Home Free (2 page)

Helping our children make their way in the world isn't unique to this generation,of course. Long ago sons automatically went into their father's business, whether it was stone masonry or innkeeping; daughters married the boy from the next concession. In fact, it might have been only the boomers who proved the exception,when they rebelled against family values and subscribed to the “generation gap,” confident that they could totally re-engineer human beings, capitalism, and music. It was unthinkable to live with our parents after the age of 20 or to work in dad's office. We had better things to do. What, I can't remember.

But now that some of us are hitting 60, the future has narrowed. We see the end. Sure, we're all going to live in funky geriatric communes, where we'll organize euthanasia parties with excellent live music. We still have contributions to make to the world (thinning out our ranks, for starters). But in the meantime, our lifelong, fierce attachment to youth, to changing the world and staying young ourselves, may have found a new focus—our twentysomething kids and what they can become for us.

If there's a new generation gap, I think it's the one between how parents and their grown kids now imagine the future. Getting a liberal arts B.A. and going into the self-employed creative fields, the path I took, now seems as precarious as heading out to sea to catch (non-existent) tuna. The so-called secure professions, in business or finance, are no longer secure. The notion of finding a career that will do you for life and end your days with a pension has become a fairytale. It doesn't matter what you do; it's going to be change and change again from here on in, and we'd better be light on our feet. What sometimes looks like stalling on the part of the young may turn out to be our kids saying no to the things that will no longer carry us forward. And yes to strategies we don't yet recognize.

That is what I think on good days.

Writing this book was full of contradictory impulses. I had a strong urge to engineer a good ending for us all, even as I dealt with the death of my parents along the way. At the same time, writing about my son was also a comfort to me, a chance to mutter into my hat and to control the narrative in a way that was impossible, or at least unwise, in real life. I clung, and I let go.

In many ways, the current wave of parents writing candidly about their lives constitutes a new sort of fiction, an alloy of truth, hope, and fallible memory. No parent can write the true story of her own children. Love casts a light on everything that is either too pitiless or too forgiving.

One problem with our family, for instance, has been our closeness. It's just the three of us, and we share a lot in common, especially music. When everyone in the family likes Etta James, it's not so easy to break up.

And then there was the business of trying to get some distance on what was unfolding day by day: almost impossible. As Joan Didion has said, a writer always betrays her subjects, sooner or later. This has nothing to do with whether the portrait is loving or critical; it's the act of putting someone on the page that feels mildly, inescapably treacherous. For me the writing itself was an act of separation that I wasn't prepared for. But my son was a step ahead of me in that department.

Leaving

W
E WATCHED him disappear into airport security. He walked with his usual bounce, even though he wore a towering backpack,with a pair of sneakers and a water bottle tied to the top. As the opaque glass doors slid shut behind him, he didn't turn around, but I waved anyway. Maybe it was the kind of glass that he could see through on his side, but we couldn't on ours.

Then we drove home in an indefinable state, without saying much. There didn't seem to be anything left to say. I had already had all my feelings about our 20-year-old son dropping out of university to hit the road—or “taking a semester off to travel,” as I preferred to call it. I had already been sad, annoyed, alarmed, and finally excited, because that's how he felt about this adventure. He was taking a cheap charter to Las Vegas to “ramble around” the southwest desert. Hitchhiking, alone. Then he thought he'd head south to Mexico for a while.

Mexico is very big, I pointed out.

I reminded him that the era of hitchhiking was long over, and that in 2003 only serial killers and hookers would stand around on some ramp in Nevada. But there was a romance going on. Casey had Woody Guthrie's hoboing and probably Chuck Berry's “Route 66”on his mind.

I gazed out the car window at the floral sculptures along the highway, advertising insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Not the Wild West by a long shot. I told myself that this was perfectly normal, for a 20-year-old to test himself. Boys are going to put themselves in harm's way, one way or another. I tried to think of it as a delayed gap year—the one he probably should have taken after high school, before heading off to university in Montreal, at the still-tender age of 18.

Why do we assume that this is the natural order of things, for boys to leave home at the height of their restlessness, to sit in classrooms for four more years?

Then, in the first week of his first year of a history degree—the official version of why things happen in the world—along came 9/11, and the dominant narrative was blown up. No wonder he was rattled. It didn't help that despite being a good student he had always questioned school, waiting for it to click into focus. That winter he put his shoulder to the wheel. He poured himself into writing ambitious essays then couldn't understand why they came back marked B or B+.

“Try less hard,” I suggested. “Just give them what they ask for.”

When had I arrived at that sort of advice?

“He's taking a semester off to travel,”I explained to friends whose sons were working on MBAs or off digging wells in Africa. A couple of footloose months, I thought,and he'd be back in school,grinding out essays on medieval concepts of time and postcolonialism in Africa.

I knew how useless a B.A. in liberal arts had become. But the parent part of my brain had swollen to such unseemly proportions that I still believed university was the last good daycare, the safest channel to a secure future in our unravelling, unforgiving world.

Promise you'll come back and finish your degree, we both argued, in our mild way.

He didn't say no. But he'd wait 'til he got back to make up his mind.

I did what I could; I went down to Mountain Equipment Co-op and bought him a small, shiny camping stove. A shard of home. He reassured us that he would stay in touch, although not by cellphone. Historically, hobos didn't have cellphones. He would email us from Internet cafés. Every village in Mexico has one, he said.

