A bittersweet parting, an empty nest

AND so September comes, an intermingling of mist on the ocean and heat in the Valley, teasing with its hint of a new season but clinging to the old.

Also arriving, this election year, is an increase in the clanging and banging of presidential campaigning, with its assertions, accusations, recriminations and denials.

Big lies triumph over feeble explanations, and cynical manipulations twist truth into distorted forms. The spin doctors are back, leading us into a looking-glass world where things are never what they seem.

Global priorities change even as sunlight burns through the September mists, bringing tomorrows of uncertain peril, like the movement of ghouls at the edge of the forest. We sense, in the scariest of ways, that something’s out there, something’s coming.

I admit to no small amount of bewilderment as news of major occurrences explodes like mortar shells around me. Iraq! France! Sudan! Israel! Shrapnel sprays our serenity and wounds our minds. Confusion always follows loud explosions.

And yet, the ordinary often prevails in the midst of chaos. We hide in small places of convenience to protect us, if only for a moment, from the flying shells. We turn to smaller problems and less cataclysmic changes. For instance, a new silence permeates our house. Teengirl has gone away.

She left one cool and sweet-smelling morning, before the sun had done its work, to catch a plane going east, lugging her teddy bear and her talent to a dorm at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A little excited, a little nervous, a little afraid.

I realize that you may not perceive this as an event of cosmic proportions. Not at all in the same league as political quests for power or military steel rolling over the bones and soft tissues of human bodies. And, of course, it isn’t. But still ....

Our Teengirl, a granddaughter, has lived with us for a year, seeking the time and distance that heals family rifts, and has filled our home with her presence. Artistically gifted and fiercely independent, she has pouted, laughed, cried, shouted, hugged and floated through our lives and left us with the stillness of a passing storm.

Frantic, last-minute packing characterized her final night before leaving for Chicago, necessities delayed until the clock ticked toward midnight, her dalliance rooted, at least partially, in a longing not to change but to remain a child, with a child’s toys and a child’s freedom.

Winnie the Pooh never grew up, and Peter Pan flies forever through the skies of Never Never Land, but these are the characters of make-believe, shielded from the real world by the magic of imagination. In reality, no amount of longing can turn the years backward. Time is relentless in its forward journey.

Our Teengirl sought her place in Chicago with the persistence of an Olympic athlete, regardless of what inner feelings for home and safety she might have possessed. Her artworks, a portfolio of sketches and watercolors, were her impressive credentials into a new world.

But now, this dawning September, it isn’t art, it’s emptiness that commands attention, leaving us a little at a loss to fill the place where Teengirl stood. I walk into her room. Shoes are thrown into a corner, clothes are scattered like debris in the wake of a storm, dresser drawers are left open. Evidence abounds of her having been there. Even her turtle, left in our care, pokes through the surface of his water and peers through the glass of his tank to search for her.

Seeing Teengirl through her final year of high school to the freedom of her 18th birthday and to her first steps toward the future has been an experience we had never anticipated when we waved goodbye to our own children years ago. But in a family of high emotions and unbending attitudes, events occurred that brought our granddaughter into our home. We are, after all, the sum of our genetic combinations, passing on glints of steel and heads tossed in defiance.

We were given a second chance, Cinelli and I, to help raise a teenage girl, and I’m not sure we did any better, or any worse, a job than we did with our own two. No book exists to guide one through the shifting attitudes of adolescence or through moods that snap in and out of focus like rapidly moving objects viewed through a lens. Teengirl’s parents did the best they could and we did the best we could, and now to her falls the responsibility of doing the best she can.

Meanwhile, at this moment, the war goes on in Iraq, hatreds bristle along the West Bank, France struggles with a life-or-death hostage dilemma, and the quest of two powerful men for the presidency of a land we occupy at its time of darkness demands that we make a choice for incumbency or revitalization.

And September passes with mist and sunlight through a new emptiness in our lives.