My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much how I once heard a writer describe the process of writing: Like feeling your way, a foot or two at a time, along a very long and very dark tunnel; you can’t fathom where it ends up.

Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child himself, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I know I’ll miss him next year, and I know that will feel right. My friend Andy has a son who is several years older than mine, and when his went off to college Andy told me that little boys evolve into teenage boys so that you are more than happy to help them pack when the time comes.

In fact, I missed my son when he was away for six weeks this past summer. (I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until suddenly there he was, grinning at me in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my arms around him I thought of that line in the poem by Walter Dean Myers, “Love that boy, like a rabbit loves to run.”)

When I told people then how he was loving the long hours he spent in the school’s clay studio and how he went back after dinner, and when I tell them now how he wants to study Ceramics in college, people often nod in a vague way about how wonderful that is before they ask something along the lines of, “So how’s he going to make a living at that?”

I can’t blame them, really. It’s crossed my mind a few times, as well. And about 25 years ago, it crossed the minds of my own parents, too, which is why my mother said to me, when I announced then that I wanted to be writer, that I might want to have a backup plan.

She wasn’t trying to be cruel; in fact, she just wanted me to have what she lacked: independence, and self-reliance, and the ability, when the guy you marry turns out to be a shit in a few key ways, to not to have to take it. It’s true that money can’t buy happiness. Yet ironically, I’ve noticed — and my mother certainly knew — that the lack of it can bring plenty of misery.

A few weeks ago my friend Paul Williams created something he called the Killer Phrase BINGO. We’re all familiar with the game BINGO: Fill out the game card, trying for five in a row to win and shout, “BINGO!” “One key reason new and potentially innovative ideas don’t get implemented at companies is because skeptics and scaredy cats kill ideas when they’re first proposed,” Paul wrote. “They use killer phrases like: ‘We’ve tried that before’ and ‘Yeah, but….’”

And so it goes in parenting, too. How many of the phrases do we use, as parents, because our own parents said them to us (here’s where I’ll admit to “Don’t make me turn this car around!”) or because we can’t bear to see our kids in pain (”Don’t make the same mistakes I did…”)? How much of our own parents do we bring to our own roles in the job, all over again?

Once, when my mother and I were having an uncharacteristically frank discussion about sex, she said to me, “Your generation didn’t invent sex, you know.” But didn’t we? Isn’t sex something we were left to puzzle through? Isn’t it up to every teenager to figure out, mostly on his or her own?

In that way, too, every generation thinks it invents parenting. Or, maybe, it’s every person who is reinvented as a parent: Sometimes, we are inspired by our own upbringing, and sometimes we exorcise it. And sometimes, as is the case with me, it’s a little of both.

In any case, Paul created this BINGO card for parents strictly for fun. But then again, you could use it for awareness, too—a reminder, of sorts, that we didn’t invent parenting, but we certainly can guide its evolution.

It’s alarming to talk with someone on the phone and realize they suspect you are a liar. This past week I received, via FTD, a belated birthday package—a gourmet basket with some of my favorite things. Like tea, biscotti, and dried apricots. There was a warm message on the card accompanying it, wishing me lots of post-celebration, feet-on-the-ottoman relaxation this autumn… but there was no signature. No name. In effect, I got a thoughtful gift from someone I couldn’t thank for their thoughtfulness. Weird.

I called the customer service number in the packaging, and someone named Danielle answered. (On a Saturday afternoon… Kudos, FTD!) I explained the predicament, and Danielle said she understood but couldn’t tell me who sent the package.

“You mean you can’t tell me, as in you don’t know?” I asked.

“Oh, I know who sent it,” Danielle said. “But it’s just that I can’t reveal it to you.” When I asked why, she said, “Well, it’s our policy. A precaution, you know, in case they don’t want you to know who sent it.”

But why would someone who sent me a birthday gift want to remain anonymous? This was a gift basket, not a wing at the Met. Danielle paused for a minute before replying, matter-of-factly, “Because maybe you aren’t supposed to know.”

