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accomplished). So I ambled my way through an English degree, which suited me fine.
    But I don’t think my parents and I ever had a single conversation about what I might “become.” I was a girl; I already was who I was going to be.
    That was then. Now,however, there have been endless conversations with my son, wearying to both of us, about what he might “become.”And all my alarms and doubts about this process were, unoriginally, funnelled into the question of school. If only he had gone to that cozy alternative school instead of the downtown public school he preferred. Or private school. Et cetera. Like Effexor, I thought school was the pill my son could swallow to solve our anxiety around what his true place in the world should be.
    But maybe school wasn’t the culprit. Maybe it was the cultural stuff he grew up around, all the romantic outlaws who sang and wrote about the American dream, when there still was one. I wandered into Casey’s old room to do some forensics.
    His bed faced a wall of bookshelves, full of our old heroes, half-mad visionaries like R. D. Laing and Charles Bukowski, ambitious Sylvia Plaths and train-hopping Al Purdys glaring down at him while he slept. Our books line one entire wall in “his” room, from the floor to the ceiling, but as I sat there I remembered the bookcase that Casey had kept in our previous house, as a teenager. It was just two shelves long, but strenuously edited. In a household full of print, with two journalist parents, he claimed not to be a reader. At 14 and 15, though, he did surreptitiously read, with his full attention. I could still reconstruct the titles that he kept in his room:
    â€” Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory
    â€” George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
    â€” Catcher in the Rye , by J.D. Salinger, of course (Brian handed it to him in a bookstore when he was 14; he opened the maroon-covered paperback, read the first few lines and said, “I’ll take this one.”)
    â€” Franny and Zooey
    â€” Jack Kerouac, On the Road
    â€” A couple early stories by John Steinbeck, I forget which.
    â€” Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    â€” Al Purdy, Rooms to Rent in the Outer Planets
    â€” Bob Dylan, Chronicles . No, that came out later.
    I forgot Allen Ginsberg’s Howl . Casey’s copy had migrated back onto our shelves, where the spine caught my eye. It was an original $3.95 City Lights edition, published in 1956. I opened to the first page, where Ginsberg begins his catalogue of “angelheaded hipsters” and the ones “who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico”—oh dear—“leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire-place Chicago. . . .”
    Dungarees. A beautiful word fallen out of use.
    I closed it. If only Casey had read less, not more.
    Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2003 00:15:32 -0500
Subject: Buenos Dias
    Hello from between Silver City and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
    Here is the latest news from my southwestern adventures. I’ve been staying in a place called the Mimbers Valley, in the mountains of south-central New Mexico, about a hundred miles north of the border. My hosts are Eric and Nancy, who run a pinhole photography journal and supplies business. I hitched here from Santa Fe on Saturday and got rides from all sorts of people . . .
    The email went on to describe his conversations with Bill, a Vietnam vet from Georgia (“excellent company”), a video-editor dude, and José from Durango. José and his truck took him over the mountains into the Mimbers Valley as he quizzed Casey at some length about his personal relationship with Jesus.
    Later he stopped and got me to take some photos of him posed in front of the truck with the mountains. He didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t found Jesus. He was more surprised that I didn’t have a cellphone.
    New Mexico is