The dilemma of the empty nest

Lots of Baby Boomers have an empty nest.

But I have a real empty nest -- one once occupied by a family of Cardinals in the large bush outside my home office window.

It's an empty nest and, frankly, I'm a little worried.

It's not too unlike being a parent. You have a house full of children one day then suddenly, or so it seems, they're gone -- off to college, off to jobs, off to lives that don't require mom and dad as much. And you worry: Is everyone OK flying around out there on their own?

It was actually kind of exciting there for a while, to be watching as a grandparent might over the progression of the three Cardinal babies, from eggs to little hatchlings with mouths wide open in their constant plea for food.

Daddy Cardinal looked like the one bringing home the bacon, or whatever it was that the babies clamored for mouths agape. I'm no expert when it comes to ornithology but it looked like he was arriving home with the food, discharging whatever it was from his beak into the mouths of babes.

They got the constant attention of Dad, resplendent in his red coat and black piping, and from Mom, more muted in her brownish tones. And they got my attention. I was able to snap a few pictures for the family album (see photo above).

Then I went away for a couple of days and when I got back the nest was empty.

Had the kids grown enough to fly the nest already? Had there been a problem -- an attack by a predator, perhaps? -- that I wasn't here to prevent?

My concern heightened when Mother Cardinal came flying into the bush on my first day back, looking in the nest, looking in various parts of the bush, even looking on the ground as if she was searching for her brood.

Nothing. No one. I went and checked around myself. No one. Nothing that indicated a struggle, no feathers, no body parts and yes I've been watching way too much "CSI".

Today, many days later, the nest is just there. It now has no purpose, it is just a hollowed collection of twigs, pine needles and mud in the crook of the bush.

The empty nest in the bush serves as a reminder of my own empty nest. Hey, when you write for a living, you find metaphors just about everywhere you go, even if it's no further than your house.

A week to be distracted

It's great when a college graduation speaker offers specific advice to the graduates. It's even better when a graduate is able to take the specific advice of the speaker.

So it is with my son David, who graduated this week from Boston College.

His commencement speaker -- documentary filmmaker Ken Burns -- talked specifically about the kinds of things the graduates should make an effort to do.

"Travel," Burns said at one point in his remarks. "Don't get stuck in one place. Stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and go to Yellowstone and Yosemite. After all, you own them. Whatever you do, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen to jazz music, the only art form created by Americans, and a daily proof that that exceptionalism, no matter what the pundits say, is alive and well."

David plans to stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and go to Yellowstone and Yosemite as part of a six-week, cross-country trip that started this week.

David is the second of my two children. In the process of preparing to graduate (a process that always involves the parents) he was also in the process of preparing for his trip (also a process that involves the parents).

So I guess I can be forgiven if I've been a little distracted with both the preparation to graduate and the preparation for the trip. Now that he's on the road, I am at once anxious and jealous. I'm anxious for the obvious reasons of just being a parent, having him and his two traveling buddies out there somewhere; jealous because I'd love to be along for the ride.

It's actually a ride I took with David's mother in the 1970s. We saw the same sites that David will see, but I hope for him that he'll see and experience much more of the road.

It's great that David is driven by a similar wunderlust. For me it was driven by the best known of the road books -- "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac, but more so by the lesser known "Travels with Charley" by John Steinbeck.

It'll be different for David. For one, if he chooses, he can be in touch through texts, or cell phone calls, or emails. My parents, according to what my Mom said recently, had no clue where I was during my trip in the '70s. Like we did, he'll have trip maps from the American Automobile Association, but unlike us he'll also have a GPS.

If he is in touch and tells me where they are, I'll be able to remember as he visits the waterfront in Seattle and eats the alder-smoked fish. I'll be able to see in my mind's eye the natural stone arches at Arches National Park in Utah.

I'll be a little distracted in worrying that he and his buds are safe. That the 2002 Mazda sedan (pictured above) he is borrowing from me will hold up to the rigors of the road. That they'll be responsible, make the right choices. That they'll have a great time and assemble memories for a lifetime.

I'll be distracted because I'll be thinking of standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

On the rail

I love doing time on the road. I discovered the other day, however, that I might have a new love: Doing time on the rail.

For the first time I took a trip by rail.

Understand, I am not a child of train travel.

I am a child of President Dwight Eisenhower's interstate highway system that started in the 1950s when I was born.

I am a child of the Age of the Automobile who grew up on those interstate highways, traveling them many times with my family as we made our annual summer pilgrimage to the ocean in New England from the high plains and foothills of Colorado.

Eventually, I graduated to airplane travel as the most efficient means to get from distant Point A to distant Point B.

It was family business related to getting a car from my daughter in Connecticut that put me on a train from Boston to New Haven.

I was struck by a pace of travel that is determined, yet unhurried, very much unlike traveling by air.

