Visit to a son partway on a long, long trail
“A season is a lifetime.” Let me catch the infrequent reader up. In July, my husband, Brian, and I made the hardest decision our marriage has faced: To keep our son Zane safe, we sent him to a “boarding school” over the mountain and across the desert.
Frequent readers dove right in, lighting candles and sprinkling pixie dust, and, like Tinker Bell, we survived on your belief.
Last weekend, Brian and I got up at 4 a.m. and flew down to El Paso.
Now it’s true that like the country song, one of “my exes lives in Texas,” an unlikely cowboy named Theodore, but I’ve visited him only once, and that was in Dallas, which bears as much resemblance to West Texas as does Jersey City.
Western Texas is both wonderful and not wonderful. We got in a car, and within a few miles were stopped by border patrol and asked whether we were American citizens. OK, my readers hate it when I get political, so let me say only this: In our own informal straw poll, in 300 miles, we counted 17 Beto versus 13 Ted signs.
We crossed the high desert, past fields of Arizona snake cotton, past ghost towns like Lobo, the tang of creosote filling the car.
We arrived at the ranch and checked in. Two minutes later there stood a young man just a little taller than me, with the faintest hint of mustache: my son Zane. A season is a lifetime.
If you’ve ever gone for 90 days without hugging your own son, you know what the next minute was like. He grabbed me fiercely, unashamed to be seen muckling onto the old man. And in that moment, I felt whole.
“You’re wearing a new shirt,” he commented. “And you shaved.” “How do you know?” “Dad, I always know when you shave.”
That’s part of family, knowing I wouldn’t shave for a plane trip, but I’d shave for him.
There’s very little child left in him. He handed me a molar, the last of his baby teeth, and I kept it in my jeans pocket, a talisman.
He introduced me to his clan, a group of boys who were each in his own way charming, yet each of them with secrets. He presented Sadie, an extraordinarily fat dog, scruffy, prone to wandering through the Bee brush in search of slow-moving jackrabbits.
We met the people watching him, the Texan division of Team Zane. I’d made a mistake all these months. Ever since that trip to Paris, I’ve been practicing Duolingo French, when I should have been practicing Duolingo Texan. So I didn’t understand when Zane asked him when he could go home, the therapist pointed at Sadie and drawled, “The dawg doesn’t know it’s Saturday.”
Our Zen master in a 10-gallon hat continued, “Don’t worry about where yah goin’. Think about where yah are.”
For the rest of the weekend, we tried just that. We took Zane out for dinner, and he had his first ribeye (but he refused the pickled asparagus) in the nearby settlement, 10 miles away. To call it a town would be generous, as it consisted of a restaurant, a grocery store and the “Largest Rattlesnake Exhibit West of the Pecos.”
Brian, Zane and I played basketball and shot pool, and went for walks, marveling at the mule deer and the horses and the Lucifer hummingbirds.
We sipped sweet tea and I even found a “y’all” or two crawling off my tongue.
Three months makes for a hard journey. We faced mysterious detours, and I gotta admit: a fair amount of roadkill.
Zane’s not ready to come home yet. But he’s on the right trail. He may indeed be deep in the heart of Texas, but he left his true heart in Fransancisco. The night we left, he saw a shooting star, and wished the family would be together again.
Some columns I’m subtle about the message, but not today: Treasure each moment with your family, because you can only be sure of the now. Take the time to smell the prairie verbena, because its season truly is a lifetime.
The therapist with the lasso was right. When I got back to the blue bungalow in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, after I hugged Aidan, I asked Bandit what day it was. He couldn’t tell me that it was Monday. But he knew I smelled a little bit like Zanebug, and for the first time in a very long time, he wagged his tail.
The night we left, he saw a shooting star, and wished the family would be together again.