Gotta Go

The phone rang, and for a change of pace, it wasn't a number I recognized immediately as calling for my wife. It was my son. This set off a different set of alarms than the ones that I had spent so many years preparing myself to deal with. The last couple of years have given me a new awareness of my son's whereabouts. When he was younger, we used to get phone calls from his friends' houses, letting us know that he was staying for dinner. Or spending the night. It was the second of those two calls that would raise the defcon status at our house. His mother and I would then spend the next several hours hoping that this would be the magic night that would give us all the relief of a night away. This was not a skill I was able to pass along to my son effectively. Instead, I seem to have passed along the homesickness virus that plagued me as a kid. The phone calls we got from our son in the middle of the night were painful for all of us. We struggled with "the right thing to do." Should we let him tough it out, or should we go up in the middle of the night and rescue him?
For a while, we didn't get those calls. Not because he conquered the fear, but because he just stopped trying to sleep over at his friends' houses. And then one day, he was ready. He found the combination and the way to deal with his fears and the only call we got was the one letting us know that he wouldn't be home that night. This was the beginning of a trend that would eventually leave us with any number of possible locations for him to land on any number of evenings. Many of these were just late nights in the backstage shop at his high school theater. He was building. He was creating. He was making a path for himself to college.
When the phone rang last week, he was calling from college. This was a treat for me, but I still had that gut reaction: Trouble?
"Hello?"
"Hey dad." No terror there.
"What's up?"
"Could you help me out?" Here it comes: Money? Lonely? Worried?
"What do you need?" I was ready.
"I'm at Trader Joe's. Do you know where they keep the Cold Brew Coffee?"
The flood of relief. "Well, I -"
"Oh, here it is. Never mind."
"Good talking to you, son."
"Good talking to you. I gotta go."
Gotta go.