Just when you think your job as a mother is on the wane, the circuits all light up again.
In second year, before he dropped out, Casey had moved into an apartment with four roommates, a vast, Montreal-sized flat around the corner from the bagel shop on St. Viateur. It was sunny, with an old porcelain kitchen sink that hit you mid-thigh and a back balcony full of drying laundry and bicycles. The smell of grilled lamb and oregano from the Greek restaurant around the corner drifted in the windows. The apartment was a block away from the bohemian scene on the patio of the Club Social and across the street from a crepe shop where one of his roommates worked, pouring batter onto a grill the size of a record turntable. Ground Zero in Mile End,maybe the coolest intersection in North America for someone his age (or so it seemed to me). But he had decided that he would rather fly to the southwestern States in the dying days of that empire, to stand in the middle of the desert with this thumb out.
Did we play too much Dylan? Was it the cover of Bringing It All Back Home staring out at the three of us, that woman in the red dress? Even though we didn’t mythologize the past, our cultural debris was still lying around, and Casey seemed to have inherited some of our creaky old cynicism about “the system.”Careers were for squares. He had no time for the go-getters, the ones climbing the ladder. He was an outlaw; he would make his own way.
Wrong era, I felt like telling him. That romance is over. Even the phrase “dropping out” had been our idea, back when not working was the most ambitious thing you could do. In 1969 spending time in Tangiers was tantamount to getting an MBA. We did finish our degrees, but school was a relatively carefree experience, not the angsty job-grooming factory it has since become. The culturally approved thing for someone growing up then was to get as far from family as possible and to inhale the world.
And that was how we spent the next 10 years or so, fomenting revolution and playing in a band (Brian) or travelling, falling in love, and occasionally writing (me). Postponing adulthood, certainly. Alarming our families.
In many ways,we had simply conformed to the times. But it was obvious from our photo albums and our modest capital assets— we were in our thirties before we could commit to buying a couch, let alone a house—that we had valued freedom and adventure over careers and financial security. Because when we were growing up, that luxurious range of options still existed.
Now, our desire to reinvent the world has dwindled for many of us to a spirited defence of our right to unpasteurized cheese. But a familiar flame of indignation burned on in Casey. In school he was impatient just reading “one guy’s version of what happened in the past”; he wanted to get out into the world, to see and feel it for himself.
I saw his point. I had done the same thing, after all. But I also didn’t want him to lose his place in the fearful queue of training and competition that had become his culture.
My parents were the first generation in their modest prairie families to go to university, in Saskatoon. Education meant a great deal to them, but they didn’t pressure me to go to college. I could always work as a secretary. Or I could teach. (I was 40 before she threw out my old high-school textbooks, imagining they might come in handy the day I came to my senses and enrolled in teachers’ college.) University was more of a finishing-school, where girls went to get a smattering of knowledge while meeting “husband material.” My father encouraged my “flair for words”urging me to “write something funny for Reader’s Digest” (which I have only recently accomplished). So I ambled my way through an English degree, which suited me fine.
But I don’t think my parents and I ever had a single conversation about what I might “become.” I was a girl; I already was who I was going to be.
That was then. Now,however, there have been endless conversations with my son, wearying to both of us, about what he might “become.”And all my alarms and doubts about this process were, unoriginally, funnelled into the question of school. If only he had gone to that cozy alternative school instead of the downtown public school he preferred. Or private school. Et cetera. Like Effexor, I thought school was the pill my son could swallow to solve our anxiety around what his true place in the world should be.
But maybe school wasn’t the culprit. Maybe it was the cultural stuff he grew up around, all the romantic outlaws who sang and wrote about the American dream, when there still was one. I wandered into Casey’s old room to do some forensics.
His bed faced a wall of bookshelves, full of our old heroes, half-mad visionaries like R. D. Laing and Charles Bukowski, ambitious Sylvia Plaths and train-hopping Al Purdys glaring down at him while he slept. Our books line one entire wall in “his” room, from the floor to the ceiling, but as I sat there I remembered the bookcase that Casey had kept in our previous house, as a teenager. It was just two shelves long, but strenuously edited. In a household full of print, with two journalist parents, he claimed not to be a reader. At 14 and 15, though, he did surreptitiously read, with his full attention. I could still reconstruct the titles that he kept in his room:
— Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory
— George Orwell,Down and Out in Paris and London
— Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, of course (Brian handed it to him in a bookstore when he was 14; he opened the maroon-covered paperback, read the first few lines and said, “I’ll take this one.”)
— Franny and Zooey
— Jack Kerouac,On the Road
— A couple early stories by John Steinbeck, I forget which.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
— Al Purdy, Rooms to Rent in the Outer Planets
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles. No, that came out later.
I forgot Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Casey’s copy had migrated back onto our shelves, where the spine caught my eye. It was an original $3.95 City Lights edition, published in 1956. I opened to the first page, where Ginsberg begins his catalogue of “angelheaded hipsters” and the ones “who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico”—oh dear—“leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire-place Chicago. . . .”
Dungarees. A beautiful word fallen out of use.
I closed it. If only Casey had read less, not more.
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2003 00:15:32 -0500
Subject: Buenos Dias
Hello from between Silver City and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Here is the latest news from my southwestern adventures. I’ve been staying in a place called the Mimbers Valley, in the mountains of south-central New Mexico, about a hundred miles north of the border. My hosts are Eric and Nancy, who run a pinhole photography journal and supplies business. I hitched here from Santa Fe on Saturday and got rides from all sorts of people . . .
The email went on to describe his conversations with Bill, a Vietnam vet from Georgia (“excellent company”), a video-editor dude, and José from Durango. José and his truck took him over the mountains into the Mimbers Valley as he quizzed Casey at some length about his personal relationship with Jesus.
Later he stopped and got me to take some photos of him posed in front of the truck with the mountains. He didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t found Jesus. He was more surprised that I didn’t have a cellphone.
New Mexico is wild and woolly. I’ve met a guy from Vancouver who lives in a 100 percent vegetable oil-fuelled truck. I’ve heard such statements as “We were building the camera obscura when Maggie, the emu, got into the concrete and ate half a bag of it. But she was fine.”
Now I am heading in the direction of Oaxaca, Mexico, via Las Cruces, El Paso, Juarez and many buses.
Hasta la vista,
Casey
Another