“What’s wrong?” my son asked.
My eyes were red. Max had seen me cry only twice before: once when I learned that one of my best friends was dying, and once when we dropped his sister off at college in New York three years earlier.
I told him I was sad. We were minutes away from saying goodbye.
This September, Max was moving 1,906 miles away to Ann Arbor for college, and I was terrified we would lose touch. My wife still talks to her dad on the phone every day, and that has always moved me. But Max and I are not great on the phone. Unlike his sister, he isn’t chatty.
If you pay attention, your kids will teach you how to stay connected. When my daughter was young, we played and went on adventures all the time. Then she became a teenager with her own plans, and her invitations shrank to one, a few times a week: Come watch TV with me. Usually, it was something I found truly grating, and I would roll my eyes.
After a few months, though, I started to get it. I never came to like reality TV, but I understood she was inviting me to just show up and be in her presence. The show was beside the point. I realized that once she left, I would give anything to watch bad TV with her again.
Since the start of Max’s senior year of high school, I worried about how we would stay connected. We used to play sports together, but by fourteen he had schooled me in all of them, and the illusion of his dad as an athlete was gone. We used to try a new Chinese restaurant every week, but as he got serious about cooking and fitness training, he wanted to eat at home to track his micro- and macronutrients. This summer, before he left, we mostly just spent time in the same room, with music on or the Yankees game in the background. When they won, we put on “New York, New York” to celebrate.
As the founder of the US Chamber of Connection, I spend a lot of time researching and thinking about social connection. At times, it makes me a little overly reflective about my own life.
As Max prepared to leave home for college, I knew I wanted to build a new ritual, something for us to look forward to during our time apart. For my 50th birthday, we had taken an e-bike tour of Tuscany. I thought about us biking the length of Italy, from the Dolomites to the toe of the boot, one week each year. Seven weeks over the next seven years, with the last one marking my 60th birthday.
I pitched the idea to Max when I dropped him off at college at the start of his freshman year: What if we rode one leg of the country the week after each school year ended?
I sent him a sample itinerary with Italian cooking classes woven in. Max loves Italy, and he is taking Italian at the University of Michigan. He said he was in.
Our new ritual, an annual bike trip, turned goodbye into I can’t wait to see you when school’s out. Before leaving Ann Arbor, my wife and I got Max a bike for Ironman training and for getting around campus. For me, it was also a tether to the plan we had made.
Then, a week after I got home, Max sent a video to the family chat: a tour of his dorm room.
The video opened with the record cover for Al Green’s Greatest Hits on his desk, with the vinyl record spinning and “Love and Happiness” filling the room as he walked us through the space.
Al Green is what I listen to when I’m having a great day. I have played him in our house for all eighteen years of Max’s life.
Watching that video, I understood something. The Italy trips are real, and I can’t wait for them. But I had been worried about the wrong thing. The work of staying connected was already done, in the music playing in the background, in the hours watching the Yankees and listening to “New York, New York,” and in the playlists he makes me, so I can feel close to him while I drive around running errands. Our eighteen years together had built more than I knew.
Max is likely one of the only guys in his dorm spinning Al Green. And I am likely one of the only 52-year-olds in Seattle listening to English rapper Dave on the way to the grocery store.