Danielle emphasized the “you” in a manner that implied that I might not be, in fact, who I said I was. Maybe I wasn’t, her tone suggested, the recipient of the gift, the one who would be sipping hot tea by a roaring fire, dipping almond biscotti. Instead I was some person who was inquiring about a gift given to someone else.

Perhaps I was just nosy, or perhaps I was someone more emotionally freighted… a jealous someone who happened upon an unexplained gift. Perhaps this gift basket wasn’t a gift basket at all, but the last straw in a series of other things I’d noted amiss: some late hours at work, unfamiliar numbers on a cell phone bill. I recalled an article I had read recently about how the owners of some hotels and restaurants work hard to accommodate their guests’ dalliances, including requiring staff to sign a letter of confidentiality, ensuring that they won’t divulge anything they see or hear. Does this apply to mail order? Did Danielle sign something, too?

“Wait,” I said to Danielle, on the phone, attempting to clear up any misunderstanding. “This is my gift. It’s really to me.”

“And anyway, if this was a romantic gift,” I reasoned, hoping to sound casually un-jilted (what might jilted sound like, anyway, over the phone?) “wouldn’t the contents of a gift basket be a little more—I don’t know—risqué, maybe, than, say, tea?” Tea was something you give a friend, or a relative, or someone English. It wasn’t usually a gift you usually gave to a romantic partner. When she didn’t say anything, I added, “I mean, seriously? Tea? Really?”

Danielle stayed silent, but I could hear her unrelenting breathing on the other end of the phone, and knew she wasn’t going to budge. I was less irked that she wasn’t going to tell me who sent the gift than I was by the notion that she thought I was a figure to be pitied.

She eventually said that she’d sent an email to the giver of the gift and would call and leave a message, too. She ended our encounter by thanking me for calling, adding, “Have a nice day.” But I could tell that she thought I wouldn’t.

Later that day, my friend and colleague Beth Harte sent an email. It was she who had sent the gift, she said, and she didn’t include a signature because she assumed her name and address would be on the box, somewhere. “Sorry for the confusion!” Beth said.

It was nice to know that Beth was thinking of me, and wonderful to be remembered. But more than that, it filled me with a kind of relief: that the gift basket was, in fact, just a gift. It was nothing more—and certainly not anything close to resembling a burden.

This morning I got an update on a former foster dog — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel who lived with us two years ago, from just prior to Halloween to just before Christmas.

The dog had some kind of skin condition and arrived hairless, itchy, raw, reddened and miserable. He was about as sad as sad can look. He didn’t come with a name, so I named him Georgie, because his naked face reminded me of the  illustration of the children’s book character Curious George.

Another volunteer, Huntly, picked Georgie up in Vermont and a mutual friend delivered him as far as a highway exit in New Hampshire. The first time I saw him, he was in a dog crate in the back of a van at a rest area, growling and snarling, his skinny body pressed as far back as he could get against the crate’s back wall, and looking for all the world more like a gremlin than a Cavalier. (More “Lilo and Stitch” than “Lady and the Tramp.”)

Prior to the pickup, he had been living by himself in an unheated trailer, with a litter box and a bag of cheap kibble. Details were fuzzy, but there was something about a divorce, and an owner who had moved to a place that didn’t allow dogs, and a hope that he might have been adopted to someone the owner knew.  But who wanted a hairless, irritable dog with some kind of undiagnosed, ugly skin condition?

Georgie was with us for a few months. Turns out he was allergic to pretty much everything; had raging ear infections; and needed regular dermatology visits, medicated baths every other day, and deep ear cleanings. I kept him sequestered from our other dogs until he was stable, which meant he and I spent a lot of one-on-one time… unlike any other foster dog I ever had. Boy was he high-maintenance! But so sweet and such a little impish personality. I fell for him hard.

The nature of the foster relationship is temporary, of course. I couldn’t keep Georgie, and anyway, even if I wanted to, we weren’t the right kind of family. We already had three Cavaliers, and Georgie needed a home where he could be the only dog; he wasn’t particularly good at sharing.

