Flying the Coop
A middle-age rite of passage.

September 4, 2001 9:10 a.m.

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.