Home Free (24 page)
A brown station wagon full of old fencing pulled up beside us, and a middle-aged man got out with a springy step to pop the trunk. He glanced our way.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said as a joke. Luckily, he laughed.
“Yeah, but who would guess, eh?”
Casey and I got into the back of the U-Haul and began hurling objects onto the loose scree of garbage. Old mops, a bristle-less broom, bent curtain rods, the worn Turkish rug I had bought for our first apartment.
I threw the curtain rods in a high arc, like javelins. They pierced a gutted mattress. Casey tossed a box full of mouldy paperbacks onto the pile.
“This is fun, isn't it?” I said, putting my arm into it.
We were making more noise than was strictly necessary. The man in the station wagon began to chuck his lumber, and a rhythm sprang up between the three of us. After all the hemming and hawing, the careful evaluation of what should stay or go, this fiesta of letting go felt good.
I turned to admire the more processed slope of debris in the other corner,impressionist in its flecks of colour. The pile was intricate and beautiful; it had broken down the identity of the individual objects but not their detail, their thingness. The rampart had a human presence.
When the truck was empty of everything except wood,we drove down the sloping exit and past the boat-sized recycling containers. We visited the graveyard of spavined appliances and old slack-jawed refrigerators. There was a pile of white ash inside a garage that rose to a delicate tip, like a heap of salt. The residue from the incinerator, probably. Ramp, dump, tunnel, flamesâso many stages before the garbage disappeared, and even then it fanned out into the air, not yet invisible.
The stubbornness of our stuff.
We drove through the weighing station where we were asked to pay $31. I was euphoric and had to restrain myself from tipping.
It was almost six o'clock, with that late-August slant of light that means fall and getting down to business. We rolled open the windows; the air felt cooler here down by the lake. Brian was at the office, finishing up a story. I phoned to tell him the good news about our defoliated basement and how much work we'd done. Luckily he didn't ask whether we'd thrown out his goat-claw percussion shakers. After 30 years of living together and 26 years of parenthood, our roles had become well defined; it was his job to hang onto things (including me), my job to feel oppressed by the basement, and it fell to Casey to tell us what was worth keeping and what we should discard.
We ate at the pub on Parliament, raising a glass of beer to our labours. We'd worked well together, perhaps because he was in the driver's seat this time. And when I had taken my mother's painting back inside the house, he hadn't argued.
I set off to visit my mother in Burlington. Every time I saw her now she came swimming back from a more distant shore, but she was still hanging in there. I found new pleasure in these last visits, so shorn of everything unnecessary from the past. Just the two of us, talking and not always making sense.
Casey went to drop the truck off. Then he and some friends were going to down to the spit, a long peninsula of land that juts out into the lake. It was still warm enough for bonfires on the beach. Brian was up in the goth-castle of the Rogers building, waiting for his story to be edited and put to bed. The city was more than big enough for all of us.
A
LTHOUGH I KNEW I could always count on my parents to bail me out financially, I never had to ask them; a benign economy shone down on the young, and life was easyâ perhaps easier than it ever will be again. In 1971, I could get by (and travel for months at a time) on the money I earned writing a freelance book-review column for a newspaper. Quaint skills! Roughly the equivalent of working as a blacksmith today. Or . . . being a narwhal impersonator. I can't think of anything that's arcane enough to convey just how obsolete my first job has become.
Astutely, my parents saw writing as an insecure pursuit. But what did they know? Our parents didn't share our music or our values. Many of us mistrusted the very concept of family, a bourgeois institution (we said) created to oppress women and shore up the patriarchy. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” begins the famous poem from that year, by Philip Larkin.
Hmmm. There's still some truth in this, but nobody seems to have come up with a better arrangement than “family,”regardless of the genders or sexual persuasions involved, for raising children, tolerating our fellow human beings, and helping each other through life. Family is a jalopy, not a Porsche, but it takes us down the road.
I saw an article in the real estate section of the paper the other day about a mother who was building an adorable little cabin, 10 by 12 feet square, on the property behind her house, where her 24-year-old college-student daughter could live rent-free. In Italy, this is nothing new; a study published by the London Centre for Economics reported that a mind-boggling 85 percent of Italian men aged 18 to 34 still live with their parents. Even when the daughters are factored in, the percentage of grown kids living with their parents in Italy is still over 50 per cent. According to a recent
Guardian
article, one minister has called for a new law forcing “
bamboc-cioni
” (mummies' boys and girls) to leave home at 18. And when they leave, the maternal ties often remain. One bachelor in Rome ships his laundry to his mother in Bari on Friday and gets his shirts back ironed perfectly by Monday.
Does this protracted family life undermine our kids' independence, or are we just helping them tackle a much tougher world than the one we grew up in?
Now that my son and I have met on the other side of the leaving-home dramas, I've come to the conclusion that these lingering familial bonds might be a good thing: signs of a return to normal clannishness after an era of hard-core individualism. The deal used to be that kids left home at 18 to “find themselves.” Then the day they turned 21 they magically became adults. Many of our parents did just that, putting on shirts and ties, getting married, having babies at an age when today's kids are still binge-drinking or applying to business schools.
But what if this patternâleaving home at the end of adolescenceâ is the real historical aberration, and the current tendency of sticking closer to home for longer periods marks a return to normal? This is what crossed Casey's mind when he first travelled in Mexico, where everyone he met asked, “Where is your family?”
“Delayed transition” is the sociological term for this new tendency in families. In previous centuries, children rarely left the shade of the family tree; sons grew up to work alongside their fathers in the family business or girls married the boy from two farms over. Then the industrial revolution arrived, driving workers into urban areas, and the era of modern travel began. Children who left home had to go farther afield,
sans
cellphone. Corporations transferred employees and scattered families all over the globe, in the hard-to-fathom days before the communications revolution.
