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way to the outskirts of the city, where he stood by the side of the road for five hours without getting a ride. Then he went back into town and bought a bus ticket to Santa Fe.
    Just when you think your job as a mother is on the wane, the circuits all light up again.
    In second year, before he dropped out, Casey had moved into an apartment with four roommates, a vast, Montreal-sized flat around the corner from the bagel shop on St. Viateur. It was sunny, with an old porcelain kitchen sink that hit you mid-thigh and a back balcony full of drying laundry and bicycles. The smell of grilled lamb and oregano from the Greek restaurant around the corner drifted in the windows. The apartment was a block away from the bohemian scene on the patio of the Club Social and across the street from a crepe shop where one of his roommates worked, pouring batter onto a grill the size of a record turntable. Ground Zero in Mile End,maybe the coolest intersection in North America for someone his age (or so it seemed to me). But he had decided that he would rather fly to the southwestern States in the dying days of that empire, to stand in the middle of the desert with this thumb out.
    Did we play too much Dylan? Was it the cover of Bringing It All Back Home staring out at the three of us, that woman in the red dress? Even though we didn’t mythologize the past, our cultural debris was still lying around, and Casey seemed to have inherited some of our creaky old cynicism about “the system.”Careers were for squares. He had no time for the go-getters, the ones climbing the ladder. He was an outlaw; he would make his own way.
    Wrong era , I felt like telling him. That romance is over. Even the phrase “dropping out” had been our idea, back when not working was the most ambitious thing you could do. In 1969 spending time in Tangiers was tantamount to getting an MBA. We did finish our degrees, but school was a relatively carefree experience, not the angsty job-grooming factory it has since become. The culturally approved thing for someone growing up then was to get as far from family as possible and to inhale the world.
    And that was how we spent the next 10 years or so, fomenting revolution and playing in a band (Brian) or travelling, falling in love, and occasionally writing (me). Postponing adulthood, certainly. Alarming our families.
    In many ways,we had simply conformed to the times. But it was obvious from our photo albums and our modest capital assets— we were in our thirties before we could commit to buying a couch, let alone a house—that we had valued freedom and adventure over careers and financial security. Because when we were growing up, that luxurious range of options still existed.
    Now, our desire to reinvent the world has dwindled for many of us to a spirited defence of our right to unpasteurized cheese. But a familiar flame of indignation burned on in Casey. In school he was impatient just reading “one guy’s version of what happened in the past”; he wanted to get out into the world, to see and feel it for himself.
    I saw his point. I had done the same thing, after all. But I also didn’t want him to lose his place in the fearful queue of training and competition that had become his culture.
    My parents were the first generation in their modest prairie families to go to university, in Saskatoon. Education meant a great deal to them, but they didn’t pressure me to go to college. I could always work as a secretary. Or I could teach. (I was 40 before she threw out my old high-school textbooks, imagining they might come in handy the day I came to my senses and enrolled in teachers’ college.) University was more of a finishing-school, where girls went to get a smattering of knowledge while meeting “husband material.” My father encouraged my “flair for words”urging me to “write something funny for Reader’s Digest ” (which I have only recently