Airports have been the catalyst for a lot of mawkish movie moments. The risible British flick Love, Actually was bookended by scenes of people greeting each other in slo-mo while Hugh Grant reflected warmly on getting a blow-job from a Hollywood hooker. Oh, sorry. I mean the meaning of love. All the more risible was the fact that he invoked 9/11, the mother of all airplane disaster days.

Dropping my son at JFK for his return to San Francisco I heard the whistles of the terminal traffic cops: “Hurry please, it’s time.” It is hard to avoid those intimations of mortality, not because I ever put anyone on a plane thinking it would crash (remember flight 222, on the Twilight Zone?) but because it is such a big fat obvious Hollywood metaphor. They’re leaving, you’re staying. They are going off to have adventures while you wait on the sidelines, as parents do, and wish for the best. In Adam’s case he is going back to CA to have an Outward Bound adventure in the Sierras, a trip he has been preparing for by training daily, quitting cigarettes, etc. We spent the last two days (and tons of $$ — caveat emptor) getting mountaineering gear. Our best experience was at a crowded little store near City Hall called Tents and Trails. Unlike some of the salesmen at Paragon, everyone we talked to there looked like they did a fair amount of wilderness wandering themselves. And all were impressed with the fact Adam was doing Outward Bound.

Young men need a challenge, a fire to walk through on the way to manhood. Left without some of the more traditional rites of passage (military service, walkabouts) American men are forced to invent their own. Me, I got in lots of trouble: drink, jail, drugs, more jail. It is my hope that by providing my son with a more controlled challenge (as an OB instructor said, “We haven’t lost anyone yet,” a promise the military can’t match) he will feel emboldened to take other risks. Finish school. Get a job. Clean his room. Not necessarily in that order.

He’s in the air now, lost to me for the time being. I feel at these times like I’m holding a kite string, all tangled up as it comforts and cuts me at once, back here, on the ground.