Every time you go away
“Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you…”
In 1985, I graduated high school and, later that year, headed off to begin my studies at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. It was also the year that Paul Young released the song quoted above, his only No. 1 hit in the United States.
I didn’t remember that it came out that year until I looked it up while considering how to title this column, and the irony is uncanny. My intention was to write about the going-aways of growing up, and I now can’t help but wonder if my parents or I listened to that song with a sense of sadness over the transition on which I was embarking.
There are lots of you parents out there sending your kids off to college at this time of the year, and I want you to know that I feel you. And, all of you kids being dropped off, I feel you and the terror/excitement that comes with this new adventure, too.
We recently sent our kid off for her last big adventure as she began her first job after graduating from Georgia Tech in the spring. Having her here this summer was a lovely reminder of the days when she was ours. But now she’s truly fully-cooked; she’s all grown up and off to conquer the world.
Thinking of these transitional steps had me remembering other times of shift for me, and I realized that my biggest turning points, my benchmarks of maturation, came at times of leaving.
The first big one that I recall was the summer that our parents sent my best friend Denise and me to spend a week with her grandmother Emaline in her little house on a hill overlooking Lake Chatuge in Hiawassee, Georgia.
I don’t remember the circumstances that led to this adventure, but I think we were around 12 years old and I remember feeling so grown up over the idea that we were being trusted with the responsibilities it entailed. Emaline was a sweet and interesting grandmother, but she was far from the doting kind. Our time was spent mostly on our own, and it was the most delicious feeling in the world.
We slept on a pull-out couch in the living room and stayed up late watching movies. Back in those days, late night TV cut off around 2 a.m. and was the home of scary things. I remember one movie, a black & white classic, that involved an army of large and terrifying spiders taking over the world, and the thrill of it had us bouncing off the walls and mattress with shrieks of horror.
We ate sour green apples off the tree in the front yard with a salt shaker in hand, and there was no one there to tell us we would give ourselves a stomach ache if we didn’t quit. I don’t remember the stomach ache, but I’m pretty sure it came.
After all, part of being grown up is having the freedom to indulge in things you will later regret and dealing with the repercussions with no one else to blame.
One day we made fried bologna sandwiches and took our bikes for a long ride across the main road and way up the hill beyond for a picnic. I had never been up that road in a car, much less all by myself on a bicycle. On the way home we stood on our bike seats with mere kickstands to balance us, to pick mulberries from the branches that hung over the dirt road to her house.
My mother would have died if she had seen us. It was a broken arm or leg waiting to happen, but we were enjoying the fruits of freedom and, luckily, stained fingers was all that we suffered.
I came home from that trip feeling changed. So much had happened that only Denise and I knew, and I had never experienced so much without the influence of my parents or someone else’s.
A couple of years later, my parents were heavily involved as the Georgia Beekeepers Association hosted the American Beekeeping Federation’s 38th Annual Convention at the Hyatt Regency in Savannah. Dad was the secretary of the GBA and they had many tasks that left my sister and me to fend for ourselves as much as they would allow.
We walked up and down River Street and wandered the hotel, keeping our behavior in check because we knew that envelope-stuffing or some other boring task would be our punishment if we got in trouble.
At one point I ended up back in our room by myself and took the opportunity to pretend that I was a grownup, there on my own trip to this fancy hotel on the river. We had lucked into a corner room and had windows overlooking the Savannah Harbor on one side, and River Street on the other.
I pulled one of Mom’s tiny cans of grapefruit juice from the fridge, the most grownup drink I could imagine, and stood gazing out those windows as though all I surveyed were mine. In that moment, I grew up a little for the thought of what was possible, and I have loved grapefruit juice ever since.
But, even after all of that growing up I had done over the years, I remember that when my parents and sister left me to myself in that dorm room at Berry College, I sat on the edge of the bed and cried like a baby for the sadness of what I was leaving behind, and the fear of the unknown ahead.
Every time we move on in life, we take a piece of those things that we love with us, but we also leave a piece of ourselves behind. The going away is part of the coming of age and, though it hurts like the dickens, it is a wonderful shift towards our better selves.