But email and Skype have made geographical separation almost a non-issue. Everyone is more often in touch with everyone, including parents and their kids.
If we think of grown children staying close to the family (not necessarily under the same roof, but looped in) as
normal
rather than a sign of arrested adolescence, then where did we get the idea that kids should leave home at 18?
I think it may have arisen from circumstances that have nothing to do with the natural curve of childhood development: the spread of post-secondary education from the rich to the middle class; and the outbreak of two world wars. At 18, children (mostly boys) either left home to go off to college or to fight in wars. And because these teenagers undertook the responsibilities of fighting in a war,we assumed they came back home as grown men.
But ask any mother who has lost a son in combat: a 19-year-old is a boy. War may prematurely age (or kill) its young soldiers but it doesn't necessarily turn them into adults. Leaving home and growing up are separate enterprises.
Part of the problem when I try to imagine the future is this: I can't. The future used to be so easy to visualize, a Jetsons landscape of housecleaning robots and mono-cars that glide along on elevated rails. Life in this cartoon world-to-come where everyone wears jumpsuits is zippy and homogeneous. Now it feels as if the very concept of The Future belongs to the past. Whenever I try to envision my son embedded in some future landscape, there's a mist around it (or a pall). The details won't come into focus. It's not that I lack faith in himâit's the things I can't imagine that lie ahead. Forty years ago, political issues were more circumscribed, wars had clear boundaries, and Canada was the ho-hum country where nothing bad could happen. Now pandemics, environmental dramas, and terrorism are a potential threat to even the most sheltered child.
With good reason, parents see the future as an edgy, competitive, unforgiving place, and we want our kids to have what it takes to cope with it. But you never know which qualities will equip your child for the world, in ways his parents can't understand. The DIY kid might be more nimble than the deep and narrow PhD. We need to have faith in our kids' sometimes wacky instincts about how to navigate the future.
I am surprised to find that more and more I do have faith. Even though I'm anxious about the obstacles still ahead of him, I feel optimistic at heart. I am beginning to believe that his resistance to the more traditional routes is part of an ongoing canny, intuitive adaptation to a new world. (Perhaps it qualifies as “evolution.”) “It's like I'm doing my own unofficial graduate program,” he says about his industrious, self-regulated days of multiple jobs, ambitious creative endeavours, and social networking. He's paying his rent, and hanging onto his dreams, as he acquires the skills, knowledge, and values that will take him forward,
in ways I cannot
imagine
.
Just when our kids need forbearance, support, and maybe some benign neglect around the topic of careers, they're more likely to encounter our fear that they will “lose their place” if they take too long figuring things out. But they don't need more nervousness; my son looks over his shoulder too.
The world
is
precarious. We want to see our kids on a foolproof, well-lit path. But that safe path no longer exists. It's a wraparound frontier now.
It was a family gathering a few days after the death of my mother, at the age of 99. Brian had put together a slide show with some old photographs of my mother's life, from a startled, round-faced baby in 1911 to a college student in a black wool bathing suit doing headstands on a beach. Then a bride in a tailored suit and hat with one foot on the runner of a Model T Ford; a new mother in front of her house, slightly frowning; finally, a grandmother in a fuchsia shirt laughing and brandishing her sherry glass. I told the people gathered in my parents' former living room a few stories about her. Then the grandsons spoke up.
“She was always doing something, or making something, and I would do it with her,” said Daniel,who has become a gifted visual artist. “Whether it was painting, or cooking, or raking the garden. I learned alongside her.”
My nephew Jake was partly raised by my parents for his first eight years, after his parents split up. Full of emotion, Jake simply said thank you to his grandmother for everything she'd done. Then Casey, the middle grandson, got up to say a few words.
Our family tends not to dress up for special occasions, but he had ironed his good white shirt and put on his suit. He wore leather shoes, polished, and his hair was combed back, just like my father in his youth. It was a nod to the importance of family rituals and a tribute to my dapper dad.
Standing in the middle of a room filled with friends and neighbours, he said that when he was little he took his grandparents and their benevolent, broadloomed realm for granted. He came for visits, ate the dinner especially prepared with his allergies and appetites in mind, then escaped the dinner table to eat his second dessert while watching cartoons in the den. He assumed that this cared-for world was just one corner of a bigger, similarly forgiving universe.
“It took a while before I realized that they had created this world for us and that it didn't just exist on its own.”
There were a few nods around the room. I wondered if we were going to be able to give our grandchildren the same sense of a warm,coherent environment (with less beige broadloom) in which to thrive. That was what we ran away from. But our children who won't leave home or the ones who come back are more grown up, in many ways, than us.
I
AM AT HOME, in my office, surrounded by piles of book manuscript on the floor. The yellow Post-its that curl up from many of the pages represent edits still to be done. The deadline is close. Cunningly, I have shifted the focus of my anxiety from my grown son to this pile of paper. But my main worry is the title. I've come up with 26 of them, but none that pass muster with my publisher,my family, and me.
If you try to think about titles for too long, you eventually lose all perspective. You start choosing random lines from songs by Beck, and they all sound brilliant.
This has already happened to me by 2 p.m. when Brian comes into the room.
“Any luck?” he asks.
“How about
I Really Must Be Going Now
.”
A tactful pause. “I think it's a bit arch.”
“But it's funny. Isn't it? They're keen on funny.”
“But the book's not that funny,” he points out.
“I know. It's semi-tragic. People keep dying in it. I warned them not to expect Erma Bombeck.”
I turn around and notice for the first time that his mouth looks strange, kind of rubbery, and that he's pale. Then I remember; he has just had a root canal.