Andy Young: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

By Andy Young

For the past decade or so one of the best things about getting my day started at 4 a.m. has been listening to the kitchen clock at that hour. Its ticking, along with the hum of the refrigerator, forms a soft, sweet and familiar symphony. Once the day starts in earnest, these quiet yet pleasing sounds get relegated into the background, drowned out by running tap water, pouring cereal, opening and closing doors, and other less subtle audible reverberations. But by then they’ve done their job.

I’ve been thinking about those quiet but pleasing early-morning vibrations lately, the ones which have allowed me to begin each day bathing in what has become my early a.m. “comfort zone.” I first learned to savor solitude, albeit in small doses, sometime in my early thirties, and as years and then decades passed, that sweet early-morning near-silence morphed into a guilty pleasure that ultimately became equal parts necessary and habitual. On those rare occasions when the ticks and humming were absent, I consciously missed them. But while I still deeply appreciate my daily dose of reassuring near-silence, too much of anything, even a good thing, is never beneficial.

The reason for all this introspection is two events that took place this past weekend. On Saturday I drove 230 miles south to drop off my daughter at the college she’ll be attending this fall. Getting home that night after darkness had fallen, I slept soundly and quickly, then woke the next morning in time to take my younger son 140 miles north to the school he’ll be going to for the foreseeable future, the one his older brother already attends. All three young Youngs have been blessed with good roommates, and each is pursuing areas of study that truly intrigue them. But they probably won’t be back around here until Thanksgiving, which means major changes not only for them, but for their suddenly empty nesting dad.

Many of the life adjustments I’ll make in the coming weeks and months seem on the surface to be fortuitous ones. My grocery bill is going to drop precipitously. I’ll be doing fewer loads of laundry, which means using less water. I’ll be turning on fewer electrical appliances, and also turning off fewer lights which have been absent-mindedly left on by others. There’ll be less vacuuming to do. The bathroom won’t need cleaning quite as often. There’ll be fewer meals to prepare, and thus fewer dishes to wash.

I’m cognizant that the primary object of parenting is to prepare one’s children to successfully navigate the world on their own, and I’m reasonably certain that all three of my offspring are well on their way to being able to do just that. Readying their brood to leave the nest is what parents are supposed to do. But who prepares parents to return to a once-bustling but suddenly empty nest?

My kids are doing fine, my expenses are shrinking, my day-to-day chores are less onerous than they once were, and for the foreseeable future I can shower with the bathroom door open if I feel like it. So why is the early morning ticking and humming I’ve found so comforting in the past suddenly sounding so shrill and irritating? And why is the face I see in the mirror first thing in the morning looking so melancholy?

There is, I suspect, a very thin border between the solitude and privacy I crave and the isolation and loneliness I dread.

The challenge lying ahead for me and other first-time empty-nesters is locating that line, but then doing whatever is necessary to avoid crossing it. <