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And a generalized biography - a scene from academic life. In September *Do they, still? … or is the journey rid of ritual, and solitary - not an end to adolescence, which cannot end, but a restructuring? The check has been deposited (it was always about money), the last inadequately felt conversation or tearfest finished, the car (it was always about cars) crammed with ill-packed clothes and electronics, and the kid leaves as the parents leave for work - the dorm, however many hundred miles away, a sour anteroom to offices; the self, whether sworn to narrow ends or endless indefinition, an ever-waning, ever-escaping star. No - they still, here and there, accompany their children, make a show of parking, carrying, and embarrassing: the father eyeing each passing lout and pausing, as if to question or fight (will he be the first?), the daughter glancing though scarcely in search of her first; the mother mourning the ingrained grime of sills and sheets and acoustic tiles, seeing exactly what her son sees: indifference transcending complaint. (Perhaps the boy is romantic and thinks he will soon be alone. Perhaps the girl is a scholar who has lived under the sign of anomaly.) Then goodbye - until the first appeal for funds, a place to crash for a month or decade, mysterious impossible understanding … still, goodbye. The parking lot, that tricky turn; the onramp; silence. Or perfunctory stoicism, Weltschmerz, companionable critique. The rest of the father's life - as always, though uncomfortably slowly - funnels into his next tangential remark, his next investment, last affair, while, like a balloon that tires of a child's hand, or captivity, love rises from the mother and to her straining eyes appears to swell a moment in the upper air.