The fish aren't jumpin' but the weather is high. It's hot here in Cologne Germany, but not nearly as hot as it is in Sicily, where my daughter is vacationing with her pal Ramona and Ramona's family. She sends me text messages which always include one of two themes: Eating spaghetti or going to the beach. This sounds like the perfect summer for a thirteen year old. Bikini, pasta, sand, waves. No boys in the picture. Yet.
On the same side of the globe, but in a different hemisphere, my son is visiting a school in Somerset, South Africa. Last week, in one of those are we out of our minds moments we put him on the airplane with a scrap of baguette and a little cash and sent him to a place neither one of us has ever seen. As he strolled through customs, confident and (very) tall, I felt a sense of pride and loss, all at once. Such is the parenthood obstacle course.
He'll be in South Africa for eight weeks, living with a family in Stellenbosch and hanging out with a group of exchange students from all over the world. It's winter down there, so most of the messages we've received include some version of the "freezin' my butt off" theme. But what a lucky kid! He's taking African drumming lessons and learning how to do some sort of beading. I'm hoping for a head dress or an exotic necklace as a condolence gift. Because the trurth is, I miss him.
When I was a kid, a trip across the Pennsylvania state line to Ohio seemed very exotic. A day at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh was the highlight of each school year. The closest I got to Italy was Tambellini's Restaurant on Shilo Street. And my only contact with Africa came from the Saturday morning Tarzan movies I watched with my sister while my parents were sleeping late. Over and over again, Tarzan would save Jane from the cannibals, the alligators, and the charging rhinos. After the movie, we would run into the courtyard and chase each other with plastic baseball bats that we pretended were clubs.
Now I'm the parent, and I'm wide awake—ZAP!!!— and wondering where the hell everyone has gone, when they're coming back, and if maybe we were all better off when our dreams were smaller, our trips were shorter, and the back yard, a baseball bat, and the television set were enough to sustain a summer's worth of fantasies. That's the worried mother in me thinking. The smart mother knows better. By traveling like this, without me, our chldren will grow, and learn, and have the time of their lives.
I know, more than I know anything, that the way to keep my kids close to me involves sending them far away. One day they won't come back, but by that time, I figure they'll know I loved them enough to open the door to a backyard that's much bigger than anything they could have imagined.
And maybe I'll get a beaded head dress for my efforts.
Robin Meloy Goldsby is the author of Piano Girl: A Memoir and RHYTHM: A Novel.
