My son, Sir Gawain

I like to stand at the window and watch for our son coming home from school. It is not because I am an overprotective dad. Rather, I like to see him on his own, as a child should be, unfettered by school or adults or rules or others’ watching eyes.

Wielding a stick, throwing clots of dirt, kicking leaves, swishing snow off a large stone; never is he simply walking home from another day of classes.

His school here in Luxembourg, where he learns new languages and befriends children from all over the the world, is a far cry from my homogeneous upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago. Whereas I grew up asking the teacher's permission to go to the bathroom or pigging out on candy, with his distinctly European upbringing my son speaks a different language of toilets and sweets.

Likewise, the route he takes to get home, with its smart patisseries and dense woodland, is nothing like the concrete and manicured lawns I walked along to and from school as a child.

As he wends his way along one of the many forest paths here, there is a small clearing where I can catch a glimpse of him. Free from distractions and lost in a world of what I envision to be fantasy, he can process his day.

While his brain organizes the knowledge and experiences of what went on at school, I imagine our son pretending to be a gladiator or knight. With Luxembourg's medieval background and the remains of the city fortifications all around us, it is easy to get lost in such reverie.

As he crosses the clearing and disappears again, it takes a bit of time before he is disgorged from the woods and makes his way to the front door.

The bell rings, and as I open the front door expecting to meet Spartacus or Sir Gawain, our son bursts through exclaiming, “What’s for lunch? Can I play computer games?”

My imagination slain.

Check out Dan's column every two weeks on wort.lu/en.