21 really is a magic number in Vegas

Our younger son just turned 21.
And I lived to tell about it.
Barely.
You see, the birthday party was in Las Vegas. He and his brother — my older son who lives in Denver — cooked it up over the summer. A bunch of their friends were going.
"It will be fun, Mom. You and Dad should come," they said.
"I don’t think so. We’re old. We can’t hang with you guys," I told them.
I’m not quite sure how the rest of the conversation went, but the next thing I knew I was looking at the Las Vegas strip out of the airplane window as we landed.
It was 10:45 p.m., a mere hour and 15 minutes until my baby was an adult.
Where was my baby?
He had taken an earlier flight.
I called his cell phone.
"We’re at the Mirage. Come on down," he said.
I wonder where the Mirage is, I thought, as I dragged my bulging suitcase through the airport. We were only going to be there three days but I had heard the horror stories about how far you had to walk to get anywhere so just to be safe, I had packed virtually every pair of shoes I own.
We checked into our room at the MGM, which, of course, was at the opposite end of the strip from the Mirage and set off to find the party.
The phone rang. This time it was my older son.
"Where are you guys?" he asked. "Get a cab. It’s pretty far away."
I hung up.
"Mike said we should get a cab …"
"We’re not getting a cab. We can walk," my husband said. "We’ve been sitting on that plane for hours."
A little while later, the phone rang again.
"Where are you guys? Did you get a cab? I told you to get a cab," my older son said.
"Mike said we should get a cab," I told my husband again.
"We don’t need a cab. It’s right there," he said, pointing at the Mirage sign.
Here’s a little tip if you’ve never been to Las Vegas: Nothing is "right there." It’s an optical illusion. It’s a two-dimensional place. There is no depth of field. Your perception is always off. Near-far, day-night, rich-broke … you can’t tell anything apart.
Except maybe sober and drunk for when we finally got to the party, it was clear which one of those everyone was — especially the birthday boy.
He disappeared for a while and I found him sitting on a railing outside the casino. He told me he was sick and wanted to go lie down, so I got him a cab and told the driver to take him back to his hotel.
The next morning, we met the gang for breakfast — burgers and beer (add breakfast and dinner to that list of things you can’t tell apart in Vegas).
This was The Day, The Birthday.
We rode the roller coaster that zips and zooms around the outside of New York, New York. We went from bar to bar and casino to casino and, in between, we drank fruity drinks out of yard-long cups.
Every once in a while, the birthday boy would say, "I can’t believe you just stuck me in a cab last night. I couldn’t even walk."
I wanted to hop in that cab with him, really I did.
But I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure who I was putting in that cab — my baby or my all-grown-up son.
What a relief it was to find out they are one and the same.