New Lives
by Suzanne Kelsey
In March, on the plane from Iowa to San Francisco, I think about how much I miss a full house.
I miss our sons, now ages 23 and 20, and on adventures of their own. I miss their voices, their music, their messy rooms, their friends swooping in for impromptu meals. I miss the details invoked by their interests that lent sure, immediate purpose to my life. I miss the way my husband and I made a good team as parents, he cooking our dinners and encouraging our sons to take risks, I coordinating our schedules and reminding the boys to do their homework.
I was never one of those relaxed, creative mothers who make their own baby food and nurse their babies past a year. I worried too much, especially during our sons’ early years. Even so, I was fascinated by them from the beginning. I liked reading them books and trying to answer their questions. I remember Jess, age 3, grappling with the death of our cat. “But we don’t die—the Kelseys don’t die, right?” he asked.
I liked joining Keegan, age 7, on neighborhood walks in the evenings, after he’d say, “Mom, let’s go for a walk and talk about life.” We’d ask each other questions like, “What would you do with a million dollars?” or “What do you want to be when you grow up?” He wanted to be a scientist and make potions to save sick people—or if such medicines were already invented, he would create formulas to make the snow rise to the window sills.
I was grateful to have a flexible work schedule as a college instructor and then as a freelance writer so I could drive our sons to soccer practices and read in the car until they were finished. I liked doing their laundry. I liked teaching them responsibility by designating chores. I didn’t even mind filling in for their paper route occasionally. Honored when they asked for help on an essay for school, I also liked setting their dental and doctor appointments, teaching them how to drive, diagnose car symptoms, and search for the right college. Sometimes I groused and ached to have a few days by myself, but for the most part, I liked being depended upon. I enjoyed being a mother. I was served by serving our sons.
And so I miss our full house. As our plane nears San Francisco, and as Chuck, Keegan, and I wait to set our eyes on Jess, I brood about the riddle I’ve carried in my head as Chuck and I have approached, and then reached, our empty nest: How can we be us, without all of us?
* * * *
Greeting us at the San Francisco airport, Jesse’s sturdy frame is relaxed, his eyes serene. Chuck grabs him first with a tight embrace. When I hug Jess, seven long months after his move to San Francisco from Iowa, I begin to cry. He returns the stronghold, gently laughing.
He brims with quiet excitement about his audition the night before with a band adding a trombone, one of his specialties, to their horn section. “Alternative rock with a jazz influence,” he says in his pleasant baritone as Keegan slings an arm around his older brother. I savor the sight of them together: Jess shorter and stockier, his hair dark and skin brown, Keegan taller but lighter in build with fair skin and blonde-brown hair. Both have their father’s gorgeous eyes—large and heavily-lashed—but Jesse’s are milk chocolate, like Chuck’s, and Keegan’s grey-blue.
As Jesse drives us across the Oakland Bay Bridge toward the house he shares with five roommates near Berkeley, he suggests that we first see the Albany Bulb. “It was a construction landfill peninsula along the bay,” he says. “Now it’s an outdoor art gallery in the middle of the wild.” We stop at his house to meet a few roommates, then head north along the bay.
The windless day is as if painted with a loaded brush—bright blue, yellow-green. Early spring, there is no fog and the air smells fresh. We walk along a gravel path, tall birch trees with shedding trunks giving way to smaller trees and bushes. After half a mile Jess points to a large hunk of concrete swirled in rusted rebar. On the mound sits a nearly life-sized ceramic skull glazed with muted pinks, yellows, and blues. Backgrounded by bushes and tall grass, the sculpture is a barely visible suggestion of a shivering, expressionless man wrapped in a concrete blanket.
Leading us down the final stretch of path, Jess reviews the history of the Albany Bulb. “About 30 years ago, the city of Albany allowed a construction dump site here, but the operator illegally dumped plant debris, and it caused a bunch of methane fires.” The city began litigation but eventually gave up and abandoned the area. Plants and animals reclaimed the land, and a homeless community settled in, building shacks near the water. Artists created sculptures and paintings out of the concrete, rebar, other metals, Styrofoam, and whatever else washed onto shore. His tone turns sharp. “Of course, there were complaints about the homeless people, and so they were forced to leave. But the art was left alone—at least for now.”
A row of large paintings faces the bay, exposed to the sun, wind, and rain. The faint smell of fish rises from the water. Keegan aims his camera at the art painted on upright pieces of old dock, all signed by an artist named “Sniff.” Jess tells us that Sniff is a group of anonymous artists who meet here on Saturdays to create together. We smile at the colorful, burlesque representations of people and animals eating, drinking, and cavorting.