There were no fights about this, but then conflict has never been our forte. Brian's family is British, and his mother's mantra, to which I aspire, is “Never mind!” Casey has always been civil and tactful with us but firm, as if negotiating with slightly impaired, part-time employees.

So off he went, holding his brown cowboy hat with the curled-up brim—a gift from his gently departing first-year girlfriend. Lindsay was doing an exchange semester abroad, in Hong Kong. Sensible girl!

I shouldn't have been surprised by this turn of events. After all, Brian and I had both spent most of our twenties kicking around the world, ignoring the future. But when we left, our parents didn't drive us to the airport, and in those days the generation gap worked like email in reverse: the point was
not
to stay in touch. The technology of the day reinforced the gap, since long-distance phone calls were expensive and the connections were poor; on a call from Burlington to Greece my father's voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the ocean (which it was). Airmail letters took forever. They sat scattered around Europe in American Express offices, waiting weeks for us to show up and claim them, if we didn't change our itinerary. And back home, nobody opened the front door to check the mailbox 20 times a day.

Once we left, we were gone. And what our parents didn't know (a great deal,which I will get to) couldn't hurt them.

When we got back home, 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 Science” or “The Physics of Music”—that he was hoping would be more “real” than history. I shoved the wooden case of crumpled tubes of acrylic paint back under his bed. He had the artist gene, all right (from his grandfather), but he probably wasn't going to take that route. Music was more his thing, playing and writing it. Still, it wasn't at all clear what path he was going to choose.

Which is normal, I thought, at 20.

I stowed the emergency-orange rain jacket I had bought him because he was always riding his bike home at 2 a.m. and kept his old address book, slightly curved from being carried in his back jeans pocket. 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 -0500
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 “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign beside the airport. Planes are loud. Vegas is bright all the time. Then I spent the whole next day trying to get out of town. 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 a grassy ditch to camp in. But Vegas is not a town of grassy ditches. He took buses all over, looking for the university (“students, they live cheaply”), then a hostel, then a cheap motel. But even the Super 8 on the outskirts of town 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 grass behind the “Welcome” sign. He brushed his teeth and unrolled his sleeping bag. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, he decided not to put up his tent.

Desert nights, he discovered, can be surprisingly 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.

Just when you think your job as a mother is on the wane, the circuits all light up again.

In second year, before he dropped out, Casey had moved into an apartment with four roommates, a vast, Montreal-sized flat around the corner from the bagel shop on St. Viateur. It was sunny, with an old porcelain kitchen sink that hit you mid-thigh and a back balcony full of drying laundry and bicycles. The smell of grilled lamb and oregano from the Greek restaurant around the corner drifted in the windows. The apartment was a block away from the bohemian scene on the patio of the Club Social and across the street from a crepe shop where one of his roommates worked, pouring batter onto a grill the size of a record turntable. Ground Zero in Mile End,maybe the coolest intersection in North America for someone his age (or so it seemed to me). But he had decided that he would rather fly to the southwestern States in the dying days of that empire, to stand in the middle of the desert with this thumb out.

Did we play too much Dylan? Was it the cover of
Bringing It All
Back Home
staring out at the three of us, that woman in the red dress? Even though we didn't mythologize the past, our cultural debris was still lying around, and Casey seemed to have inherited some of our creaky old cynicism about “the system.”Careers were for squares. He had no time for the go-getters, the ones climbing the ladder. He was an outlaw; he would make his own way.

Wrong era
, I felt like telling him. That romance is over. Even the phrase “dropping out” had been our idea, back when
not
working was the most ambitious thing you could do. In 1969 spending time in Tangiers was tantamount to getting an MBA. We did finish our degrees, but school was a relatively carefree experience, not the angsty job-grooming factory it has since become. The culturally approved thing for someone growing up then was to get as far from family as possible and to inhale the world.

And that was how we spent the next 10 years or so, fomenting revolution and playing in a band (Brian) or travelling, falling in love, and occasionally writing (me). Postponing adulthood, certainly. Alarming our families.

In many ways,we had simply conformed to the times. But it was obvious from our photo albums and our modest capital assets— we were in our thirties before we could commit to buying a couch, let alone a house—that we had valued freedom and adventure over careers and financial security. Because when we were growing up, that luxurious range of options still existed.

Now, our desire to reinvent the world has dwindled for many of us to a spirited defence of our right to unpasteurized cheese. But a familiar flame of indignation burned on in Casey. In school he was impatient just reading “one guy's version of what happened in the past”; he wanted to get out into the world, to see and feel it for himself.

I saw his point. I had done the same thing, after all. But I also didn't want him to lose his place in the fearful queue of training and competition that had become his culture.

My parents were the first generation in their modest prairie families to go to university, in Saskatoon. Education meant a great deal to them, but they didn't pressure me to go to college. I could always work as a secretary. Or I could teach. (I was 40 before she threw out my old high-school textbooks, imagining they might come in handy the day I came to my senses and enrolled in teachers' college.) University was more of a finishing-school, where girls went to get a smattering of knowledge while meeting “husband material.” My father encouraged my “flair for words”urging me to “write something funny for
Reader's Digest
” (which I have only recently accomplished). So I ambled my way through an English degree, which suited me fine.