“Clearing you out”: Summer’s End /Road Trips
For the last few years, the teenager and I have played hookie, making our way out of town, beyond the city, into bucolic upstate New York.
“It's so beautiful,” they say, passing green hills and mountains, shuterred farmhouses and factories, abandoned clinics and morning dew in the distance.
We’ve done dozens of these trips.
Last week, after yoga, the teenager hatched a plan telling me we would be on the road again today, up to Fahnestock State Park, in Putnam Valley, New York, for a swim and a hike on the Appalachian trail. On the way out, we played “Hot to Go!” the song by Chappell Roan, we danced to as we were getting arrested the day before. And stopped to pick up buddies in Downtown Brooklyn, meandering through the Bronx, past crumbling buildings, missing the turnoff, getting lost on the Cross Bronx Expressway that Robert Moses slashed through communities that Stanley and Marshall argued about, on the way to Astoria to pick up buddy number two, who was not picking up their phone. Arriving in Astoria, the two knocked on the window of their sleeping buddy who's phone was turned off and roused her. And the trip continued North, giggling our way out of the city, chatting about bands and scenes, shows in Chinatown, bands they’ve set up shows for. And out to a gorgeous pond, looking at the tidepools, hiking through the woods, greeting a snake and a salamander, saying hi to a frog in the forest, stepping across a stream, hiking through the rain, out for a snack at a diner in Fishkill. Next stop, a cemetery in Wappingers Falls, wondering about the people there. Driving back, we listened to Connie Converse. Where did she go? What happened to her? Was she still alive or did she take her own life, we speculated, listening to Blaze Foley and Apes of State, past Pete Seeger's place, singing along to Dolly Parton, looking at the trees, recalling the scones and pancakes Penel used to make for us in Cold Spring. For decades, we’d go weekly, out for ice cream in Peekskill with as Al, through years of memories, and giggles, back to holy New York City. Through snowy winter roads, into spring and summer, these trips have sustained us through the years.
Hiking we chat about our favorite books about the road, Into the Wild and, of course, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, chuckling about the story of two under prepared hikers finding something in themselves on the road. The road exposes something in, offering us something of a mystery, in an encounter with the unknown. No one knows how to really respond. “That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.” says Bill Bryson.
Back to the City we drive, dropping off the buddies at Union Square, before making our way back to Brooklyn.
Its the end of an era, says our friend Max, reflecting on taking his third kid to college, the next day.
I think about the teenager and our years together, when they came and it felt like I had no time, clashing and going to school together, slowly getting a hang of it, meeting on Friday after school ended, to the library and the community bookstore, or to Coney Island or to Judson, or reading in bed.
Gradually that all ended.
They asserted their own story, their own subjectivities.
And stopped going with me.
Picking and choosing what they wanted to do with old dad, if anything.
And they grew up.
Applied to colleges, soon to hit the road to Boston.
The cats in the cradle.
My mind trails back to sitting with Rob and Bear, chatting about writing, in a pub in Falmoth England, swimming in Garrison, listening to music, talking about Blaze Foley, and Connie Converse and Apes of State, listening to podcasts together, reminding me not to let Katie be my pixie dream girl in New Orleans, walking through VerwalterHaus, our favorite friedhof in Berlin, jogging on the beach in Long Beach, biking up to school on the tandem, up to Park Slope, I think about the guest who came to stay that day at the end of June, 2006, recalling Rumi, the Sufi Master:
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”
The unexpected guest was the teenager almost two decades ago. The new guest is absence; its loneliness. Can I welcome them or see the connection between the two, the interplay in between the arrivals and eternal departures of family members, ever going their own way, brothers, grandparents, Dad, kids, connecting and separating through time, wishing they were here?
I guess I have no choice.
Their last night at home, I had a dream about Syd Barrett, the beloved singer who inspired us to play on a surrealist landscape of our making, exploding in our heads. And helped me see a whole world to explore in the human mind. I think about his dream and our dream, his memory and ours, ever disappearing and reappearing and receding in the distance, a love song about a girl no one would really know:
“I knew a girl and I like her still
she said she knew she would trust me
and I her will...
I said: OK baby, tell me what you be
and I'll lay my head down and see what I see.
By the time she was back
by her open eyes
I knew that I was in for a big surprise.”
I certainly was.
I wrote them a card, recalling some of our collective daydreams.
“You can't fall off a mountain…”
“.. it all ends in tears anyways…”
The Dharma Bums are many.
Last day, I arrived home from yoga.
And they were off to say bye to Grandpa.
Bye to the kitties.
Bye to the dolls in their room.
Bye to the bookshelves and childhood bedroom they planned countless redesigns for on the Camino, hiking all afternoon long.
