Knights and Squires

“I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.”


My older son graduated high school and is driving across this country of ours with a friend of his.  They planned out the trip together over the course of several weeks and shared the route with their parents via Google Drive and Google Maps.  We were asked to make comments in the documents and so I copied and pasted the links to roadfood.com, the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and the new ticket policy at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.  On the last night before he left, Henry and I drove out to Immigrant Point and sat in the car and while the wind blew in off the Pacific, he told me things he doesn’t normally tell me, but that he wanted me to know before he left home.  Then we went to Walgreens and wandered the aisles looking for bug spray and sun screen.  Then we went to the grocery store and bought eight honeycrisp apples and a bunch of bananas that are still in the kitchen, because he forgot them.

I imagine an infomercial that begins, So you’ve raised a son to adulthood!  Now what?  And then offers to sell me something strange that will take my mind off him leaving.  Teach a snake to bike ride!  Build your own birch bark canoe!  Become extremely flexible!

And then footage of tearful parents desperately pressing the numbers on their phones.  Yes!  Something!  Anything!

One thing that nags at me is the worry that I haven’t passed along everything I wanted to give him.  Four nights ago I went over that list, with my husband.  I said, He likes music.  He reads books.  He feels connected with the world.  He hates fascism.  Check, check, check, check. The list seemed pretty complete.  But on the way back to the house from the supermarket, I sat there trying not to spout a series of last-minute additional bits of wisdom at my son.  They were all probably things I’d told him before.  Also, he’s a smart and reasonable person, and they were all things he could easily figure out.  And also, it wasn’t like he was going somewhere there was no cellphone access.  We were going to speak again.  Nonetheless, I urgently wanted to tell him these things.  Luckily, he was feeling kindly towards his old mother, and when I said, as he parked the car, I’ve been trying not to give you final pieces of advice, he said, It’s fine, do what you have to do. 

So I did.

Then we unloaded the groceries, and went into the house.  David and I made dinner for the four of us, and Henry packed, and we all, including his younger brother, watched a movie together.  In the morning, before Henry left, I woke up from a dream and thought about his elbows, which were, in what seemed to be recent memory, soft and hung over with rolls of fat.  I could hold onto them and stroke them when he rode in the baby carrier on my chest.  And then sometimes he would fall asleep in the baby carrier and slump forward, and become so heavy that it seemed I was carrying a different baby on a different planet with a different gravitational force.  I thought about how when he was still little but a little older than that, he would lie with his head in my lap and I would look in his ears and I would think that I could see right into his brain, even though ears don’t work that way. I could hold all of him, right up until I couldn’t.  And once I couldn’t hold all of him, physically, I still knew him, continuously, from the time he was born, and I could hold him, in my mind, like that. 

Henry ate leftovers for breakfast.  Then, to everyone’s shock, we were done with his childhood. 

He and his friend are currently driving through desert.  After that, they will get to the hot and swampy South, and then, some time later, they’ll turn the car northward, and head up along the highways and forests that lead to the nation’s capital, and then New York, and then finally to Nantucket.  There he will meet my parents and relax for a week or so, before, in truly anticlimactic fashion, flying home again.