So eventually, the day came when, stronger and fuzzier, he went home to his new life. If I tried to describe how much I missed him, you’d think I was describing how I had lost a lung. How much can you miss a creature who squirms at the endless ear cleaning? Who struggles in the bath? Who growls at your son? Who nips at your other dogs? Who hops over gates? Who hoards his food? How much can you miss a tense, skittish creature whose naked tail quickens like the reverberations of a violin string when he sees you? How much can you miss something that presses his lean body so tightly against your leg that you can feel his heart keeping time with your own?

It’s surprising how much, really.

In her note, Georgie’s new Mom calls him fabulous. Playful. A love. “I cannot thank you enough!” she writes. She includes a picture of Georgie as he is today, poised expectantly above a tennis ball, furry as a collie. There’s something about his eyes that’s familiar. Otherwise, I barely recognize him. Which thrills me.

Georgie is one of those rescue miracle stories; the kind of from-the-brink of disaster stories you hear sometimes at a party or whatever, about animals or people or about other kinds of reformations. And you think, “Really? Could that really be true?”

But it is true. It really happens that way sometimes. Which not only fills my heart but also gives me a kind of faith in humanity, and reminds me of the enormous capacity of love.

As goofy as that might sound.

Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because America Online’s aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. Or mass irritation. However you look at it.

In fact, the end of that era likely came without you being aware that is was, in fact, the end of an era. But that’s how evolution is, right? One day you have to bungee-wrap your trash cans against the bands of marauding wild animals outside your cave, and the next thing you know you can’t remember the last time you saw a mastodon happen by.

Things change. Technology evolves. And suddenly you’re dealing with a whole different set of problems. When was the last time you got a busy signal? Or went on (or heard of anyone else going on) a true “blind date”? Looked up a number in a phone book? Had one of your kid’s friends call the house phone? PC World compiles a list of these and other obsolete things here.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. The other day I unearthed the item pictured below from an old desk drawer. It didn’t seem that foreign an object to me, but my 12-year-old daughter had no idea what it was. “Is it some kind of violin bow?” she asked.

But you guys know what it is… right? Anyone…? (Shout it out below!)

Posted via email from annhandley’s posterous

I had some happy news last week: The story of Gigi’s adventure with her beloved green tomato has been picked up by The Bark, a magazine I happen to love. In other words, if I were a dog, my tail would be wagging like that of a retriever with a tennis ball. (Or Gigi herself with a pork chop.) Big shout here to The Bark editor Lisa Wogan for making it happen.

If you don’t know The Bark, it’s a bi-monthly magazine about modern dog culture, with a literary twist. If NPR’s office dog hung around after hours, The Bark might be what he’d produce as his moonlighting project. I’m tempted to say that there’s plenty in each issue to appeal to the non-dog lover as well. But I have four dogs, so you shouldn’t trust my opinion anyway.

Either way, check out Gigi’s story again. Just for the thrill of it. And thanks!

My childhood friend Ron Ploof was so inspired by the pathos of Gigi’s story that he adapted it to the small screen. I think he did a fine job with it, and I particularly like the tweak of the ending. So what do you think?

Gigi Spies a Green Tomato from Ron Ploof on Vimeo.

The stage: A small wooden deck with sturdy balusters, overlooking a vegetable garden in late season.

Enter main character: Gigi, a 6-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. It’s clear from her saunter that Gigi is unhurried and uncomplicated, and her portly figure implies a dog who is enthusiastic about her meals. Suddenly, Gigi sees something that piques her interest, and a drama ensues.

Scene 1: Gigi spies a green tomato that has fallen from its vine in the garden. From the glint in her eye and quickening of her step, it’s clear she considers the green tomato a tasty prize — a kind of lucky harvest her enterprising belly has stumbled upon.

Scene 2: Lacking a working knowledge of spacial relevance, Gigi attempts to reach the tomato by squeezing her ample physique through the (blasted!) unforgiving deck rails. In an instant, she regrets the enthusiasm with which she enjoyed last night’s second helping of chicken pot pie, delivering in response to her successful, if pitiful, whining. She wonders whether she might have managed the evening just as well with less, and whether that might have made all the difference, right now.

Scene 3: She is so close to the object of her affection, yet so far. Whether she sings like a Siren to entice the tomato to her, or whether she cries in agony for the tragedy of it all… is hard to say. Whatever the case, the tomato remains silent as stone. And unrelenting.