Bye to the skulls and bones, bye to the talismans.
To the books you marked up,
Hugs and snapshots, bike secured on the top of the old Highlander we got when they were born, that took us from Long Beach up and down the California Coast and countless trips since. And they are off. I guess someone is clearing me out. For while there, they were everywhere here. I was working and wanted nothing of parenting. Twenty years later, I wish there was more. But they are on the road somewhere else. Dad's happiest years were in Boston. One of his army buddies is even still there. Now the teenager is off learn the history of this old majestic city, even if they cant keep a straight face. Onward little one. Onward. Valiente, they used to say to us in the Camino as the little one hiked across Spain, later Italy and France. The road trips many, from the hospital to Princeton 18 years ago, to Long Beach for a year, back to Brooklyn, to school in Park Slope, out to the park or bookstore every Friday after school, to Dublin, Berlin, Tokyo, Hanoi, to Sarajevo, to Berlin and back. And off to Boston with Summer's end. The road goes on forever, even if you cant keep a straight face. Onward.
And then they drove off with mom, leaving Dad to prepare for first day of class in Brooklyn tomorrow.
And now its over. The ledger of good and the bad parenting, the mistakes and successes, the struggles and victories, frustrated screams and delights, the painful dynamics and the joys, all for the record books now. There will be other parenting to do. But not on a daily. The daily trips to the bus stop or subway, gone, X Files watching parties, monthly road trips to Princeton and upstate, to a cemetery or record store, Wes Anderson Midnight Kingdom binges, a thing of the past, chats when they get home from school on Mondays, a thing of the past.
The “clearing you out” time has begun. I know. I know. I know. But I'm going to miss the surprise of that guest who arrived when Italy was beating Ukraine 3 - 0 in the World Cup Quarter finals in 2006 and stayed with us for another 18 years. Those were the happiest days of my life.
I think of the greetings, ‘hi dad!’
I look back at an old journal entry, when they told me about a friend who dropped by late at night, knocking on their window.
“We wanted to see you before we go” their friend told them. They planned to depart for for parts unknown.
“Where?” they wondered.
“No place on earth” their friend replied.
Parting glances, here, there.
It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to the little one.
Their heart raced.
So did mine listening, knowing I hadn’t always been there, like I needed to be.
There had been screams and threats.
“Why do people always say they are going to leave me?” they wondered, thinking back, looking at me.
“Please don’t hurt yourself” they plead their friends. “Text me tomorrow to let me know you are ok, please.”
The years had been long, pandemics, friends lost, a year in a bedroom, not quite sure how to return to the world.
They took their friends seriously.
And it came at a cost, bullying, teenage cruelties, podcasts and coping.
Sophomore year Penel departed on Halloween.
Others followed.
They found their way into the woods, running off to midnight waterring hole, finding new friends.
For a long time, we read stories together, Gods and Heros, Garp, Old Man and the Sea, half of War and Peace, on and on.
And then they started raiding my bookshelf, Borges and Me, Love in the Time of Cholera, 100 Years of Solitude, Master and Margarita, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laugher and Forgetting, and our favorite, The Dharma Bums, and its words for the ages.
“Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”
And we dug in the garden. Wendy rememberred us coming to Siempre Verde to squat the old vacant lott after we returned from Dublin, a dozen years ago, before the garden won approval from the community board. There was something egalitarian, something free found in those trees, where the teenager climbed after school, in the green spaces, the biodiversity which reminded us everyone is unique, showing me a secret garden after their sister departed for the West Coast, keeping me company all those years ago.
There was something we could find there.
“Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me,” wrote Leslie Feinberg in Stone Butch Blues.
They pulled books off my shelf, exploring our pasts, one story after another, one explosion after another. They referred to Carson as “our favorite lonely lesbian.” They read the Heart is a Lonely Hunter over and over again: “The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.”
And we went to climate demos and organized a memorial for Nex Benedict. And they found their own voice, telling me they were not coming to Berlin with us. They would stay in Brooklyn with Grandpa, working setting up shows, sitting at the merch table, and having the summer of their lives, just as I had after my senior year.
For a long time, we hiked together, each Thanksgiving, then on the Camino all those summers, ahead of the crowd, and then they went on their own in Prague, taking the train with their Berlin buddy, texting me in a techno club when they were back in Berlin, meeting me on our balcony for a doner kebab and a radler looking at the city.
And we rode to Tompkins, up over the Manhatten Bridge, them ahead, waiting for dad, who used to ride ahead, waiting at the bottom, before they spead ahead, exchanging texts once we arrived. They went their way and I went mine.
And we went for one final road trip, listening to the Damned, “I just can’t be happy today,” recalling that spring when we all listening to them every day, before they moved away.
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