When we can do nothing

On the night of Clinton's re-election in November 1996, my niece Anne lost our car. These things happen.

In 1995 Anne was a freshman here at the university--like me, Anne was a Chicagoan in exile, tho' unlike me, by choice. She'd chosen to come down, to escape Family, yet to be with Extended Family (me). Naturally, I'd invited her to join us for our election-watch party that, given the results, turned into Quite The Celebration. At which my then-18-year-old niece got rather drunk. I figured it was ok. A learning experience. A Teaching Moment. She was spending the night. She wasn't driving. I'd be able to hand her Tylenol, hold her hair back while she vomited, and offer gentle, non-mom-like-but-totally-cool-aunt-like advice as she showered.

I was an idiot.

The next morning I awoke, as usual, to baby Hugh's cries. Plucking Hugh out of his crib and Owen from his bunk, I headed with my two pajama-clad little guys toward the kitchen. I turned on the light. Oh sweet Jesus. Something Gone Awry. A chair on its side. A couple of overturned bottles of red wine. Broken glass everywhere.

I did what I always do in a crisis: I shrieked, "KEITH!!" Said hero came running, well, stumbling, really, out of bed. "Geez," he said. We looked at each other and then, as one, went running toward the guest room where Anne was supposed to be sleeping. She wasn't there. She wasn't there. We ran outside. Neither was our Toyota Tercel. Anne, our regular babysitter, had her own set of keys to our house and the Tercel.

The next few hours were truly, tremendously, terrifying. When I was 13, my 20-year-old brother had died when his car crashed into a culvert as he was driving home late one night. A few years later, my sister was in a serious car accident. A year later, another brother was injured in another car accident. And then, a few years after that, that same brother. plus another and his two sons, my oldest nephews, were in a serious car crash that left two of them in comas. So--Anne, lots of red wine, our car--the possibilities were horrifying.

In fact, she was asleep in her dorm room. When we found her, well, we got the giggles. She was ok. Miserably hungover, but ok. And meanwhile, we couldn't find our car. Anne had no memory of the previous night. The car was nowhere to be found. We ended up having to call the campus police (Hello? Um, yes, we've lost our car. No, no, it hasn't been stolen. Just, um, well, misplaced). After several hours of searching thru the campus parking lots, we finally uncovered the Tercel. Parked perfectly. Anne turned out to be an amazingly capable drunk.

Flash forward to 2010. Owen is a freshman at a college far far away in Portland, Oregon. People say to me, "How can you stand him being so far away?" And I think, "He's 18. At least I have no idea what he's doing."

When Owen was 8, I took him for his second snow skiing trip to Colorado. Already attuned to All Things Cool, this time he wanted to try snow boarding, so I enrolled him in snowboard school. And, as it happened, I ended up on the chair lift just behind him as he headed up the mountain for his first snowboard run. Oh. Dear. God. Owen was in the middle of two bigger boys. The lift seat came around and up they jumped; he wasn't on properly, yet up the seat swung. So there I was behind him, watching my beautiful boy, the light of my life, the center of my existence, precariously dangling on this chair, while the two boys on both sides of him proceeded to kick their legs and swing the chair vigorously. I could do nothing. Cell phones had yet to be invented. I could do nothing. I could only watch my boy, his butt slowly slipping off the seat, as the chair moved higher and higher up. "It's ok, it's ok," I told myself, "no one dies slipping off a chair lift, right?"--in actual fact, a child died just that way at a ski resort in Colorado just a few months ago--while I watched, helpless, praying, praying, praying.

It really is best that we have no idea when they're dangling off the chair lift, when the seat is swinging and their butt is slipping off, when they're driving after drinking a couple of bottles of red wine, when they're 18, when we can do nothing.