Free Love Life by Rob Lowe

mechanical malfunctions, and personnel changes due to scheduling conflict, miscommunication, bad information, tardiness, nonperformance, incapacitation, drugs or death.

With fellow Best Actor nominee James Gandolfini at the Emmys.

A Boy
    I ’m trying to remember when I felt like this before. Like an elephant is sitting on my chest, like my throat is so tight and constricted that I can feel its tendons, like my eyes are 100 percent water, spilling out at will, down pathways on my face that have been dry for as long as I can think of. I’m trying to remember: When was the last time my heart was breaking?
    The death of my mother was one time, but her passing was prolonged enough to let me prepare for it, to the extent anyone can. At the most intense moment, sitting at her gravesite, I felt like I could hear every leaf blower in a fifty-mile radius, felt as if I could feel the sun’s rays turning my skin darker shades with each second, my skin irritated and jumpy, making me want to crawl out of it. I’m feeling it all now again, but no one has died.
    When I was a boy, I had to leave my friends in the summer, just as Malibu was becoming Malibu, say good-bye to my first girlfriend and go to Ohio to stay with my dad. There is a little of that sense memoryat play too, a feeling that I’m about to be left out of important events, separated from life as I know it, the world as I love it.
    I am remembering and feeling the details of my parents’ divorce and our family’s forced march out of my home to an alien world across the country. The good-byes to my father and my beloved grandparents; rationally I knew I would see them all again, but now I have the same body-deadening weight of the condemned, counting the minutes until the final moments of a life that’s all I’ve ever known. This encompassing, exhausting sadness I had mostly forgotten, or buried, until now.
    Today is my son Matthew’s last night home before college.
    I have been emotionally blindsided. I know that this is a rite many have been through, that this is nothing unique. I know that this is all good news; my son will go to a great school, something we as a family have worked hard at for many years. I know that this is his finest hour. But looking at his suitcases on his bed, his New England Patriots posters on the wall and his dog watching him pack, sends me out of the room to a hidden corner where I can’t stop crying.
    Through the grief I feel a rising embarrassment. “Jesus Christ, pull yourself together, man!” I tell myself. There are parents sending their kids off to battle zones, or putting them into rehabs and many other more legitimately emotional situations, all over our country. How dare I feel so shattered? What the hell is going on?
    One of the great gifts of my life has been having my two boys and, through them, exploring the mysterious, complicated and charged relationship between fathers and sons. As I try to raise them, I discover the depth and currents of not only our relationship but ones already downstream, the love and loss that flowed between my father and me and how that bond is so powerful.
    After my parents’ divorce, when I was four, I spent weekends with my dad, before we finally moved to California. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was incapable of enjoying the day’s activities, of beingin the moment, because I was already dreading the inevitable good-bye of Sunday evening. Trips to the mall, miniature golf or movies had me in a foggy, lump-throated daze long before my dad would drop me home and drive away.
    Now, standing among the accumulation of the life of a little boy he no longer is, I look at my own young doppelgänger and realize: it’s me who has become a boy again. All my heavy-chested sadness, loss and longing to hold on to things as they used to be are back, sweeping over me as they did when I was a child.
    In front of Matthew I’m doing some of the best acting of my career. I’ve said before that the common