For Sept 26

Drummer Column, Gibbs, 700 words

Setting son

The wife and I took our son, Adam, down to Santa Cruz over the weekend. He's starting college. We're starting a new life. The eagle has flown. The nest is empty.

All summer we were concerned about our baby's ability to adjust to life without parents, afraid he may feel estranged, homesick, alone. Within an hour of our arrival, he had 15 people jammed into his dorm room.

First we heard all this whooping and howling outside his window. We looked out to see that a large group had just returned from ten days in the wilderness. They'd been part of a backpacking orientation program designed to toughen them up and help them make friends. Adam took the same hike a few weeks ago.

One fellow was howling a tad louder than the rest. Adam said, "I wonder if one of those guys is my roommate. He took the hike."

Susan called down, "Hey, Ryan." The howling guy looked up. "Are you Ryan, Room 302?" He nodded yes. She pointed to Adam. "Here's your new roommate."

"Hey, everybody!" yelled Ryan. "I just met my new roommate." With a wave of his arm, he ran into the dorm and everyone followed. Up the stairs, to the top of their lungs, they came. I pressed myself against the wall to let them by. Grubby and grinning, they filed into the room and high-fived my boy.

We felt parental euphoria. We sighed relief. Our boy had friends.

When the group left, Adam asked to take us on a tour. We didn't visit the library or the gift shop; we visited friends' dorm rooms. We checked in on two other Benicians, Ryan Day and Leslie Shulman, who are also doing fine, and then tracked down a particular girl Adam had met on his backpacking trip. Katy is a peach, a rose, a jewel. We greeted her with relief and euphoria.

By this time, however, we were starting to be in the way. We wanted to take Adam to the Provost's house for afternoon cookies and punch, but he'd made a date to meet Katy in his room by 4 p.m.

After his rendezvous we dragged him downtown for his last expensive meal. We ate at India Joe's, a crowded hot spot full of parents and teen-aged children. He enjoyed his meal but wanted to get back on campus for the dance.

When we left him at his dorm room, he first hung a message board on his door, then hugged us both and ran down the hall toward the dance. We waved one last time from opposite ends of the hall, and he was gone. Or were we gone?

Empty nest. Empty nest. We kept using those words in sentences all the way back to the car. We made jokes. Our mouths smiled. Our eyes didn't. Our baby was gone. Oh, my God. What will we do without him? Who will play morning rock music and bring home weird videos now? Who will attach Monty Python sound effects to every action on his computer and play them through his stereo speakers at full volume now? Who will remind us to buy cereal and peanut butter? Who will answer the phone? Who will fix the clock on our VCR? Who, pray tell, will bug us to go to concerts? And who will we worry about and fuss over and nuzzle?

At home we stood in the kitchen and hugged silently for the longest time. Then we went up to his room and hugged again. The room still smelled of him - a good, sweet smell. His bed was unmade. He left some posters on the wall. Books were scattered across the floor. It was as if he still lived here, except that the phone wasn't ringing.

Susan called her parents and talked a good, long time. I busied myself with some technical manuals, but they lacked the usual passion and fire. We had a bottle of champagne chilling in the refrigerator. We planned to drink a sunset toast to our new freedom, but never popped the cork. Instead, she read a book and I watched a TLC special on Plato's Republic. We went to bed early.

We'll have to adjust slowly.