Commentary: A Son in a Dangerous World

Editor’s note: the following was broadcast on WSHU public radio. Jessica Bram is Westport writer.

By Jessica Bram

When my son David e-mailed me that his summer college internship had him living across from the Madrid train station where 89 morning commuters died during rush hour last year, I had only the briefest moment of unease.  After all, I told myself, the simultaneous explosion of 10 bombs in Madrid’s public transportation system 16 months ago was now long in the past.  Then I quickly turned my attention to David’s jubilant report of his host family’s perfect location two blocks from the Prado, of strange and wonderful Spanish customs such as dinner at 11, and discovering that eight years of classroom Spanish finally paid off.  “I can understand them!” he marveled. 

I rejoiced for my 19-year-old son at the prospect of this wondrous experience when he would leap into the world, unjaded and unafraid, to encounter strange customs and unfamiliar sounds, while stretching his young legs into adulthood.  It brought back with crystal clarity my own summer after college in 1974, when I crisscrossed Europe with only a backpack, Eurailpass, and ripped-apart copy of Harvard’s “Let’s Go Europe.”  I sometimes marvel at my own courage to have ventured out alone that way so young.  But I don’t remember courage � only a dizzy intoxication at being footloose and utterly on my own in strange and wonderful foreign lands.

This was what I wanted David to experience when I decided to give him an unlimited Eurail pass, like the one I had had, to use after his Madrid internship.  When I sent him off with new sneakers, an extra-large bottle of sunscreen and the sternest admonition not to even think about getting a tattoo, terrorism was far from my mind.

I’ve had a moment or two of regret for that gift since the recent bombings in London.  With the ripped apart trains barely cleared from the London Underground, the Madrid bombings become far too real.  I think of my boy, who just a few years ago I would carpool to Boy Scouts being careful to let off only at crosswalks, now traipsing in his flip-flops off and on the trains of Europe.  Those same trains where on any ordinary day might be left, under a seat or on an overhead rack, a pack filled with 20-pound explosives.  I find myself imagining not David’s first glimpse of the spires of Venice, but Islamic extremists who might like nothing more than to avenge Allah with the death of a privileged American college student.

In two days David will be in Milan—one of the cities most frequently cited as the next terrorist target.

I could warn him away, I suppose.  Just as I could prohibit David’s younger brother Robert from riding the New York City subway to this Sunday’s Mets game.

But of course I won’t.  Because what it all comes down to, even in this awful era of bombs and exploding trains, is that sending one’s child off into this dangerous world is no more or less terrifying than it has ever been.  Letting them grow up, up and away—as though one had a choice in the matter—has always been a cruel and terrible prospect.  It’s a daily reminder that being a parent has always been about the highest risk-reward venture there ever was. 

Allowing them to cross the street, cross the ocean, and plunge head-first into this wide and perilous world?  Watching them ship off in uniform to Baghdad or to Kabul?

Now that’s courage.