Scene 4: Gigi is nothing if not patient. In the life of a dog, “waiting” is an occupation to which they devote significant resources. A dog, after all, is always waiting for something: the sound of kibble in the bowl, a car engine in the driveway, a key in the door lock. What else can a dog do… but wait, wait, wait?

Scene 5 (panorama): Suddenly, it’s clear: Here’s the true tragicomedy of Gigi’s predicament. The audience sees that the deck railing extends only a few feet beyond Gigi’s current spot on the deck. If you were there, you’d want to urge her to walk around the railing, hop into the garden from its short end, and seize the green orb as her own. You might wave your arms about like an air traffic controller on the runway, signaling a clear path. To resolution… to victory! But even if you did, she wouldn’t respond.

Otherwise, this wouldn’t be much of a story at all. It wouldn’t tell a tale that’s fuller than an under-ripe tomato: A tale about want. And desire. And how — in the end — the shortest path isn’t always the most successful, to what your heart seeks most.

We set off on foot, the six of us, under an azure sky as big as the ocean. The breeze off the water smelled of salt and September, and the dune grasses bent toward each other, whispering the news that fall was coming.

It was a picture-perfect, precious August day, the kind of day that a talented someone with a camera might photograph and print onto a postcard, which someone else might then buy to send to a friend, to show how big the Maine sky can look over an endless sea; and how the line from the midday crowd snakes lazily out of the soda fountain, through a squeaky screen door propped open all day, in turn, by the backside of whoever happens to be waiting for service next; and the way the wild beach roses that grow straight out of sand, impossibly, cascade over a split-rail fence, tumbling like curls over a toddler’s forehead.

The idea was simple: Each of the three teams of two was armed with a single list of two-dozen things to scavenge from around the tiny seaside village of cottages and a few public buildings. Things as in things: a bit of beach glass ground smooth in the surf; or a bit of clothing lying abandoned on the beach, stiff with sand and salt; or a ripe rose hip, red as a miniature candy apple. And also things as in information: the year the Curtis Guest House opened for business, or the color of the roof at 18 Maine Street, or the first name of the formidable guy behind the tall oak counter at the post office.

Each team paired a grownup with a teenager (or near-teen), and so Rachel and I became partners. In some ways, Rachel, who is almost 13, and I, some 30 years older, we were a fitting pair. She and I approached the list seriously—and, I thought, intelligently: Scrounging the more common facts in a guidebook that we found lying around the house. There was an efficient economy to finding the name of the present village Association president as it was printed in the book, rather than, for example, having to step into the association office and actually asking.

And that was the downside, too, of Rachel and me as partners: Neither of us really likes to talk to people we don’t know, and yet here we were in a game that required us to stride into the town gift shop and ask the shopkeeper where she went to high school. I know that sounds simple enough, but when you are prone to avoiding conversation with strangers, it’s embarrassing.

I don’t know much about psychology, but I would guess that because Rachel and I are both the youngest in our families, we have been trained to hang back and let others do the talking for us. Of course, Rachel is still a girl, and she has plenty of time to change, I hope. While there are times as a grownup when you can’t live that way—when you have to, for the sake of ordering Chinese food or arranging for cable TV or mailing a package first-class or what have you… and so you have to deal forthrightly with strangers—I’d still prefer to avoid the whole business.

Which is why, when I found myself standing in the gift shop in front of the shopkeeper, who turned and looked at me expectantly, it occurred to me that I’d much rather send her an email or, at that moment, perhaps pass her a note across the glass counter. She could write down the name of her high school, and pass it back, and then Rachel and I could be on our way.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be a grownup so I wouldn’t have to do things I’d rather not do. But then you become a grownup, and you realize you have to do more of those things than ever, which meant that I, and not Rachel, had to ask the shopkeeper where she went to high school. Then I had to ask the postmaster his first name. And I was the one who had to ask the blond-haired cashier at the variety store where she bought the T-shirt she was wearing. (”Right over here,” she said, kindly, leading the way. “Third shelf.”)