Along the bay is a bunker of concrete, rocks, and hunks of Styrofoam, large enough to accommodate six people. A poured concrete stairway leads to the flat roof where the view includes the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge. I climb the roof to sit by myself and luxuriate in the sun, the 65 degrees, the fact that we have five days with Jess, and the murmurs of my family.
Jess, our new college graduate of cinema studies, is absorbed in a sculpture 10 yards away. Friends his age are beginning graduate or medical school or landing jobs with shiny new business degrees. Always fond of the road less traveled, our son works in a camera store developing film while he seeks his break in film editing and sound design, and spends his spare time in places like this. I like that he is managing to make ends meet even on an ascetic’s income. I like that he found this place and chose to share it with us on our first day. Not many people from this area even know about the Albany Bulb. I like that our son knows.
* * * *
The second day Jess suggests a drive up to the Muir Woods, north of San Francisco and along the ocean. The forest is one of the last uncut stands of redwoods—a sanctuary. We step away from noise and into cool air rich with oxygen and humus. “The air is moister in here. For California, that is,” I say, thinking about the humidity we’ll face in Iowa this summer.
Jess smiles. “Every time I come here, I feel lighter,” he says.
We climb the Ocean View Trail and I savor the Douglas firs, maples, oaks, buckeyes, and redwoods which are 500, 800, even 1,000 years old, some 22 feet around and 370 feet high. Unaccustomed to being dwarfed by such tall trees—in Iowa the tallest are oaks and cottonwoods, a quarter the height of these redwoods—I feel comfortably insignificant in this old forest that filters the light into a hundred shades of green.
After an hour’s climb we reach the top of the trail where we bask in the sun on large rocks in a meadow. Now we can hear the incongruous noise of cars on a busy road above us. Jess casually points to the ocean in the distance, a horizontal glimmer of silver that I might have mistaken for a cloud. Keegan picks up a small rock and pockets it—an echo of times we collected dimpled Lake Michigan rocks north of Chicago and smooth Lake Superior stones near Duluth. “For my boss,” I hear him tell Jess.
Keegan has taken a semester’s hiatus from college, to decide where to transfer and earn some money. He lives with us but we barely see him: he holds two jobs from 4:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., five days a week, and visits his girlfriend in Wisconsin on the weekends. Sleep-deprived and missing his independence, this purgatory is not easy for him – nor for us. “She has a rock collection and asked me to find some,” he tells his brother.
As we descend the path I breathe the thick air with gratitude. Jess has found sacred space in his new environment, and while Keegan might be irritable to live with these few months, his generous spirit still resides underneath.
* * * *
The third day we take in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—the SF MOMA. Jess is not only a musician and film artist but also a talented sketcher, Keegan a photographer and sculptor. Chuck’s media are cooking and gardening, mine writing and painting. At art museums, we gravitate to specific areas. Today Jess and Chuck head for the multi-media exhibits, Keegan to the photographs, and I to the paintings. Modern paintings are my favorite, so I anticipate a feast in this museum.
Viewing art triggers the same sense of awe, for me, as does being in nature. One nonrepresentational painting by Clyfford Still particularly speaks to me: burgundy and cranberry cover a large canvas, and then a small, jagged line of black. I find it comforting to think that a man would create, at 47—my age—such a luxurious painting. I sit for minutes on a bench, mesmerized by the burgundy painting which seems to say, like Julian of Norwich, the mystic, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Our dinner afterward at a tapas restaurant and microbrewery has the aura of Babette’s Feast. Chuck, a tapas artist himself, has educated our family’s palate for several years. In fact, a continuous comfort through the busy years of raising our sons was having meals together on a near-daily basis. Our dining has always been infused with graceful artistry, from 20-minute meals to those made for extended family or friends over two day’s time. Our sons learned early on to try new foods under the eye of the chef, who watched us carefully for genuine reactions. Both Jess and Keegan have leanings toward Chuck’s culinary skills and an ability to truly appreciate good food.
We order a round of drinks and some breads and assorted olives to take the edge off our hunger. We follow with a second round of more complicated dishes, and the appreciation of the food flows. After awhile, though, Keegan looks at his father and says, “It’s great food, but I’ve had even better from you.” Chuck’s face turns sober, the way it does when the compliment means so much he can’t answer. But then he makes a toast: “To Jess and his new adventure, to Keegan and his next phase of school, and to all of us.”
All will be well. Indeed, all is well.
* * * *
The fourth day we go our separate ways—Jess to work at the camera store and Keegan to Santa Barbara to investigate a photography school. Though difficult, we respect that he doesn’t want our company like he did two years earlier during his first college search. Chuck and I pack and load the car for a 24-hour trip, just the two of us—a little island of romance in the middle of the family vacation—just like we took semi-annual B&B getaways while the boys were growing up. We know that our sons will appreciate the break from us, as well.
