It is Sunday night and I am driving my oldest son back to college after winter break. It is a strange thing, when your children begin forming lives of their own outside of your daily rhythms, when they’re waking up more mornings away from you than in the same house as you. The sky is gray. Later that night, when I am by myself and starting a fire on the patio, the sky will hold a low, pastel, tired sunset, like it’s missing someone.
We drive through the slate Sunday afternoon, the highway and the miles and the lost time, and we talk about fresh starts and new semesters and what kind of a person he wants to be four months from now when the semester is over and he’s coming home again. And the small daily decisions we all make, every single day, that turn us into the people we will someday become.
I feel, as always, like I could have done more.
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I have a memory, and I’m not sure how it’s linked to driving my son back to college, but here it is anyway: my dad and I, building a floor at the very end of the cellar in the basement of our city house three or four years ago. We dig down six inches for more headspace, and we vacuum out all the dust and debris.
Wrapped around the water pipes is this black, filmy substance that peels like onion skin, and as I peel more and more of it away, as the outer layers flake and I get to the inner parts, I realize it is old newspaper, from the 30s and 40s. There is an article about Hitler. Another about what’s going on in Lancaster, our very city, 80 years ago.
And in that tiny, cramped space, my dad and I build a new floor, butting it up against the 100-year-old stone wall that lines the cellar. And I wonder who wrapped those pipes before us, and I wonder if it could have possibly been a father and son, working together, the son amazed at something so old as an 80-year-old page of newspaper, and the father watching his son, feeling like perhaps he could have done more.
I wonder if, eighty years from now, or ninety, as the 22nd century is dawning, if another father and son will tear up the floor and find small traces of our long-ago existence.
These father-son relationships come and go in the blink of an eye. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. They come and go so quickly, and yet they go on forever.
* * * * *
It takes only two trips to carry my son’s things into his dorm room, and he is grinning, finally back at school, and I hug him, tell him how proud I am of him, how much we love him and always will, no matter what.
“Love you, too, Pops,” he says, and walking out of the dorm I realize again that I am 46 now, nearly 30 years removed from being a freshman on that same campus. Decades. Unfathomable time. Young people everywhere on the sidewalks and unloading their cars and having no idea that someday they will be me, wondering where all the time has gone.
At home I play soccer with our youngest son. “Feel the ball hit your foot. Lock that ankle. There you go. Now with your left.” The other kids have fled to their rooms and Maile sits at the dining room table with her planner, going over the week to come. I wander around the side of the house, into the dying gray light, and I start a fire on the patio.
The wood is wet from weeks of rain and frost that forms and melts and forms and melts and saturates the sticks. But I keep trying, and soon a blaze is going, and Winnie the Labrador races through the woods. I can’t see her anymore, but I can hear her feet shushing through last fall’s leaves. The sun sets, a tired sort of pastel color at the very edge of the Earth, just a line of light under all that gray.
I sit in a chair by myself and watch the fire grow and behind it the sunset and somewhere in between Winnie is still running. Darkness falls. Then I go inside and call to everyone that I have built a fire, and in a few minutes the seven of us are together, huddled around the flames, sitting on chairs and laps, and someone asks if we have any marshmallows.
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Last chance to sing up for our Nine Month Novel class!
You can find out all about it HERE.
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Your writing is so beautiful. I love the detail you notice in mundane, everyday moments. Makes them seem considerably less mundane and infinitely more special. Thank you for sharing your gift.
Nice little vignette.