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 a's
crying. Her oldest boy is going off to school. Pa's sighing. Who
the hell's going to mow the lawn?
And so we reach
a middle-age rite of passage. The boy's institution of choice is
the Berklee College of Music, located in Boston, along with 100
or so other colleges and universities. Few other places in the world
contain so many young people seeking knowledge, enlightenment, and
future job contacts — as well as older people seeking to milk
those dreams for all they are worth. The tuition! The rent! The
associated living expenses! The horror!
Ma thinks about
those burning bales of currency and sighs. Pa thinks of crying,
but what's the use?
After all,
despite all the sadness of losing a son to the world, the alternative
is much less appealing: A stay-home kid, living endlessly off parental
sweat. While you're busy scheming, dreaming, backstabbing, bribing,
pleading, and otherwise conducting business among the other pirates
of the world, the slug is back home eating your food, drinking your
beer, cranking up the air conditioner, and otherwise waiting for
you to go out and buy him a winning lottery ticket.
Sending the
kid away is far better. Only then can the world's trickier lessons
truly be learned. For instance, Berklee is apparently the predominant
contemporary music school in the United States, or so indicate the
people in the public-relations/billing office. All told, a student
is going to spend a bit over 30 grand a year, whether learning jazz
(the boy's discipline) or specializing in three-chord music, which
is where the real money is.
The lesson
is clear: If you get really good at something hard, you'll probably
achieve relative anonymity. To put it in money terms, you pay 30
grand a year for schooling and when you get out you might make 12
grand a year playing in clubs, which will hardly cover your bar
bill. Toss in a cocaine addiction and Heaven forbid a wife and suddenly
you're in way over your head.
We can only
say, Go for it, Dude. After all, it could be much worse. He might
have ended up studying the humanities at a prestigious college.
Far better to learn licks in Boston than English at Duke. The fact
that the boy will be practicing arpeggios late into the evening
instead of contemplating the sexual tension between Moby Dick and
Ahab supplies a father with an almost supernatural peace.
The departure
of the oldest son, to be sure, makes for much reflection. Did we
do right by the boy: Was he taken fishing enough, exposed to the
finer arts, dragged successfully before the parson, infused with
sound reason, instructed in the high art of ridiculing fools, taught
to distrust politicians and other authority figures (save for father),
etc.? Grade inflation being what it is, superior marks must be granted.
We can also
take a slight bow for setting him on the road to Boston. Early on,
we instituted a rule: Any and all official offspring would be required
to take three years of piano lessons. Then they could quit and,
if that be their ignorant desire, never play an instrument again.
To no surprise, practice sessions turned into titanic battles, and
for both our sons, it was three years and out. Yet both returned
to music.
Among the other
mileposts, lovingly considered this week, was the boy's first gig,
at age 12 or so, in a bar outside Denver. The singer hit all the
notes except the right ones, but we were watching the lead guitar
player, who actually tapped time, the metronome being a foot clad
in a black tennis shoe. Having a kid tapping time is a good sign.
There were fights over CDs with vile lyrics and the surprise turn
toward music we liked — the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones
(formerly demon bands but, thanks to the miracle of cultural disintegration,
saintly by current standards).
Then, out of
nowhere, the ascent to jazz. He got better and better, sometimes
sitting in with the old man during a gig, slowly but surely playing
circles around me. As was once said of Benito Mussolini, the boy
can hang.
Not all the
memories are musical. There were the two passes he caught, in two
different seasons, that took his football teams into the playoffs;
fly-fishing in Colorado's South Platte River; the saying of farewell
to friends when it came time to move back East; the terrible April
afternoon we spent before the television, watching frantic former
schoolmates outside Columbine High School and wondering who was
dead and who wasn't.
So goes the
life of a young man. Now he's going away, floating on a sea of hope.
Ma is crying. Pa's thinking about joining her, so she won't be so
alone.
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