Twenty years ago our family packed up and moved from the city to the suburbs thereby essentially rewriting a future history that never happened. The next two decades up to the present played out with the joys, despairs and memories as unique to our family as they are commonly recognizable to any group of people related by birth and proximity. With the added dimension that we have always kept in touch with a small pocket of people who would have been the daily players in our lives had we never moved away.
This week Son’s college senior photos arrived and like Bogie and Bergman in Casablanca I can’t seem to see them enough. I walk by the piano where the framed 8×10 is displayed and I can feel an uncontrollable smile spread across my face. Neither of my parents attended college. In fact my father left school in the 8th grade to help support his family and didn’t get his GED until many years later. He went on to become a successful and beloved maverick entrepreneur who was wildly proud of his two children who also never completed their college educations. Daughter’s university graduation would have been the first in the family either of my parents would have attended but the event unfolded in Boston while they both fought terminal illnesses in New York. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys stood in the middle of the Fleet Center singing In My Room, while Daughter waved from the massive sea of gowns, a distant jellybean recognizable only through binoculars by the Superman artwork on top of her cap. It was magically giddy. The only thing missing was my parents.
Earlier this evening I left my house for dinner out with my Brooklyn Girls, the moms of the kids my kids knew as kids, and the two things I brought with me were a bottle of wine and Son’s graduation picture. Our gatherings have become less frequent over the years but that has only served to make us covet them more. We shared some health concerns, some new adventures and old routines. We compared college timelines and whose kids were on the five, six or seven year plan, what their goals were, where they were living and where we’d like them to be living. We looked at the pictures we all brought and discussed how our conversations with our children have changed now that they’re all adults. One friend said how she talks to her twenty-something daughter now more like she would a friend. I said how I recently told Daughter a tidbit of too intimate information that inspired her to respond, “Okay, so now I have to go squirt something on my brain to wash that away.”
We ate and we laughed and we set a date for our next dinner. I drove home on the Belt Parkway in the rain with Beyonce on the radio singing Irreplaceable. Perfect.