"Empty Rooms" 1 is one of André Aciman's most accessible essays. In it, Aciman is just a father, musing about the trauma of his sons' departure as they head off for college, leaving their childhood home on the Upper West Side of New York.
The essay contains a few of Aciman's favorite Proustian tropes -- for example, recounting how each night for years he deliberately imagined his future separation from his kids as he waited to pick them up from their school bus stop. Why? In order to dull the pain when the time arrived for the boys' actually departure. But, more than with many of his essays, "Empty Rooms" is a musing over an experience that most parents confront, sooner or later, and a catalog of reactions that those parents share.
His description of his relationship with his school age sons was so vivid that the last time I was in New York, staying in a hotel on the Upper West Side, I actually made a point of visiting the intersection of Broadway and W. 110th Street, the magical corner where Aciman waited each night to greet his sons. My experience with that street corner was underwhelming. But Aciman would not be surprised. He has often described his belief that the romance or magic of a place depends less on its physical appearance than on the feelings and past experiences that the viewer brings to it -- an emotional "film" that covers the physical bones of the place, "a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance -- romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all." 2
I had brought no "film" of my own to Broadway at 110th -- just my reading of Aciman.
I don't mean to analyze Aciman's essay. But when I read "Empty Rooms," I came across a casual remark that started me thinking about my actual subject in this posting. Aciman mentions that separation from his boys didn't hurt as much as he had feared, because "e-mail and cell phones kept my eldest son, in college, present at all times." and "In the morning, on his way to class in Chicago, he always managed to call. A new ritual had sprung."
Similarly, I've read mothers' descriptions of how their son or daughter always calls on the way to class, of how her daughter calls in the morning and wants advice on what she should wear to class that day. It seems like the kids never, for better or worse, really left home.
My own memories of "leaving home" are vivid. My dad took time off work, and drove me to the local railway station. We stood there, a bit awkwardly but companionably, waiting for the southbound train that would take me to California. We were a bit like that Norman Rockwell painting. And then I was gone until Christmas. Long distance calls were expensive. I may have called once or twice during the quarter, to share some information or ask some advice -- but we always remembered that after the first three minutes, additional charges began adding up.
I was just seven hundred miles from home. I felt like I was in Africa. When I stepped off the train home that first Christmas, the Christmas of my freshman year, the town looked strange and dark, hemmed in by the hills surrounding it. Very unlike the sun and palm trees I'd begun to take for granted.
My nephew Denny now lives and teaches in Chiang Mai, Thailand. A few weeks ago, Denny called me by Messenger video chat. I was sitting in Seattle, he was sitting in northern Thailand. The call was free, and the quality was so good that he could have been calling from the next room. If Aciman's sons were in college today, they'd be grinning at each other on video chat.
Again, I'm reminded of my six months in Florence, Italy, during my junior year. I suppose that a long distance call home would have been theoretically possible, but no one I knew ever attempted it. The price would have been out of sight, and the quality -- judging from other Italian services at the time -- would have been poor. My only communication with home was by aerogram -- a handwritten letter on thin paper that folded over itself for mailing. I don't recall the postage being surprisingly high, but it took at least a week for it to be delivered, and another week for a reply to arrive back. The only other form of communication, so to speak, was my parents' wiring of money to a bank in Florence to keep me afloat financially for another month or so.
What a different experience it would have been, for both me and my parents, if I could have video chatted with them -- if I could have waved the iPhone around to give them a glimpse of the Colosseum or the Leaning Tower of Pisa!
It would have been fun. And yet. And yet. I wonder if something wouldn't have been lost -- whether I was just 700 miles away in California, or a hemisphere away in Italy? The feeling that I was off on my own, surviving without the support of my parents. An illusory feeling in some ways, considering the number of checks and wired payments moving from my home town (from a family that was really just scraping by at the time) to wherever I happened to be. But psychologically, subjectively -- yes; I felt independent, a feeling that left me both proud and a bit scared.
I suspect that more than the average college student, I began my freshman year still very attached to my family. And, of course, I still am. But not having cheap cell phone service, not having video chatting, forced me to undergo a loosening of those ties that was necessary eventually and best accomplished when it was. Even as I remained financially dependent, to a large degree.
So, I envy Aciman and I envy his sons. I envy my nephew who -- unable to travel or receive visitors because of Covid-19 -- can at least speak effortlessly and with visual accompaniment with family and friends back home.
But I'm also glad that I came of age when I did, with the limitations that were imposed on us. And of course, because we couldn't imagine the marvels of the future, those limitations seemed just a necessary part of real life.
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1 André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, "Empty Rooms" (2011)
2 Ibid., "New York, Luminous"
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