TRAVELER

MY FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD SON has just returned from abroad with a dozen rolls of exposed film and a hundred dollars in uncashed travelers’ checks, and is asleep at the moment, drifting slowly westward toward Central Time. His blue duffel bag lies on the hall floor where he dropped it, about four short strides into the house. Last night, he slept in Paris, and the twenty nights before that in various beds in England and Scotland, but evidently he postponed as much sleep as he could: when he walked in and we embraced and he said he’d missed home, his electrical system suddenly switched off, and he headed half-unconscious for the sack, where I imagine he may beat his old record of sixteen hours.

I don’t think I’ll sleep for a while. This household has been running a low fever over the trip since weeks before it began, when we said, “In one month, you’ll be in London! Imagine!” It was his first trip overseas, so we pressed travel books on him, and a tape cassette of useful French phrases; drew up a list of people to visit; advised him on clothing and other things. At the luggage store where we went to buy him a suitcase, he looked at a few suitcases and headed for the duffels and knapsacks. He said that suitcases were more for old people. I am only in my forties, however, and I pointed out that a suitcase keeps your clothes neater—a sports coat, for example. He said he wasn’t taking a sports coat. The voice of my mother spoke through me. “Don’t you want to look nice?” I said. He winced in pain and turned away.

My mother and father and a nephew went with him on the trip, during which he called home three times: from London, from Paris, and from a village named Ullapool, in the Highlands. “It’s like no place in America,” he reported from London. Near Ullapool, he hiked through a crowd of Scottish sheep and climbed a mountain in a rainstorm that almost blew him off the summit. He took cover behind a boulder, and the sun came out. In the village, a man spoke to him in Gaelic, and, too polite to interrupt, my son listened to him for ten or fifteen minutes, trying to nod and murmur in the right places. The French he learned from the cassette didn’t hold water in Paris—not even his fallback phrase, “Parlez-vous anglais?” The French he said it to shrugged and walked on. In Paris, he bought a hamburger at a tiny shop run by a Greek couple, who offered Thousand Island dressing in place of ketchup. He described Notre Dame to me, and the Eiffel Tower, as he had described Edinburgh, Blair Castle, hotel rooms, meals, people he saw on the streets.

“What is it like?” I asked over and over. I myself have never been outside the United States, except twice when I was in Canada. When I was eighteen, a friend and I made a list of experiences we intended to have before we reached twenty-one, which included hopping a freight to the West Coast, learning to play the guitar, and going to Europe. I’ve done none of them. When my son called, I sat down at the kitchen table and leaned forward and hung on every word. His voice came through clearly, though two of the calls were like ship-to-shore radio communication in which you have to switch from Receive to Send, and when I interrupted him with a “Great!” or a “Really?” I knocked a little hole in his transmission. So I just sat and listened. I have never listened to a telephone so intently and with so much pleasure as I did those three times. It was wonderful and moving to hear news from him that was so new to me. In my book, he was the first man to land on the moon, and I knew that I had no advice to give him and that what I had already given was probably not much help.

The unused checks that he’s left on the hall table—almost half the wad I sent him off with—is certainly evidence of that. Youth travels light. No suitcase, no sports coat, not much language, and a slim expense account, and yet he went to the scene, got the story, and came back home safely. I sit here amazed. The night when your child returns with dust on his shoes from a country you’ve never seen is a night you would gladly prolong into a week.