Outliving the Suburbs, but Not Our Home

At dusk we walk the dogs.

As the house empties the evenings are the biggest change.

There was a time when I would rush home from work to help with the bath, pajamas, teeth-brushing, story-telling and to bed before the adults returned to the kitchen for a dinner of our own.

The routine changed as they learned to feed themselves and made sure the parents stayed away as they covered up on their way to the shower.

And now we come home and the lone remaining child is already upstairs doing things where we have no logical role.  Maybe we can look over a paper or answer high impact questions like: “I'm out of toothpaste.” “Why is it so hot in this house?”  “Is the Wifi broken?”

But other than that we are left to our own devices.  But what are those devices?

I’ve asked several friends whose nests have emptied what they do at night?

Seven o’clock is the new witching hour.

Our only remaining live-in child gets home from swim practice at six thirty, the elaborate meal of a protein, starch and veggie is eaten standing up at the kitchen counter much to my wife’s dismay.  But the child hurries back up to her room for homework, college applications and social connection via social media.

So now what?  It’s seven o’clock.

I used to sneak into my den for a few minutes of work or reading or writing when they were young.  Now I have the time alone, but I don’t want it.

So we walk the dogs down the street, up to the elementary school where they can go off leash to run.

At the school there are parents pushing strollers through the adjacent playground, maybe someone is on a swing, another is catching a child swirling down a slide.

On the blacktop there is a father chasing a bicycle as a little boy with helmet, knee pads and elbow pads wobbles back and forth before straightening his front tire and heading for the safety of the grassy baseball field.

Onto the soccer field we go, a practice of middle schoolers in full swing, a few parents linger along the sidelines.  When the dogs get too close and the snares from the sideline parents too intense, we call for them to come.

These are all scenes we have run through.  We have been on that playground, pushed a bike through that parking lot, anxiously cheered a child from those sidelines.

But now it’s all sidelines.

It’s getting dark and practices need to end, parents trying to get home, children stretching for one more chance at daylight.

A father in the parking lot implores his child to come to the car, as the little boy tries, in vain, to make one final shot on the basketball court before running to the open door.

“We don’t belong here anymore,” I say, as the dogs go into a trot on the way back home.  “The suburbs served their purpose, now it’s time for someone else to be on this street with their kids, their basketball, their dogs and leashes.”

These nightly walks are a trip through our lives, a splendid one at that.  Our kids played on those fields, but now they are gone and we should be too.

“We’re not selling the house,” she says.

“Why not?”

“You can’t sell their childhood while they are in college, they need a place to come home to.”

“We’re not going to be homeless, we’ll move someplace else.  The suburbs are built for families.  We have nothing to rush home to in the evening, our job here is done.”

“The kids need to know they can come home.  To their home, not some house where they stay in a guest bedroom.”

We went from living in a dorm, to an apartment in a city, to the suburbs.  But somewhere after suburbs, but before Florida or a “community”, where do you go? 

A friend of mine, a city dweller, called the suburbs soul-less.  I disagree.  The soul of the suburbs are the family’s that live there.  But when the kids leave the house, a light goes out. 

Had we outlived our suburban purpose?

Thanksgiving comes and everybody rushes home.  The kids love their beds and their bedrooms, their dogs and their place on the couch with unrivaled affection.  Rooms we haven’t entered in months are now filled with people and friends, empty bottles and cups, dented cushions and noise that is music to any parent’s ears.

I get it. 

The children are fiercely defensive of their homestead, their bedrooms, their backyard, their pets.  They want it all hermetically sealed in a place they remember when they were small(er).  We are not meant to live in museums.  They are places to visit, pause and remember. 

But what are we to do between visits?

Changing Rooms

We don’t see gradual.

I looked up one day from our intense preparation for his college departure and realized, he was already gone.

Our parent's generation doesn't seem to understand.  Somehow my departure from the stage wasn't such a cataclysmic event.

When they say "What's the big deal, no one died" I want to shake them and say "you don't understand, I'm just gonna miss him, his presence, the pleasure of his company."

I am trying not to be overly dramatic about the first one leaving the nest, but even the most hard-bitten friends have talked about the emptiness that comes when they do.