It is a means of travel that I found fits my personality, especially a personality that is being retooled by retirement. I don't need the frantic scheduling of airlines. I can get where I need to go with the deliberate but unhurried pace of the railroads.

Because of my own need for promptness, I appreciated the precision almost to the minute of the travel to the schedule:
Arrive Providence 10:16, just as it says on the schedule;
Arrive Westerly 10:37;
Arrive Mystic 10:51;
And so on until our arrival in New Haven at 12:08.

And it was a different view of travel altogether.

On the highway as a driver, the view is stitching of the white line lane divider and a landscape you might glimpse when you look away from the road.

On a plane as a passenger, the view is a patchwork of roads and farm fields and a landscape pretty much flattened from being eight miles high.

On a train at about 60 miles the ground level view lingers longer. You can stare at the view and focus. And can stare and daydream. Or you can ignore it altogether. I sat on the car's east side as it traveled south, giving me wonderful water views as we hugged the Rhode Island and Connecticut coast (see image above).

The truest sign that this captured my interest?

I took the in-seat magazine called "Arrive." I never take the in-flight magazine. But I took this one as the surest sign I want to learn more because I want to do rail more.

Feeling sorry about the yard, for once

Normally, I don't care for or much about the yard.

I care enough to mow the grass. But I don't care enough to fertilize, I don't care enough to de-thatch, I don't care enough to water.

Been there, done that, I guess you could say of me. I cared a lot about how green, and how lush and how few dandelions there were in my lawn during a previous life in the suburbs of Boston.

In the suburbs, you and your property values were often judged on looks, so we kept up appearances. Everyone fertilized, everyone mowed on weekends, everyone bagged clippings, everyone raked.

But I don't have neighbors here in rural New Hampshire who judge my lawn. I have trees, and the trees don't judge either.

But it's because of the trees -- and the harshness of the winter -- that I feel genuinely sorry for my lawn this spring, enough so that I will go to some unusual lengths -- at least for me -- to care for it this season.

In general, the winter was tough on the lawn because of the amount of snow that had to be plowed. With only so many places to push the snow, it became necessary to push it more and more and more onto the yard. As the plow's blade push the snow it also dug into the grass along the driveway. As a result I have big scars of dirt where the turf used to be.

The lawn also took a beating from the December Ice Storm and all the branches -- some small, some big -- that came down from all the trees.

The limbs have been gathered and fed into a rented chipper, leaving me with a very large pile of natural mulch (photo above).

But there's lots of more suburban-like maintenance to do. I need to rake away what's left of the Ice Storm tree debris. I need to get some grass seed to fill in the ugly scars. I need to use the mulch in the garden beds that may or may not get planted by my wife this season.

There are times when I want to release my yard back to nature ... just forget about the whole thing, let it assume control over its own destiny rather than have me try to control its will.

But this year the lawn has got me feeling guilty.

So there's work to do. The lawn is too big to fail. Time for a bailout. And I'm the stimulus.

Old habits r hard 2 break

"The Elements of Style" -- the elegant little book on correct writing -- celebrated its 50th anniversary last week.

I have an original 1959 printing, courtesy of my father, also a writer.

During my many years as a newspaper man, "The Elements of Style" and "The Associated Press Stylebook" were my sacred texts. Any question about how to write something or about usage had an answer in one or the other.

The AP Stylebook has been updated many times over the years. Back in 1984, for example, it did not have a reference for the Internet.

"The Elements of Style," by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, hasn't changed too much. It's in its fourth edition, having been updated last in 1999.

As a Baby Boomer who's making a concerted effort to navigate his way online, I find it hard to unlearn the style of Strunk and White in favor of the shorthand style that electronic communication sometimes demands.

I always want to write in complete sentences. I always want to have a subject and verb. I always want to use proper punctuation, and proper capitalization and proper voice. I always want subject/verb agreement and noun/pronoun agreement.

Email became the first excuse to write in a tone and manner that was both abbreviated and, quite frankly, often lacking in style. It became worse as we exchanged emails using the BlackBerry keyboards, and it became worse still when we began texting off the cellphone keypad.

The new ways we write to to each other cramp the style of "The Elements of Style."

Are became r. To became 2. Oh, my God became OMG. Honestly, I need a glossary to help me sort through it in the same way I needed "The Elements of Style" and the AP stylebook.

But I refrain from using the abbreviated language of cellphone texting at a 160-character limit and the micro-blog Twitter at 140 characters.

I won't substitute the online shorthand for the words. You won't see me use SWAK for sealed with a kiss.

I actually find myself becoming a better writer and self-editor. By using whole words within a character-limited box, I shrink my thinking about what I want to say to its essence. Say it, say it clearly and say it in 140 characters or less. It's the haiku challenge of online communication.

"Omit needless words," Strunk and White advise.

Needless words, indeed.

At 55, I feel a kinship to my 50 year old book: We're both a bit dog-eared and maybe a little outdated, but still fundamentally sound.