Sunlight on the Side of a House

We are in Boston to visit our daughter who is off and running and radiant in her leaving. She’ll be studying and traveling in Europe for the summer and then returning to Boston in the fall for her final semester. She tries to be patient with me, but I can tell that I am already skirting the boundaries of irrelevance. Now and then I say something Mom-like, and I catch that flicker of embarrassment, almost a wince, or occasionally an affectionate look of amused indulgence. I am a relic, formerly useful and still sort of quaint but essentially outmoded, like a hat pin or a typewriter.

“Miranda…,” I begin, and maybe there’s something needy in my voice, because she immediately asks, “Is this going to be one of those weird reassurance things?”

Yeah, I guess it was.

We are walking through the North End, Boston’s Little Italy, where she will be living come September. It’s a great neighborhood of narrow streets, old brick buildings, Italian restaurants and pastry shops. There’s a Knights of Columbus Hall down the block from her apartment, a bakery that’s always open, and a pizzeria on the corner with a vintage neon sign. Paul Revere and Ben Franklin just strolled by, drawing not a second glance, and an elderly Italian lady wends her way slowly down the street pushing a little shopping cart filled with groceries. Colorful packets of seeds are on display outside the hardware store, saints and angels are keeping vigil in the alleyways, and it is snowing white blossoms.

“Buy the skinny ones,” a woman is saying, referring to egg plants, “they have fewer seeds.”

It all comes down to letting go, but at least I am releasing her into enviable circumstances and a life of possibilities. The hard part is heading home and reshaping the life that is my own -- the roles that defined me have vanished, the body that contains me has frayed, and frankly I’m a little confused. I realize I am a cliché, and I am sick of all the hype lately about aging Baby Boomers, but there it is. This is the time of life when one is young enough to feel capable but old enough to perceive limitations, the time to acknowledge that there might be some truth to those rumors of mortality and to make the remainder of the journey count.

I want to savor the precious ordinary, but I still have a craving to explore some new frontiers before it’s over, and I can’t shake the belief that the measure of a life ultimately translates into the good it brings to others, but I don’t know what form that should take. And now I'm seeing off a daughter who feels confident enough to say good-bye jauntily and head out toward her own horizons. I guess I need to somehow do the same.

Monte and I are staying on the South end of town in a brownstone bed and breakfast run by the gregarious duo of Al and Dominic. In the morning we have breakfast with a group of Germans here for the Bio-Tech convention. One of the Germans, whose name is Iggy, is explaining why Wal-Mart failed in Germany. Al is at the grill tending to the French toast and Dominic sits down with us. He brings up politics, and at some point expresses a leaning toward Hilary, wondering how I feel about the subject.

“Anyone is better than the nightmare we have now,” I mutter unhelpfully.

“I wish it WAS a nightmare,” says Al at the grill, “’cause then we could just wake up.”

Dieter asks if we are going to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, a welcome change of subject and a very good idea.

“All I ever wanted to do,” said Edward Hopper, “was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” And did he ever.

The exhibit is extraordinary, from etchings to watercolors to the oils we tend to think of. It is an almost hypnotic experience. We look through windows into the rooms of strangers, all of whom seem to be living parallel but unconnected lives. We contemplate white wooden houses, stolid brick buildings and shops long gone, a brightly lit drug store with its glass jars and Ex-Lax sign, the light and shadow of a New York theater. I stare for long minutes at the iconic Nighthawks, where the four sleepless souls in an eerily lit all-night diner seem forever lost in their own thoughts. We peer like voyeurs into hotel rooms and living rooms where the floors are green and the silence is palpable. There is such a sense of isolation and loneliness that the final painting seems inevitable: Sun in an Empty Room.

I’m in an Edward Hopper frame of mind when we leave the museum, but I’d forgotten how astonishing forsythias are. “We're back!” they shout, never shy about stealing the show. It is springtime after all, and springtime in the Northeast is something else again. Only those who have lived in winter’s clutch for six long months can fully appreciate the euphoria of the first warm days, when suddenly the very earth seems to breathe.

We wander through the Boston Common and Public Garden, where people are out strolling or lying contentedly on the grass with their faces to the sun. Couples snuggle on park benches, kids practice softball, and families celebrate weddings and graduations, taking pictures of each other by the tulip beds. New parents of every ethnicity hold their babies with the same look of fullness and joy, and someone is incongruously playing bagpipes in the distance. The Charles River sparkles in sunlight and the trees are crowned by the lacy yellow-green of early foliage or delicately blossomed in white and pink.