We choose Sonoma County, the road a little less traveled, over Napa Valley. The rolling, pastoral hills are reminiscent of southeast Iowa, except instead of corn and soybeans, the green, grassy fields are full of newly-leafed grape vines stretched across cables. We visit wineries around Sonoma and taste their wares, but Chuck becomes most animated at a little store that sells olive oil, outside the tiny village of Glenn Elyn. Inside, a woman describes the four oils for which she offers samples with bread. We dip, note the differences, and then Chuck drinks the remains of the samples. Carried away in wine country, I think, smiling at my mate. That evening we feast on crab cakes, sea bass, and beer at a lovely restaurant along the Sonoma town square. We walk back in the cool California air to the inn, where we sit in the hot tub on the roof of the second floor, watching tree tops wave in the night breeze.
Even after months of our sons being gone and years of practicing our B&B getaways, it feels odd to be just the two of us together. Someone told me recently that a relative used to say, “It’s easy to add a plate to the family table, but it’s hard to take one away.” I gaze at my mate’s brown eyes as he enjoys the hot tub. He’s always been more flexible, more accepting than I, which probably explains why I’m having a tougher time with the two missing plates at our dining room table. I smile at him, silently willing him to bear with me. He returns my smile.
* * * *
The next morning—the fifth day—we luxuriate in our room at the Inn, sipping coffee and reading the paper in bed. Fresh air wafts in an unscreened, open window.
Eventually the reality that this is our final day can not be ignored, and I say, “I don’t want to say good-bye to Jess today.” Chuck nods but doesn’t respond, and I don’t expect him to. What can he say, after all? I set my cup on the nightstand, put on shorts and a shirt, and tell him I’m going for a quick stroll. He nods, respecting my need to be alone.
Outside I walk around the sleepy town square and think about how dependent I became on our sons while they were growing up for my raison d’etre. Ironic, for someone who hadn’t planned on having children. Our pregnancy with Jess came by surprise a year after I finished my bachelor’s degree, three years into our marriage, and even Keegan was not entirely planned. As a feminist I embraced the idea that being a mother shouldn’t preclude my need to work outside the home. I began graduate school bouncing Keegan on my knee and serving as a room mother for Jesse’s kindergarten class. Chuck and I had satisfying work while we raised our sons, he in social services and I as an editor, then college instructor, then finally my dream job as a freelance writer.
But to my surprise, motherhood turned out to be the most compelling vocation. And now I miss our full house.
I sigh and return to the inn, where I meet Chuck in the lobby for breakfast.
* * * *
Our last day in San Francisco is unexpectedly light and Jess sweet and funny. Chuck and I eat lunch with him in Berkeley—a golden time alone with him—and then the three of us drive across the bay into San Francisco. He insists we need to see the ocean again. We drive to a thin strip of beach, where it is cold and windy, the waves crashing onto the shore, the horizon a muted blue, turquoise, and violet.
From there we drive to Golden Gate Park. We hike up and down green hills and around a pond, toward the beautiful if slightly seedy Japanese tea garden. We meet Keegan, euphoric from the scenic train ride back along the coast from Santa Barbara. We drink overpriced tea served by girls in geisha dress, and we hike the garden path, admiring the designs. After dinner and coffee in Chinatown it is unavoidably time to drive to the airport. Jess returns our grasping hugs, but he is at ease. As we drive away I am reassured by the spring in his step as he heads down Market Street toward the BART station for home, or maybe to duck in a bar to hear some live music. Exploring his city.
On the way to the airport I think about how each son is flourishing in his own way. Jess is living an adventure, playing his trombone and guitar, experimenting with film. Keegan is looking for ways to explore his artistic side by transferring to an art or photography school. Chuck and I, too, are exploring new avenues of creativity—Chuck branching into some serious gardening, me into new writing territory in the form of a novel and a memoir. We’re taking a tango class together. As I add all this up in my head, I admit that maybe I do know the answer to my riddle about how to be us without all of us. We are us and will always be us. It’s true that, except for Keegan’s brief hiatus from college, we don’t live together anymore, but we all share a love of creating that transcends place.
Like the artists of the Albany Bulb, we are all making new lives out of old materials that have resided in our family all along, like a love of art, nature, music, good food—and like love, itself.
Suzanne Kelsey (www.suzannekelsey.com) is a freelance writer, editor, and writing coach. She currently lives in Eastern Iowa with her talented chef husband, Charles Kelsey, and their dog, Ginger, who helps keep the nest from feeling completely empty. The couple continues to enjoy watching their sons’ adult lives unfold.
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