College

I stood there on the grass outside the auditorium where Convocation had just finished. Parents were still making their way out the doors and down the steps to the refreshment tables where I waited.  Students streamed out the side doors of the auditorium like a school of minnows, a silvery blur in the dappled sunlight of late afternoon.  There were four hundred odd students and more than twice that number of parents and family members trying to find each other.  I thought of cattle being separated from their young during branding and how when it’s over and the pens are opened each cow, miraculously to me, finds her calf out of the hundreds milling about.

I began to move towards the swarm of students, and noticed a mother with tears starting to spill out of her eyes as she gazed at her daughter.  Her arms were fluttering around like wings, fingers reaching out to pluck at the girl and then falling back to her sides, as if resisting the urge to grab her child and never let go.  I passed a stony-eyed boy in stilted conversation with his father, willing this parting to be over, the anguish visible in every line of his body. I went by clusters of students forming fledgling friendships, awkwardly introducing their parents.  I weaved my way in and out of these people, searching for my son.  He was looking for me too, but not bawling like a newly branded calf needing comfort from its mother.  Nor was I calling for him in panicked desperation, worried that the sand was leaking out of the hourglass.

As I reached my son’s side I realized what differentiated me from the other parents. Instead of loss, grief, or even anger, what I was feeling was relief.  Happy, joyous relief.  This child of mine was in one place, where I could reach him by phone. Where family could reach him by car.  He would be sleeping in the same room for nine months.  He was surrounded by peers, about to embark on nothing more dangerous than academia for most of the day.

We stood there making small talk with his roommate and his parents while thoughts of my son’s exploits over the past year drifted through my mind.  When he was sleeping outside in Africa and he could hear a hippo grazing a few feet away, rustling the side of his tent.  Or when he was working in the rhino sanctuary and came across poachers.  Or when he stumbled upon a family of elephants and stopped to take photos.  Or when his ex South African Special Forces boss made him train with the Army Rangers, his white skin a blemish amongst the ebony colored group, posing for the photo with AK47s in an open jeep.  Or when I saw him tagged on Facebook with thirty-something Peace Corps volunteers, empty beer cans littering the ground around them.  Or when he went to Zanzibar over Christmas but didn’t bother to get a phone so he couldn’t call.  And then seeing more photos on Facebook of him jumping off cliffs into water with tawny children, showing off his flips and spins and corks that he had practiced on our trampoline for hours and hours. When he could have hit his head.  Or gotten sick from the water.  Or been robbed. Or worse.  Or when he trekked to Annapurna Base Camp alone, saying to me a million miles away, “It’s fine. There are tea houses along the way.  I’m sure I’ll meet people.” Or when he fell in love with a twenty four year old British girl he met in Goa and lied about his age as they traveled by train through India together.  To exotic places with exotic sounding names, places I’ve been to that romance the soul and make you want to become a Sadhu.  Places like Jodphur and Jaiselmeer.  Where you drink tea bought from chai wallahs at stations, passed up through the window in unfired clay bowls that you throw on the tracks when you finish, shattering them into the dust from whence they came.  Or when I got his last cryptic emails before he was due to fly home from Katmandu, when he had let the cigarette-burned, needle-tracked ex Nepalese mafia guy and his wife sleep in his room.  When I didn’t know if he would be on the plane.  All of these thoughts passed through me as we chatted with others on the lawn of this small liberal arts college.  I saw him, impossibly young and yet old at the same time, reflecting my thoughts back to me, in silent communication.  “I’m safe,” is what I heard.