The little boy who no longer lives here

I won't be reading this column today; it was hard enough just to write it. This is the father-notes-little-boy-growing-up column that I fought off a dozen times. Nick's high school graduation was in June. I attended, of course, and found myself too melancholy - and too much in denial - to write about it in public. Saturday was take-the-first-child-to-college day. I resisted, with full self-consciousness, taking up this space and your time with my little bit of miserable joy - what my Portuguese ancestors called saudade, the mixture of feelings one experiences at the landmark events of life. But it didn't work, so you'll just have to bear with me.

Besides, I've learned lately - and never really appreciated it before now - that many other parents are experiencing the same feelings.

"It was by far the saddest and hardest day of my life as a parent," a friend wrote in a commiserative e-mail last week. "I thought such a distinction was reserved for the day I would walk my little girl down the aisle. ... No, it was the day we took my son to Syracuse University. I guess, looking back, we were this perfectly happy family of four and life was great until one day we woke up and realized that one of the foursome had a new role to assume."

Over the many years of writing for The Evening Sun and then the morning paper, I wasn't much for telling family stories. Wise editors discouraged it.

So, after Nick was born, you never read much about him in this space. Occasionally, I referred to him as "the little boy who lives in our house," but only when news events compelled commentary from a parent's perspective.

One day in 1995, we had the television on, and the news was all about the bombing in Oklahoma City, with children among the victims. I noted how "the little boy who lives in our house" seemed drawn into this horrible news the way he was usually drawn into cartoons, and my instinct as a parent trumped my need-to-know as a journalist. I shut off the television, hoping to protect Nick from the cruelty of the world just a little longer.

During the Summer Games of 1996, I wrote: "The little boy in our house built an Olympic Village out of Lego blocks, then looked up for assurance that the real Olympic Village, the one in Atlanta, was far away. He only asked, of course, after news of the bomb in Centennial Olympic Park."

At times, there were advantages to allowing him to watch a limited amount of television, particularly the low-rent channels, with cheap commercials.