GOOD-BYES 101
The fundamental things apply
By Herbert Hadad
Fresh out of Northeastern, I fell into a romance
with Rebecca, a lively, pretty nursing student. (She was graduating from
Boston University, but as we all know, in love there is no accounting for
taste.) Just as I started to think we had a future together, she announced
she was joining the military to please her Army officer father.
The day she left, I walked her to South Station.
We made ritual promises of loyalty and reunion neither of us could keep,
hugged and kissed, and said good-bye. Then I stood on the platform watching
the train pull away, while a piece of me died.
As time went by, I remembered the moment a little
differently. I pictured myself looking like Bogart at the Paris train station,
rain dripping off my hat, waiting for Bergman with growing desperation.
The comparison was comical, but it helped take the hurt away, reminding
me these good-byes have been happening ever since the wheel was invented.
Even so, I was startled by the intensity of my
feelings the morning my oldest child left for college. I had anticipated
the day for months, knowing Edward Salim would give his mother and me quick
kisses, we'd exchange assurances of love, he'd be picked up by chums, and
be gone.
But as the car eased down the driveway and slipped
onto the road, there seemed little difference between romantic love and
paternal love. I ached with the sense of loss that is love's companion.
My wife and two younger children and I stood in the driveway, waved good-bye-and
a piece of me died.
Admittedly, I had made the departure even more
difficult than it had to be. A few days earlier, Edward Salim, perhaps
feeling dashing as he embarked upon a life of adventure and independence,
had gotten himself fitted with an earring. When he turned his head so I
would discover it, he was smiling uneasily, hoping I would be a sport,
maybe even admire it, but knowing he was on uncertain ground. My response?
I split a gut.
"I'm working hard to send you to a fine private
college, and you're presenting yourself to the world as what? A mindless
hippie? A suburban pirate? A giggling pothead?"
My reaction was diplomatic and sensitive compared
with that of the neighbor down the road when his son came home with the
same earring. That father, a large man in a business requiring physical
strength, chased his son across the room, trying to remove the bauble.
My wife's wisdom prevailed, as it so often has.
"Don't ruin his departure, for you or for him. He'll probably toss
the earring away after a few days," Evelyn said. Charles Aram and
Sara Jameel, his siblings, agreed; the earring was neither a reason to
flip out nor an impediment to serious study. Love, in its own peculiar
way, had reduced the caring and devoted father to the silly old fool.
So Edward Salim established his new life at Lehigh
University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (despite my determined campaign,
he had foregone study at Northeastern). Our communications consisted of
the occasional care package or phone call to discuss his well-being in
a small room with two other freshmen and receive pledges that he was finding
the time and energy for academic effort amid pondering the miracle of barley
and hops.
I gradually became accustomed to his absence.
His brother's and sister's presence helped cushion the change. Yet, even
this relative calm was vulnerable to ambush by powerful and unpredictable
emotions.
When Edward Salim was nearly ten, he passionately
wanted a boom box. He and I spent several hours visiting stores along a
shopping strip in Westchester County, New York, looking for the perfect
instrument. Now, the sleek gun-metal gray Toshiba sat on a table near the
computer. I noticed it one morning and suddenly began to sob.
I missed my son terribly. To make matters worse,
I realized I missed both the eighteen-year-old and the ten-year-old.
As with my Casablanca fantasy, I reverted to movie
stereotype once again. In countless films, characters telegraph longing
by visiting the old haunts of the absent beloved. And so I found myself
tiptoeing into Edward Salim's bedroom.
Formerly my home office, it is a room of unusual
and pleasing angles and crannies, with windows on two sides looking out
onto woods. I studied the display of high school sports letters, the old
German stein his grandmother gave him, the Yankees and Knicks pennants
and posters, the small Turkish rug we pinned to the wall.
I pictured him reading in bed or watching television,
pouring over his impressive collection of baseball cards (when he was younger),
reflecting on the posters of Cindy Crawford and Paula Abdul (when he was
older). I remembered the loud, incomprehensible lyrics of the music he
played. I remembered the sweet, simple taste of his forehead when I kissed
him good night or good morning.
It had been two months, and I had to see him.
Evelyn and I booked a hotel room in Bethlehem.
We found Edward Salim in his large, old dormitory near the top of a hill.
We were happy to see each other, and he seemed relaxed, but I still began
to worry. An overflowing ashtray sat on one roommate's bedside table. Another
roommate was eerily quiet in the shadows of the tapestry that surrounded
his bunk. There was the obligatory collection of bottles and blowups of
women ecstatically promoting beer.
I see myself as a tiger of a father, always willing
to take on the biggest bullies or most powerful institutions when I detect
cruelty or unfairness toward my family. Probably because of our separation,
because I missed being so important to my son, this reckless temperament
suddenly rose to the surface.
"How are your professors? Treating you right?
Teaching you what you want to know? We don't want any duds. We're not paying
for duds. We're paying for a first-class education, and we expect to get
it. Want me to call the president? What's his name? I'll call the president."
(Two years later, when Edward Salim was denied
access to his classes over a billing error ultimately shown to be the university's
fault, I actually did call the president and demand he apologize to my
son. He didn't, but Edward Salim was promptly admitted to his classes.)
After a while, we drove into historic Bethlehem,
which in many ways resembles Boston's Back Bay and Beacon Hill. It was
here, on streets reminiscent of my old hometown, that the deepest and most
tender feelings for my son came rushing back, as well as a powerful melancholy.
I remember how the cobblestone sidewalks looked
that day, and the scarred old bricks on the face of the newspaper building.
We went into a five-and-dime with creaky wooden floors, the same kind of
store I enjoyed as a boy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and as a father
in midtown Manhattan and suburban New York. Evelyn and I helped Edward
Salim pick out socks and towels and notions, and I realized that this,
too, is a form of love.
The next morning, a Sunday, we picked him up and
brought him back to the Hotel Bethlehem. Under glistening chandeliers in
the ornate old ballroom, where magnates once drank their brandies and smoked
their cigars and took enormous satisfaction in making the strongest steel
for the strongest nation on earth, we breakfasted on orange juice and coffee,
bacon and sausages, waffles and cheese omelets. We, too, felt good about
ourselves and the world around us, and that is how we parted.
Over time, the love between my old flame Rebecca
and me has all but died, the memories both fond and painful dimmed, just
as surely as the train that left South Station that distant afternoon faded
out of sight.
But I have held onto an important memento of our
first visit with Edward Salim-the customer copy of a MasterCard bill stapled
to a Hotel Bethlehem receipt. We stayed in Room 703 one night. The off-season
cost, with tax, was $50.88. The bill should have been lost or discarded
years ago, but I can't part with it. It is the symbol of my oldest child's
first farewell and of a wondrous lesson.
In Bethlehem, I finally learned that saying good-bye
does not have to be a test of love. It is an act of love.
Herbert Hadad is a Northeastern graduate and
an award-winning writer based in upstate New York. His column on the milestones
and transitions faced by alumni will appear regularly.
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