has given me.  And I’d give myself decent grades overall: 

Don’t text him unless he texts first.  (A-) 

Don’t call, unless it’s an emergency.  (A-) 

Don’t ask too many questions, or give too much advice.  (C)

Ok, so there’s room for improvement on my end, but for the most part, it’s been pretty routine stuff.

What wasn’t routine was a text that floored me just a few nights ago, when Kevin asked, out of the blue, if I remembered the final line of The Great Gatsby.

He knows I know it by heart.  I texted the line back to him:

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

He told me he’d been thinking about it a lot lately, in a way he hadn’t when he “fake read” the book in high school.  I guess he’s decided the statute of limitations has expired on all those assignments he half-assed. 

Mind you, he’s not reading the book now.  He’s not even taking an English class (we’ll get that straightened out soon enough).  But like the true son of two English majors, he’d been turning a well-written sentence over and over in his head, and contemplating his own emerging sense of a personal past—his life B.D. (Before Drop-off).

I watched the blinking dots on my phone screen, waiting for his interpretation of the line, and I remembered my own freshman year drop off.  I remembered feeling like I’d been abandoned on a foreign planet, even though I was less than half an hour from home.  I remembered the weird smells and the unfamiliar faces.  I remembered how all the stuff I’d unpacked looked sterile and shiny and not-mine, like the new shoes I wore to school every September in elementary school.

I remembered feeling not much older than that.

I won’t betray Kevin’s confidence by quoting him directly (if you’re reading this it’s only because he has granted permission to share), but the gist of his sudden obsession with Gatsby had to do with a nagging sense that his life B.D. was rapidly receding.  Everything would be different the next time he came home.  Naturally, the idea made him a bit sad.  It made me a bit sad, too. 

    

So the English teacher in this mom kicked in, and we revisited Fitzgerald’s line together.  

Yes, I conceded, the past slips away.  Gatsby can’t return to 1917 any more than a college freshman can return to his senior year.  But Fitzgerald’s “past” is a paradox, I told him:  both irretrievable and inescapable.  (This should serve as a warning to anyone who texts an English teacher, especially at the end of the day.  Expect unreasonably long replies.)

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The image is of someone reaching for their future, stretching their arms out toward a distant goal.  But even as they chase it, an invisible current pulls them back—always back—toward the past.

To Fitzgerald’s protagonists, that past is an obstacle:  a relentless undertow preventing them from paddling out toward fresh and open water.  But when your college freshman has left home and everything feels like it’s changing too quickly (for both of you), there is some solace in its stubborn inescapability. 

Irretrievable and inescapable. 

Alone as he is in upstate Vermont right now, surrounded by people who aren’t-yet-his-people and places still strange and unfamiliar, life B.D. feels to him increasingly distant.  But I know it remains a part of who he is, always.  It’s the invisible weight he carries: sometimes a trophy, sometimes an albatross.

Maybe that’s why it wasn’t all that hard for me to leave him.  He’ll change while he’s away, and I am more than OK with that.  What decent mother wouldn’t be?  But there’s a part of him that remains tethered to us.  Not in the creepy “I’ll-still-rock-you-like-a-baby-even-when-you’re-a-teenager” way (seriously, let’s agree to STOP buying Love You Forever until it fades forever out of print), but lightly tethered, just the same.  

It’s not at all what The Great Gatsby is about.  It’s a terribly botched application of the text.  The point is, Fitzgerald threw us a line that connected us in these uncharted waters of our lives A.D., and for that I am grateful.

Renting vs. Owning

Old people don’t have time for bullshit.

I remember once telling my backyard neighbor, who must have been nearing the century mark, that I was considering a much shorter hairstyle. “I wouldn’t do that,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your hair is the one thing you have going for you.”

Then there was the time my grandmother called me her “ugly duckling.” She was right; I was gangly and awkward and needed a bit longer than other girls to “come into my own” (I’m still very much in the process).

But nothing touches the afternoon I phoned my grandfather just hours after Mark and I closed on our first home. I felt so adult and accomplished when they handed me that tiny set of house-keys, and I couldn’t wait to tell Poppy. He was long retired by that time, but like many first-generation Italian-Americans he had labored much of his adult life in construction and concrete, eventually owning and operating his own string of family businesses. My mother, his only daughter, remembers waiting impatiently for him to come home in the late afternoon and watching him scrub his thick, calloused hands with a gritty paste called SKAT. At 85, he was still strong, barrel-chested and the living embodiment of Hard Work. As proud as I'm sure he was of his first-born grandchild for pursuing a PhD in Renaissance Literature, I always felt what I did must have seemed to him soft and spoiled in comparison.

Poppy and his four sons. 
(Not pictured is my mother, who was probably playing barefoot somewhere nearby.)

But buying a house meant I was finally dealing in Poppy’s currency. I knew how much he valued property.  I’d studied the focused expression with which he steered the riding mower around his 2-acre yard (to this day my sister and I call it "the Poppy face" and we catch ourselves making it whenever we're concentrating hard on something). I’d traced his confident footsteps in the dappled shade of his giant garden, which smelled of ripe tomatoes and good dirt. 

Maybe now I’d try planting my own tomatoes. Even line them up on the kitchen windowsill, as he did.

“Poppy, I'm a homeowner!” I practically yelled into the phone. “Can you believe it?!?”

“Good girl,” he said. “Now make sure you take care of it for the next person.”

Talk about deflating my ego. Mark and I hadn’t even unpacked our boxes and he was already worried I’d screw it up for the next guy.