At one point, Rachel voiced something I, too, had silently been considering, “Oh let’s just make it up!” she said. “How will they know?”

It was tempting. But as the grownup in this partnership, it seemed my duty to lead her on the less complicated path of truth. Except for one small allowance: I used an application on my iPhone to sniff out a nearby Twitter user, rather than polling passers-by in town, randomly and excruciatingly painfully. It was to be the coup de grâce: the thing that ended it for the others and clinched the game for Rachel and me. I have thousands of followers there; the others weren’t even on Twitter… how could they possibly find the answer to that challenge?

It turns out we weren’t the only ones who cheated: Rachel’s sister Amanda confessed that the soaked and sandy sock she presented as her team’s found bit of clothing was actually peeled off her partner’s foot, dipped in the surf and then rolled in the sand, like a breaded cutlet. Only the third group—our friend Beccy and my girl Caroline—hadn’t cheated, so that made them both the winners. In the game, certainly, but also maybe in a larger sense: Beccy conversed with the postmaster long enough to uncover that his first name, Win, was actually short for Winthrop, and, when her bit of small talk with the gift shop owner was overheard by a browser in the store, she uncovered—impossibly!—a local Twitter user, too. I’m competitive enough to covet her win, certainly. But more than that, I envy her easy way with people.

Later, it was hard not to look at everything in town as a possible challenge in the scavenger hunt. Here was a woman walking down the sidewalk, and yet all I could see was the possible solution to “Find someone wearing a fanny pack!” Here comes a child on a scooter: “Find someone with ketchup dripped on her shirt!”

And then here was a pretty one-armed girl in a bikini, talking and laughing with her boyfriend in an easy manner as they picked their way past the soda fountain on a sidewalk strewn with bicycles, and through middle-aged Moms wearing beach cover-ups, and small children holding teetering ice cream cones. I tried to view the one-armed girl with only humanity and compassion. But it was hard not to view her as something else entirely: the clincher in some future game, perhaps, an answer that required no conversation of any kind—only simple observation. Now that, I can do.

The Boston outlet of Morton’s, a Chicago-based steakhouse chain, sits across the street from Boston Harbor in a newly developed part of town called the Seaport. Inside, Morton’s has a clubby feel—all hushed tones and white linen and dark paneling. The bad lighting makes it hard to read the prices, which are high, so perhaps that’s the point. I guess it’s a very nice restaurant, but it reminds me more of the kind of place my parents might think of as a very nice restaurant: When a group of us walked in one recent night, it was a little like entering a private inner chamber. We weren’t exactly rowdy—but, still, it felt like the Laugh-In party of seven had just crashed Masterpiece Theatre.

Morton’s is known for its beef. Right away, after you’re seated, a waiter trots over, parading raw steaks on a wheeled display cart. He takes a lot of time, table side, to explain the various samples of meat and the characteristics of each cut, but still I can’t grasp the difference between a porterhouse, or a NY strip, or a double-cut filet. In my mind, I instead give each a name: One as big as a shoebox. Oval with bone. Size of a Chihuahua’s head.

Each steak is gargantuan, with the overfed and solid look of a linebacker. The other things on the rolling display are huge, too: An entire head of broccoli, a potato the size of a shot-put. But what caught my attention was a colossal green-black lobster perched on a plastic tray, his powerful claws neutered by thick rubber bands. The creature was motionless, so it took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t, as I originally thought, dead. Its slick antennae whips suddenly twitched and its stalked eyes seemed to dart about, as if to silently signal a frantic recommendation that diners try the steaks.

Lots of seafood restaurants—and some grocery stores—warehouse live lobsters in saltwater tanks until a customer picks one out. You carry it home live, boil a pot of water, drop the lobster in, and then wait for it to stop thrashing and clanging its claws against the kettle before you lift it out and, soon after, begin a different kind of wrestling—cracking the shell, picking out the edible parts, and tossing aside the icky stuff. Set aside for a minute the moral issue of cooking a creature alive, the lobster is easy to cook but considerably more work to eat.

