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My
Son Has Just Received
His First Carby
Byron Browne | |
Well,
it was bound to happen. Our son has his first car. At almost twenty years old,
maybe he was a little past due but, it has finally arrived in all of it’s 1992
Mitsubishi 3000 GT with only 78,000 mile, glory. The car, punctuating our home’s
facade like a hood ornament at the top of the drive, has big fat tires and
everything and our son is now indeed a Highway Star. He loves it, of course,
looks fantastic in it and, after the requisite cursing and small-scale violence
involved with learning how to manipulate a standard shift, has added this tool
to his ever expanding universe of accoutrement. However, as we zigged and zagged
around the local high school’s parking lot it occurred to me that the car exposes
entirely different worlds to the two of us. For my son the vehicle offers status,
maturity and of course the freedom of rapid access to whom and whatever he feels
drawn towards. For myself I had the selfish and dour thought that the car was
just another element propelling my son away from home. Even after his two years
in college, I am still, at times, having separation anxiety. I find that I’m still
walking around my empty nest kicking at disregarded toys or picking up too short,
discarded trousers and pushing them into the hollow recesses of a neglected chest
of drawers. But the car is just another, and most probably the penultimate, accessory
in a long and varied string of factors and events that has facilitated his exit
from everything childhood.
Many parents will tell you that a significant
portion of their child’s ethos was lost the moment they dropped him or her off
at kindergarten. Yes, school. That institution that teaches the three or four
R’s, conditions timed structure and how to interact with your peers without, usually,
slapping them stupid. Kindergarten, and its ugly stepsisters first and second
grade, also teach our children that publicly kissing them is a horror (who of
us was not broken the first time our child recoiled from the kiss trying to find
its mark on the forehead before sending them in to classes?). School is that Fagin
that introduces and demonstrates prejudice and bias. It is there that that great
evil, Vanity, which every philosopher from Paul to Gandhi has tried, in vain,
to dissuade us from, comes into full view. Try as I might, I cannot forget the
first time I heard my son fret over the appearance of his clothing and the comb
of his hair; both on the same morning-both my fault. The tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil finds fecund soil in our school systems. Couple this newfound
wisdom with some newfound vocabulary (my first was, “Oh, this damn ice cream!”
Spilled on pants at a birthday party. Six years old.) and your angel’s halo is
not only forever sullied but they have taken their first steps on that path that
leads straight out the front door. The only Good, as far as I can tell, is that
the information acquired in these primary grades is nearly sufficient to battle
that Monster of monsters: Puberty.
Which of our homo habilis ancestors
committed a sin so grievous that we are forever cursed by the plague of puberty?
I’d like to know. I’d like to wring his simian neck. Adolescence is that period,
those tender years when our children acquire Universal Knowledge and the burdenous
boredom that must accompany such a load of wisdom. These are also the years when
we, as parents, grow horns, forked tongues, oily tails and acquire a stink so
putrid that it can be eradicated by no soap or salve. During these few years adults
make the leap from Shaman to shameful in Olympic time. The only hope of redemption
is trusting Nature to gather them to adulthood, to allow them to view us from
the other side. Then we can all continue on with our lives, assuming that we have
not taken theirs during the intervening years. Abandon all hope ye who enter these
turbulent times. No other force of Nature so swiftly and assuredly steals our
pudgy-faced cherubim than adolescence. As a single parent I stood much too close
to this volcano for far too long. The hair on my arms has yet to grow back.
For
the longest time I felt the drag of what I took for some dark, malevolent entity
on my son and try as I might, I could not disentangle him from its tendrils. It
took a few years before I realized that puberty wasn’t the only thing tugging
at my son- his friends were just outside grappling for a firm hold as well. And
they were pulling him out of the house with the same force as puberty was pushing
him.
As with school, my son’s friends, most of whom I loved as my own,
were intermittently, harbingers of foul tales and suspect language. They proclaimed
prurient stories and lusty, exotic adventures. My son and his friends spent hours
to days reacting exciting scenes from movies with stale, precocious themes and
young actors, relating segments from sophomoric, inane television sitcoms and
becoming breathless from the buxom, latex-wrapped heroines of comics. Then, of
course, that messiah of the media, the Internet, that muezzin in the minaret calling
all to partake of worlds that, perhaps, were better left alien and imagined. Nevertheless,
my son has been a willing and active participant in this heated desire to become
adult before due, at times following and other times leading the group as it sped
away from their respective homes at mach speed. These boys raced from childhood’s
comfort as if they had broken its window with an errant baseball. However, many
of us are, at times, not only susceptible to wantonness but also desirous of it.
My son and his friends flared to the end of the pier with eager anticipation to
leap off. As they should. Isn’t this as common at this age, as natural a thing
as craving anything soaked in sugar? Not running with the pack would stunt natural
progression. Maturation would grow weak from malnutrition and soon become a bent,
malformed entity. It should not be negligent to silently wish to see our children
hustling around with their friends, swimming naked in the lake, choking on a first
(hopefully last) cigarette, breaking the speed limit, grimacing at the harsh,
metallic fume of bourbon, leaping from the higher branch, stumbling into an unexpected
kiss in an unfamiliar room. Cloistering children is as much a sin as letting them
roam at will. Finding that balance, as complex an exercise as advanced calculus.
I did not want my son to stay home once he was fit for flight. I only found that
there was pain in watching him leave.
And so the car facilitates this
progress. His wheels are greased. With the car my son flits from college to home
and back again as a humming bird at feeders. But he’s on track and the car is
only the next gear advancing his journey. And if the vehicle is that penultimate
factor in my son’s final exit from home, if it is the next to last conveyance
in his maturation process, what will be the ultima, the final stretch?
I suspect, as it has been since antiquity, his marriage to some exciting young
beauty whose own parents are, even now, watching from behind some ball-cracked
window.
Copyright Byron Browne
Notes
From Over Here August
1, 2009 Column
Byron Browne can be reached at Byron.Browne@gmail.com
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