Sociologists call it "emptying the nest," but I like to think of it as cleaning out the basement.
It is that milestone in family life that occurs when your youngest child moves out of the homestead, taking -- you hope -- many possessions with him.
It is a bittersweet experience. You know you will miss his company, but you also don't want to miss the opportunity to get rid of that old rug and those stacks of dinner plates, and perhaps an "interesting" lamp or two that have been dwelling in the basement.
This week I was elated as a double bed and box spring, an old kitchen table, a bookcase and other assorted furniture made the journey out of the house and into a rented truck, destined for the newly rented Washington apartment of our 22-year-old son.
Some of these goods had been "transitioning" in our basement. They came home in May, along with the kid and his college diploma. Others, like the old kitchen table, had been in our household for decades. I thought of pointing out the crayon drawings that my son and his older brother had put on the under side of that table when they were toddlers, but I didn't want to stop the flow of old goods out of the house.
In his final days at home, I found myself both picking the kid's brain -- getting those final reminders on how to operate the many features of my cell phone -- and tapping his brawn. I almost wept with joy when he and his strapping buddy, Hugh, carried the 16-ton sofa bed down three flights of stairs out the front door of our rowhouse.
Later, when the sofa wouldn't quite fit through the doorway of his new place, my son called and asked if he could saw off a piece of it. I told him he could saw that sofa in half if he had to, just don't bring it back.
The move went pretty smoothly, as moves go. Having helped relocate his older brother twice, once to Chambersburg. Pa., then to Anniston, Ala., I was somewhat seasoned.
It also helped that my younger son's move was a short one; from Baltimore to the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. -- a mere 40 miles.
But something usually goes awry during a move. Our foul-up occurred last week as we hurried around town picking up items he needed for the move. One afternoon, we picked up a suit that he would wear at his new job at a financial consulting firm, Cambridge Associates in Arlington, Va.
When you see your kid wearing a dark blue business suit with a subtle chalk stripe, he is no longer your little boy. Perhaps I was somewhat shaken by this experience, and that was why I did not notice that I was driving through downtown Baltimore with a box of shoes on the roof of my car.
The shoes, black dress oxfords, had been placed on the roof as we loaded the suit in the car that was parked on South Street. He had worn them when he tried on the suit at Jos. A. Banks. Somehow, we had forgotten to take the shoes off the roof. They stayed there as we drove past City Hall and cruised by War Memorial Plaza.
But when I took a left onto the Jones Falls Expressway entrance ramp at Gay Street, near the old MB Klein shop where I had once bought this kid model trains, the box of shoes fell off.
We figured this out when we got home and noticed the missing shoes and retraced our route. So, just as afternoon rush hour was building, I found myself precariously positioning the car on the side of the Gay Street entrance ramp and watching in the rearview mirror as my son tried to retrieve his shoes. Cars shot up the ramp, narrowly missing the footwear. Picking his spots, my son sprinted out, scooped up the shoes and jumped in our car. The left shoe was fine; the right shoe had been flattened.
What to do with one shoe? Not so long ago we could have walked across the street and made a pitch to Simon Harris. That was a sporting goods shop that for decades operated on the corner of Gay and Fallsway. It was the few enterprises on Earth that attempted to sell solo footwear. For instance, it had a solitary football cleat in its display window. When I asked a salesman about the solo cleat, I was told: "Make me an offer."
But Simon Harris is long gone; the building is now a counseling center. So my son and I took our lumps and the flattened shoe and headed back to the house to finish packing. The tale of the Gay Street shoe, I told him, was the stuff that family stories are made of.
rob.kasper@baltsun.com