If that’s what he was thinking, he was right to be concerned. I don’t think we’d been in the house a month when I made our first “emergency” call to the heating company. The furnace was out and the house was freezing. I told the technician our pipes were “about to burst,” though I’m not sure how one would actually know that.

“Do me a favor,” he said, somehow sensing my ineptitude over the phone. “Walk to the top of the cellar stairs. See the red switch-plate that says FURNACE? The one right next to the light switch? I’m betting you turned it off last night. Flip it back on.”

I chose not to share that story with my grandfather.

In hindsight, I don’t believe Poppy meant to suggest we'd be incompetent homeowners. At least I like to think that’s not all he meant. I think he knew what I’ve only recently begun to appreciate: nothing ever belongs to us. Everything is only rented for a time.

A year or two before he died, Poppy came over to watch a giant tree come down in our back yard. My mother suggested I invite him over for the big event, because she knew he’d be fascinated by it. I hesitated because I didn’t feel much like entertaining that day; I was surprisingly emotional about the dumb tree. I liked the late-afternoon shadow it cast over the boys’ play-set, I was resentful of the enormous price tag for having it removed, and despite the inspector's insistence it was "an accident waiting to happen," I felt a little guilty about messing with Mother Nature.

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about entertaining anyone; Poppy was content to sit on my back porch and watch. Every once in a while, he’d call me over to narrate bits of what was happening (he knew every technical name for every piece of machinery) and he seemed happier than I’d seen him in a long time. He sipped lemonade and watched until dusk fell and only a wide stump remained where the tree had stood. When my mother came to pick him up he looked tired but pleased, like someone who had spent a perfectly productive day.

I may be projecting too much, but I imagine for Poppy, the process of letting go was already familiar. He’d long ago lost his parents. He’d outlived all five of his brothers, and he’d buried his beloved wife, Rosie. To him, the day wasn’t tarnished with maudlin sentimentality; it was only about cool drinks, heavy machinery (he was back in his wheelhouse, even as an observer), and the expert dismantling of a tree whose time had come to die. Watching it go was part of the adventure.

I’d like to say Poppy approached his own death with the same degree of stoicism and spirit of adventure. I don’t think he did; I think he feared death as much as anyone else.

But there are lessons he taught me just the same, and I’ve found myself consciously rehearsing them this summer as we prepare to alter the landscape of our home once again.

Our firstborn is leaving for college in a few short weeks. And I know, IT IS NOT THAT BIG A DEAL. I swear I’m doing my best to be super nonchalant about it. But the fact sits heavy on my heart: my son won’t live here anymore.

Our firstborn.

My son.

See, I have a terrible, 17-year long habit of emphasizing ownership. And this is where I’m trying to take my cue from Poppy. Instead of saying “My son is going away,” or “Our firstborn is leaving the nest...”, I’m teaching myself to say, “We’re dropping Kevin off….” Or better yet, “Kevin is heading off...”

I’m finally coming to terms with what I always knew but didn’t want to admit: the anxious, brilliant, deeply compassionate kid who inherited so many of my nerdy quirks, but who has a distinctly Italian love of dried garbanzo beans, pepper biscuits and extra-sharp cheese just like his great-grandfather, was never mine to begin with. He was just on loan to me for a time.

I could not love any human being more than I have loved...than I will always love this young man. Screw the nonchalance.  Letting him go is so damn hard.  But I hope Poppy would agree, without bullshitting, that I took good care of him for the next person.

Kevin and Poppy, Memorial Day 2002

The Key Rack

Mark and I were newlyweds the morning we packed up the tiny apartment where we’d been “living in sin,” as one relative enjoyed addressing his mail to us. Mark finished loading the car while I lugged out the last bag of trash. Propped on the side of the communal dumpster was a little heart-shaped key rack. I figured someone started to throw it away, but thought better of it and hoped it might find a new home. It wasn’t my style (too country), and I’ve never been a “dumpster diver.” But I was already feeling sentimental that day, so I impulsively grabbed it and took it with me to the car. I showed it to Mark, who was indifferent to it, and we drove off.

I remember hanging the key rack later that afternoon in our new apartment. I made fun of how Mark swung the hammer, and I wrested it from him and did it myself. (It’s good to get that first fight out of the way quickly, kids.)

I remember where Mark hung the key rack when we bought our first “real” house a couple of years later (he was much better with the hammer by then). And I remember where it hung in the house we bought three years after that…the one I begged and begged and begged him to buy…the same one where I rolled over in bed the first night, six-months pregnant with our second son, and whispered, “You were right. I hate it. Let’s move.”

And now the "dumpster rack" has hung in this spot for the past fifteen years, in home number five.

For twenty-one years in all, each time we’ve grabbed our keys, and each time we’ve put them back, we’ve brushed this key rack. When we left at 5:45 am in labor with our first born. When we returned two days later with a tiny human we weren't sure what to do with. At the eager start of every family vacation, and at every ripe and exhausted homecoming. Every stupid, storming-out fight, and every apologetic return. I just took the time to work it out on a calculator. Conservatively, we’ve used this key rack 30,660 times. Probably far more.

We’ve finally lived in one place long enough to justify a kitchen remodel, and today I considered tossing this relic and replacing it with something nicer. But I know in my heart I can’t do it.

Soon, we’ll grab the keys to bring our oldest son to college for the first time. We’ll come home and hang them up again, feeling a bit like everything has changed, I bet. But nothing changes, really. We’ll keep hanging up this heart, every place we go.

It’s not expensive, or stylish, or particularly well-bred. But it’s dependable. Constant. Necessary, even.

It works. It’s us. It’s love.

originally posted 1/29/19