Enjoy Your Time

It is hard not to feel sad and reflective in Boston on a gray September 11th. How could it be otherwise? Naturally the media were doing their best to whip folks into a 9/11 frenzy, as if the significance of the day might have slipped by unnoticed had they not been there to remind us. But no one had forgotten.

My flight to Los Angeles would be departing that very afternoon. I said good-bye to Miranda when she left for class in the morning, and I won't see her again until Christmas. With each passing day I learn how much I love her and how much this love requires that I let her set sail into her own life.

Now I sat on the rug of the room so recently emptied of her. My sound track was one of workers hammering, muffled voices, motors and machinery. The studio apartment is on the ground floor at the front of an old building, essentially on the street. People pass by day and night, momentarily in the room with us when fragments of their conversation, startlingly clear and near, drift into the open window and hang in the air, then fade along with their footsteps.

It's a city procession backed by constant city sound -- car horns honking, garbage trucks stopping and starting and banging things around three mornings a week, a heavy-footed neighbor running up the stairs, doors slamming, a shout, a laugh, a siren in the distance. Even in the deepest hours of night there are various tickings and whirs within the walls and a constant ambient light. (It all reminds me of my childhood years in Brooklyn, but life at the ranch has long since transformed me into someone oddly rural, and I'm always a little out of place lately, anywhere.)

And there's Miranda -- a flash of color, mop of dark hair, string of beads, boots and skirts and sweater dresses. Sometimes she is my little girl, curled up on a new gold polyester sheet with a blanket she bought in Morocco, stripes of deep tangerine and rich magenta-red, bright sunset colors. Her hair spills out onto the pillow and into her face. She is reading intently, and I notice that familiar straight-line serious mouth, and oh, my heart catches.

We had dinner together in the apartment sitting at a card table we found on sale, complete with four fine folding chairs. I covered it with a 1950s vintage tablecloth from a little shop down the street. It's red and white with big green roses and brown leaves and stems, splashy and eccentric. Miranda chose plates from Portugal that look hand-painted. On our first night we ordered pizza from Regina's at the corner. Another night, we had take-out pumpkin tortellini, and oranges for dessert. The idea that I am eating dinner in my daughter's apartment keeps surprising me. It sounds so grown-up, so not-yet-us -- but here we are.

I finally met her boyfriend too. There he was, a talking head on her computer screen, all the way from England. She kept his voice to herself most of the time, earphones in. He could hear me, though, a silly middle-aged woman gushing about newfangled technology, fully amazed by the miracle of this communication, perhaps equally amazed at the fact of this transatlantic romance that didn't exist three months ago and is now a force of its own, shaping shifts in plans and airline ticket purchases.

One morning we met a fellow tenant of the building in the phone booth-sized vestibule by the mailboxes. I had been urging Miranda to get to know some of her neighbors, so I pushily introduced her. His name is Michael, and he's friendly but in a hurry, probably going to class. "Enjoy your time," he says to her.

Enjoy your time. It's a funny sort of welcome with its built-in acknowledgement of temporariness, its implicit expiration date. But it's honest, I suppose.

Rain. I walked as far as Hanover Street, then, already wet, I hailed a taxi to the T station. In addition to my luggage, I was carrying Miranda's violin, bringing it back to California after a year or two in Boston closets. Maybe people thought I could actually play it. I grew fond of the notion that I might be mistaken for a musician.

The airport was as gloomy as ever. We submitted to the rituals of our post 9/11 age, removing shoes, discarding liquids, moving along with an air of resignation. There were images on television screens in the waiting areas showing memorial services, flags flying, tears at Ground Zero. We were treated to a still of Osama Bin Laden and excerpts of his latest greetings, followed by Wolf Blitzer asking some expert what he seemed to believe were the tough important questions: Are there sleeper cells in the U.S. today? Is there heightened chatter? ARE terrorists at large even now just waiting for the moment to strike?

We are mired meanwhile in Bush's catastrophic adventure in Iraq, no end in sight. For the life of me, I still cannot understand how we got from there to here.

I hold on tightly to Miranda's violin, wishing more than ever I could play it.

"I'm an idealist," she has written, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."

In a few hours I will be on the other side of the continent, where the sun sets over the sea, where the sound of night is the rush of wind and the drum of a heart.

Enjoy your time.