Set Free

First and Last

The Princess and I will be on the road this morning to a Non-Contiguous New England State, on a visit to Hiptastic University. #1 Son is a senior there. How did that happen? Graduation is only six weeks in the distance. And this weekend marks his final performance as an actor at college.

Four student years ago, chubbier and softer, he played the nerdy assistant bank manager in a student-driven production of "No Sex, Please, We're British." His entire freshman dorm floor came, en masse, to the production I saw, and they cheered him to an embarrassing (for him) extent during the curtain calls. It was my first night out on a university campus since about 1982, and I was shocked by the wardrobe of the girls in the audience, which was similar to that of the working girls portrayed in the play. It was hard to imagine how my boy might be managing in that milieu, and I think he would tell you now, the first semester was tough.

But he found he had real friends on that dorm floor, some of whom are housemates this senior year, and he found his place in the Hiptastic theatre universe.

And he grew up.

The soft-cheeked boy can now grow a fearsome beard, has worked hard at school, on-stage and backstage, has formed into a young man, with more edges and a different kind of energy. He turns in his senior thesis today.

As a little boy, he had a way of folding into a hug, and that has not changed, for which I am grateful.

We'll have a late lunch today at one of our traditional meeting places in Hiptastictown, significantly called First and Last. Pure Luck will join us, and Dos (#1 Son's girlfriend) and a college friend already graduated and a friend from home who has been in the picture since middle school.

I anticipate some emotion, for me, anyway. Where will he be in six months, or a year? What will the future hold for a young actor whose life has been as soft as he once was? Will he learn to live in a world with more edges?

I believe he will.

Sun Dog and Moondoggie

Yesterday I found myself driving westbound with my husband and two, yes two, of my children in the back seat, and just before the turn south toward the third child, I noticed my husband with his hand blocking the sun and his eye on something to the north.

"What are you looking at?"

"It's a Sun Dog," he told me, but this told me nothing. I had never heard of a Sun Dog.

It's really a  parhelion, a collection of ice crystals in the clouds that catch the light much like a prism, following the sun in its westward journey. Through the sunroof's tinted glass, The Princess and Snowman could see the full range of colors, a little rainbow in the clouds.

We traveled far and wide yesterday, from a time when the sun was low in the east until it was nearly gone into the west, a journey first to church and then to meet Pure Luck at a commuter parking lot, then to get Snowman at the airport in Beantown, and from there to Hiptastic University to see #1 Son play Creon in Oedipus Rex at Hiptastic University. Just as the sun in our eyes threatened to obscure our view of its faithful sidekick, the masks worn in the play disguised some aspects of our boy.

But as he entered from beneath the stage, I knew his hands, his movements, his feet in the odd platform sandals worn by all the characters. 

I remembered the story of Oedipus, of course, although I read the play in college and that is many years gone. It sets up the contrast between those who would trust only the Gods (Creon wants to have the gods' assurances before acting) and those who would control their own fate, only to have it go awry (Oedipus, of course). In the car coming home late last night, Pure Luck and I kept each other awake pondering free will. Would it count as free will, he wondered, if the only choices before us were good ones? And further, is there *any* chance we, humanity, that is, will choose collectively the good?

It was the first time in almost three months that I could see and touch all three of my children, sit around a table with them (and with Dos), a momentous day in some ways, but ordinary in others, containing the usual elements of our times together: reminiscing, teasing, conversation ranging from Battlestar Galactica to Dungeons&Dragons to the state of the world to science to the food at school and the music Snowman has heard and played and the acting #1 Son hopes to pursue as his work and right back to the Writer's Guild strike and its possible effect on Avatar, a great concern for The Princess.

Oh. And God.

And foolishness, as when we left the theatre to walk back to the car and saw a ring around the moon, and I asked, "Is that the Moondoggie?"

Back to School, Part One

I spent the day taking #1 Son back to Hiptastic University, to begin his Senior year. He has been a non-worrying college student, and I am grateful, considering the sorts of fits my brother and I gave our parents. As always, we enjoyed traveling in the car together and found no shortage of conversational topics. As my father once said about the little fellow, age 2, "He must be good company."

This year he looks forward to doing an Acting Thesis, which will include performing in Oedipus Rex and Big Love (not the HBO drama, but the play by Charles Mee), as well as writing a big paper. He will live in a house on campus with four friends. I stand by my conclusion that it is a hovel, although it is much cleaner now than when I saw it occupied last spring.

#1 Son amused himself and his housemate by telling me I mispronounced "hovel." Clearly he doesn't remember where ah'm from...

(Bigger versions at Flickr. I may not be able to live with the grey hair after seeing this morning's pictures.)