Notes From a Big Country: Journey Into the American Dream by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409095729
Google: LvB8TIh9CwwC
Amazon: 1784161845
Published: 2010-03-02T15:11:40+00:00

ON LOSING A SON

This may get a little soppy, and I’m sorry, but yesterday evening I was working at my desk when my youngest child came up to me, a baseball bat perched on his shoulder, a cap on his head, and asked me if I felt like playing a little ball with him. I was trying to get some important work done before going away on a long trip, and I very nearly declined with regrets, but then it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

So we went out on to the front lawn and here is where it gets soppy. There was a kind of beauty about the experience so elemental and wonderful I cannot tell you – the way the evening sun fell across the lawn, the earnest eagerness of his young stance, the fact that we were doing this most quintessentially dad-and-son thing, the supreme contentment of just being together – and I couldn’t believe that it would ever have occurred to me that finishing an article or writing a book or doing anything at all could be more important and rewarding than this.

Now what has brought on all this sudden sensitivity is that a week or so ago we took our eldest son off to a small university in Ohio. He was the first of our four to fly the coop, and now he is gone – grown up, independent, far away – and I am suddenly realizing how quickly they go.

‘Once they leave for college they never really come back,’ a neighbour who has lost two of her own in this way told us wistfully the other day.

This isn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that they come back a lot, only this time they hang up their clothes, admire you for your intelligence and wit, and no longer have a hankering to sink diamond studs into various odd holes in their heads. But the neighbour was right. He is gone. There is an emptiness in the house that proves it.

I hadn’t expected it to be like this because for the past couple of years even when he was here he wasn’t really here, if you see what I mean. Like most teenagers, he didn’t live in our house in any meaningful sense – more just dropped by a couple of times a day to see what was in the refrigerator or to wander between rooms, a towel round his waist, calling out, ‘Mum, where’s my …?’ as in, ‘Mum, where’s my yellow shirt?’ and ‘Mum, where’s my deodorant?’ Occasionally I would see the top of his head in an easy chair in front of a television on which Oriental people were kicking each other in the heads, but mostly he resided in a place called ‘Out.’

My role in getting him off to college was simply to write cheques – lots and lots of them – and to look suitably pale and aghast as the sums mounted.

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