Empty Nesters

Empty nesters if just for a few days.  

That's what Jude and I are with Joe at Woodberry Forest Sports Camp and JP in Boulder, CO.  Empty nesters.  We're getting the barest glimpse of what life is like for so many of my friends, like Mark & Elizabeth (Puryear), Doug and Sally (Brown), all with children out of college and working.  We're a long way from those days.

Last night, Jude and I met our friends, Russ and Suzanna (Allen) for dinner at The Henry.  Nice meal and even better conversation.  A lifetime ago, I wrote a piece in this space, "Friends that Fit," describing our family's relationship with the Allen family.  We've vacationed together, shared meals together, and our boys (JP and Cooper) played sports together.  Now, Ella is halfway through Wake Forest and works at my office on Fridays.  Cooper will be a senior at MBA and JP a junior.  Joe will be start 7th grade at MBA next year.

We don't see each other nearly as much as we did when the boys were younger and Russ (basketball) and I (baseball) were coaching them in sports.  However, that makes it all the more special when we are able to steal a night to go to dinner, like last night.  For Jude and me, Russ and Suzanna will forever be "friends that fit," and our friendship will remind me of a time in our lives when we were together virtually every weekend on a basketball court or baseball field somewhere in town.  I miss those days.

Last night, I enjoyed showing Russ and Suzanna the Woodberry Forest Sports Camp website, along with the blog we anxiously check every morning for an update on the previous days' activities and to see how Joe's "Alabama" team performed in their two or three games.  Yesterday, they lost a heartbreaker in team handball, 9-8.  They've won several contests that way, too, and by my estimation, his squad is slightly over  .500 so far, maybe a little better. 

I talked to JP on my drive home last night.  He and Sam ran 10 miles yesterday on a bike trail in Boulder, CO.  It was 52 degrees there when he woke up yesterday and 72 degrees when we talked at 4:00 p.m. (MST).  Gorgeous.  Meanwhile, it was 97 degrees in Nashville and one of our air conditioning units went out at work.  Am I envious?  You bet your ass I am.

In classic high school/college road trip fashion, JP slept on an air mattress that deflated halfway through the night.  Sam's truck wouldn't start yesterday morning, so he rode his bicycle into town to get "starter fluid," whatever that is.  Predictably, his truck still wouldn't start, so the he had his truck towed into Firestone.  JP and Sam walked a mile into town to see the campus at Colorado University?  Why didn't they Uber?  Only they know the answer to that question.

In the end, JP and Sam will figure it out.  Joe is in the process of figuring it out at Woodberry Forest Sports Camp.  Figure what out, you ask?  Everything, I guess.  How to be on your own.  Life.  All of it, I guess.

And that's really the point of all of this, isn't it?  For Jude and me to put our boys in a position - with safety nets, some visible and some invisible - of where they have to begin to learn to figure it out, all on their own.  

It's a modified version of "the Escape Game," except what the JP and Joe are escaping from is childhood.  That's a little bit sad to a nostalgia old dad like me but absolutely necessary, too.  They're growing up and, if we do it right, they will need us less and less and time marches on.  Also sad but also absolutely necessary. 

(Bongo Java)