For about $120, Morton’s eases the process for diners. The restaurant doesn’t have a tank; instead, lobsters are warehoused on ice in a walk-in cooler, except for when they take a wheeled tour around the dining room. Lobsters can survive outside of the water this way for 12 hours or more, our waiter explained. They remain alive, but the cold renders them fairly listless and limp, like a cucumber that spends too long in the crisper drawer.

That explanation, and the lobster’s sorry fate, made me feel immediately sad for the creature. I stared into its pinched, plated face, at his black beady eyes which for years had surveyed nothing but the murky sea bottom. Those black eyes failed him, I guess, when they couldn’t discern that the tangle of net securing the bait in the lobster trap would instantly signal an end to life as he knew it. Instead, for the lobster, life became an endless parade around the dining room. Perhaps he thought it couldn’t get worse. Of course, it would.

My friend Amber Naslund, seated two seats away from me, said I was being ridiculous. The lobster didn’t have a clue what was going on, she said, adding by way of explanation: “It’s a bug! It’s a giant bug! That lives in the water!”

It’s true that the lobster looks closer to a swollen grasshopper than, say, a cocker spaniel. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with the scene in Morton’s: Here we were, a jolly bunch out for an expense-account dinner, each of us sure that we had a job, money in our wallets, and the love of those waiting at home for our eventual return. And what was the lobster sure of? What did he know now, except for a consuming fear and misery? His life, his future, was in our hands. His poor soul, bearing silent witness to the happy excess at our table—and 50 more like ours around the dining room—made Morton’s the stage something of a medieval spectacle, tortured and grotesque.

“Does that comparison seem a bit much?” the renowned late author David Foster Wallace wrote in his August 2004 feature on lobsters for Gourmet magazine, when he compared Maine Lobster Festival (occurring again in a few weeks) to a Roman circus, among other things. For Wallace, his visit to Maine inspired a fearless look at the ethics of boiling an animal alive, as the realities of the scene left “no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.” And so it was in Morton’s that night: When the thing is inches away and staring at you, there is no conscious way to sidestep the issue.

If you think I’m carrying things too far here, then you’ll likely be appalled at what happened next. Because Amber, who is brave and decisive and unflinching in a way that I am passive and mournful and silent, suddenly snapped open her purse, counted out several twenties, and threw them on the table. “Let’s free him!” she dared us. “Who’s in?”

There was only the tiniest stunned silence before the rest of us around the table (Greg, Mack, Tim, Doug, and Justin) were in on the plot, unfolding bills and tossing them onto hers. Suddenly, the whole thing amped up into a kind of frenzied rescue operation. The next thing I knew, we were on our feet and parading the lobster for a final time through Morton’s—Amber was carrying him this time, cradling him the way Mary herself might have protected an infant Jesus—out of the front door and across the windswept street toward the Harbor.

“Wait!” someone from the restaurant called after us, and our waiter emerged from the small puzzled crowd of staff and a few diners who had gathered at the entry. “You’ll need these to clip his paws!” And he pressed a pair of scissors into my hand. Paws. “Did you hear that?” I yelled at the others, over the wind.

The lobster’s release was swift. There was a kind of small ceremony on the drizzly dockside, and someone quickly christened him the luckiest lobster alive—and, at that, the name Lucky was his. With a grisly sounding snip he was freed from his thick rubber-band shackles; then he was overboard and disappeared below the surface of the brown water.

In my memory, his reunion with the sea was climactic. I remember a giddy scramble toward the water, his graceful swoop toward the surface, and his landing with a small but satisfyingly final splash. But the whole thing was captured on video by my friend Justin Cresswell, and, in truth, when I watched it later, the release was nothing like that: Instead the lobster lurched away from us with a kind of contempt, and I have no doubt that had my hand wandered too close to his fantastic paws he would have had no qualms about snipping off a finger. He landed in the water awkwardly, upside down, and seemed to sink like a cannonball.

That’s the problem with video. It doesn’t allow you to hold your memories the way you want, like a photograph does. It forces you to accept them as they really were. Which is why, when I think of Lucky’s release, I think of the waiter’s last mention of him, and the way he referred to his two powerful pinchers as “paws.” The waiter was not a native speaker of English, so maybe he confused “claws” with “paws.” But I prefer to think otherwise. I like to think that he thought of the lobster a little bit like I did—less Jurassic Park and more Lassie. Maybe the creature was more like a bug than a puppy dog. But he was, all the same, something in need of rescue.

