My children are away with my wife visiting her family in Chicago on the occasion of my brother-in-law's graduation from medical school. Having seen them off at the airport yesterday, this has been my first full day without them and I'm already feeling the loss. They won't be back until next Wednesday, so I have five more days like this to go.
They make this particular trip about once a year. When my daughter was very young, my wife would make the trip alone, leaving the two of us to have an absolutely wonderful time together. By the time my daughter was old enough to travel, my son had come along, so he and I would have our own adventures while the girls were away. Now that they are both old enough, the three of them make the trip together, leaving me here all by my lonesome. Such has been the case the last two or three years, and I've felt the sting of separation a little earlier each year.
The last time they were up there was around Valentine's Day last year. They left me a very elaborate series of Valentine's gifts to soften the blow of that trip; a small gift for each day they were away (eleven days in all, I think). Each day I would open the specified gift and find something to entertain me or remind me of them. It was nice.
Toward the end of the cycle, one of the gifts was the soundtrack to the movie
Garden State. Lousy movie; great soundtrack. By the time I opened this particular gift, they had been away for more than a week and I was really missing them. I listened to that album quite a bit in the days preceding their return and one song came to be the anthem of my loneliness: ColdPlay's
Don't Panic. Lousy band; great song. Even now, more than a year later, a bittersweet shiver runs through me anytime I hear that song, reinforced by my son, who likes the song and usually asks me to replay it when he hears it.
There are two new songs duking it out to be the anthem of my current emotional funk: Interpol's
Public Pervert and The Rosebuds'
Boxcar. Neither song has anything to do with my current situation, but there is something about the emotional tone of each that is hitting me hard today.
I really miss my kids. It's entirely possible I'm become insufferably sentimental.