“It’s like they cut a hole in your heart,” according to friend I would call, unemotional.

Nothing ages you like your children's passages.  When you send them off to college and realize the clock really is ticking, not on them, but on you.  It forces us to think about all we are in the midst of: Jobs, marriages, friendships, life.

In a much passed-around article, columnist Michael Gerson compared dropping his child off at college with the ending of the universe.  He notes that Cosmologists, who I thought gave facials, “assure us, our sun and all suns will consume their fuel, violently explode and then become cold and dark. Matter itself will evaporate into the void and the universe will become desolate for the rest of time.”

Okay, that’s dramatic, but only a little.

We started preparing early, at the start of senior year, a time everyone told us would be a disaster.  But it wasn’t.  The college application process, the waiting, the pull and push of a teenager trying to escape childhood and parents trying to keep order.

Everything flew generally on time and according to plan.    

And then one night a few weeks ago I headed upstairs to drop the new copy of Sports Illustrated on his bed and found myself in the center of his empty room.  There were lots of days like this, with work, friends, and his own angst changing the household routine, I would leave before he was up and he was out when I went to bed.  His job as an 18-year old waiter conflicted with my schedule as a human.  I could go days without seeing his face. 

I hadn’t been in his room in weeks.  It used to be a regular hang out.  At first to tuck him in, read a book, make sure he was asleep, then make sure he was home.  It was a place where serious talks took place and stories were told in the confidence of darkness.  

And now I stood in a foreign zone, duffle bags splayed open like patients on an operating table, packages of t-shirts and socks, various dorm room requirements, fresh toiletries still in their packaging.  Along the perimeter was his past.  An outer ring of memorabilia that tracked his childhood: 

A baseball glove, a collage of pictures with kids from another neighborhood, stacks of books from various years, Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Road. Some are dog eared, some un-cracked.  Old bobble heads, long-forgotten ticket stubs, a sea shell, baseball caps of all sizes, a faded art project, a piggy bank stuffed with pennies, a replica of the Forum, an empty Coke bottle from Israel, a deconstructed science project.

A friend of mine calls this a “memory minefield.”  These places that shake us with their history, of a time that no longer exists.  

I look for them in every room, every block of our neighborhood, every memento.  The school, the restaurants, a dent on the couch, things from a different era, when the house had a different rhythm. Gerson said that parenthood is a lesson in humility: “The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else’s story.”

Hunting around these corners, preparing myself for these moments, I realized that while I was still on stage, he was already gone.  Off on his new adventure, while I am here with the memories, a minefield for me, a past for him.

Closing the Door

There are any number of quotes about London that come to mind as we leave.  But this best represents the sentiment:

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."--Hemingway

London is the new Paris.

It was before seven in the morning a few weeks ago and the captain said we were landing at Heathrow. He said it in the way they say it, two words, Heath--Row. And my stomach was excited in a new way, all the thrill of going home coupled with the anticipation of being away.

We would only be in London for 10 days, some final clean up at the office, pack up the apartment, attend the Olympics.  And ten days later the call from the stewardess was "We are arriving in Dulles Washington" as she called it.  It didn't have the same appeal.

I’ve tried to identify the emotion we are experiencing.  Why can't I put my finger on what it was that I felt when I closed the door on that house and this year?

It is an ending.  It’s not a movie or a vacation or a restaurant we can return to.  It's most akin to the end of college.  

I can go back to Ann Arbor, but not as an 18 year old. I can walk down State Street but the bars are filled with different students making their own memories.  There isn't a Sammy house full of brothers, those aren't my books, my beer, my teachers or my first taste of freedom. They now belong to someone else.  Only the memories are mine.

So yes, we’ll go back to London.  And we'll even return to 9 Abbey Gardens, but not as a resident.  We'll never stay in that neighborhood as a neighbor.  And in the end that's what makes me long for it, as I did when I left anything for the last time and it was termed a Commencement:  Because you can go home again, but sometimes the home isn't there, just the house is.

Thoreau said when he left his cabin on the shores of Walden Pond: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

And so we return to the common hours.