On Thursday, my son finished up his junior year of high school, and today his dad, little sister and I drove him 75 miles to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he’ll spend the next 6 weeks immersed in Art. He’ll spend much of that time muddying his clothes in the ceramics studio, with his hands elbow-deep in clay that turns magical in his two hands — hands that have turned sinewy and strong from all his time at the potter’s wheel.

He hugged me and patted my back with those hands when we left to drive back home. He’s gone to summer camps before. But this was the first time that he didn’t push me toward the exit with impatience, counting the seconds before I would stop embarrassing him, or smothering him, or fretting too much, or whatever it is that I do that usually drives him absolutely crazy. “Thanks, Mom,” he said instead.

We were standing in his dorm room, the place that will be his home for the next six weeks. I don’t think he was talking about the twin-sized bed I had just made up for him, with the freshly purchased extra-long sheets and the fleece blanket from his bed at home. He seemed to be talking about something else entirely, and it was that other thing that caused a sudden lump to rise in my throat.

I had noticed it earlier: He walked with ease with the three of us around the campus, getting the lay of the land, taking it all in like he always does — like he always has since his newborn eyes focused so intently that as a new and nervous mother I was convinced it was the sign of a vision problem.

As we walked around the campus, and checked him in, and picked up his ID card, and visited the health office, and the housing office, and all that, he didn’t say much, really. But it was more what wasn’t there that I noticed: The way he didn’t walk two steps ahead of us or loiter behind us. The way he didn’t look away — seemingly mortified at being caught red-handed with the ridiculous people who spawned him — when we passed another student on the brick sidewalks near the school. The way that he didn’t roll his eyes when I clarified with the kitchen attendant some specifics of his meal plan, or got the exact coordinates of the laundry facility. And when I relayed it back, he actually listened, and he didn’t cut me off with an impatient, “O-kay! I know!”

In other words, he didn’t act one bit like he’d rather be anywhere else except where he was at that very moment, interacting with anyone else except me. If you have a teenager, or you’ve ever been one, you can recognize that behavior.

His “thank you” in the dorm room was for help with all of that, I think. But also for putting him there at all. By that I mean writing the check, of course. But more than that: for racing in the pouring rain to the post office to make the application deadline. For slogging through the confusing reams of paperwork the college sent. For the marathon seven loads of laundry just the day before. The desperate run for deodorant. The last-ditch stop on the way because I was worried he wouldn’t have enough cash for supplies. For the opportunity he seemed suddenly awed to realize he had been given.

I could fool myself into thinking that his thank you meant more than that: that he was grateful for all the stuff that fell into place in the 17 years leading up to today, too: All of the mostly thankless and unacknowledged stuff that I do, and any parent does, just to keep our kids healthy and happy and safely out of the path of a moving bus, those that are actual as well as metaphorical. But he probably wasn’t thinking of that, of course. Love rolls down hill. It’ll be years and years (I hope) before he has his own family and he’ll come close to understanding any of it.

All afternoon, in the back of my mind, while we zipped around the campus on foot on a hot, muggy day, I tried to think of a word that might describe how completely happy he was to be there, how excited, how amazed at the possibilities, how completely turned on he felt.

And then I tried to think of how it felt, as a parent, to see him so happy and alive. Most parents might describe it as pride, I guess. But pride doesn’t come close, because it’s not about me. It’s about him. What’s a word that describes how you feel when one of the people you love most in the world, one of the very few people you would gladly suffer deeply for, would do just about anything for just because they asked — no questions asked, no strings attached, no payment required — without resentment, or anything even close to anger or complaint, and in fact would see it as a kind of duty and honor? What’s the word for a kind of love that fills you up to the point that it overflows the brim?

Whatever you call it, that’s what rose in my throat today, and rendered me unable to tell him, right then, that I was happy for him. That I loved him. I hoped he’d have the time of his life, and goodbye.