The Road

We spent the weekend down south. Not all the way south, like the Los Angeles or San Diego kind, but the San Luis Obispo kind. The kind of south that required a four hour drive and plenty of conversation between my wife and I. It's one of those times that the rest of the world falls away a little bit and we can have conversations about things in the past or in the future and we don't get mired in what has to be done right now.

There was some mild immediacy to our trip. Our son was running the sound for a production of Shakespeare's Tempest. In the days leading up to our trip, we reveled in telling anyone who would listen that our son had the starring role in the play. He would be playing the Tempest. It is this kind of excitement that translates directly into us getting into a car and driving half a day through admittedly pretty scenic hills and dales, but still stuck in a car with one direction: Son. 

There was a time when finding our son would have been a much easier task. The three of us were pretty close. He would have been in the back seat, busy with whatever action figure guy he was connecting with at the time or busily chattering away about what he had just read in his latest volume of Calvin and Hobbes. But not so much in the past four years. Since he got a car of his own, since he moved out of the house, since he turned twenty-one, we don't see as much of the kid. It's the way of these things, I'm told.

Which is why it was such a nice thing to be invited over to his house and even into his room where he showed us where all that magic takes place these days. It was nice to notice relics from his past that were connected to things we had done and seen together. It was also a treat to hang out with him for an hour or so while he sold televisions at Best Buy. Pardon me, Home Theater. Not televisions. At some point I stopped in amazement at the amount of stuff he carries around in his head. Not just about TVs and computers and cars, but about art and literature and the world around him. The world in which he lives. The world in which we were now guests.

And when the weekend was over, and we piled back into the car there was a call. It was our son, taking a break from his busy day tearing down the set of The Tempest and finding that person in his area that still hadn't purchased that flat screen for the living room. He told us how nice it was to hang around with his parents for the weekend, and he hoped that he would see us again soon. And that he loved us. Which made the trip completely worthwhile.