Education – I Can See Kinda Clearly Now

On his show Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David often notices small, annoying things another person is doing and then can’t concentrate on anything else.

The same thing happened to me last week. I was waiting in line outside my local library to pick up an at-home Covid test kit and noticed the woman behind me kept inching closer to me. Everyone else was about six feet apart and many people were wearing masks. This woman was not wearing a mask or keeping any distance, and it was annoying me in a Larry David kind of way.

Each time I felt her behind me, I would turn around and glare and then move a little further away. She was gabbing on the phone (changing travel plans), and every time I moved away from her, she would step closer. I was wondering whether she was oblivious to my angry glances or if she just didn’t mind being disliked. Both, maybe?

My mental gymnastics on this issue were interrupted by a call from my son, who informed me that he was getting a tattoo in Washington, D.C. that afternoon.

We were three days away from traveling to the University of Michigan so he could begin his first semester, and I was desperately trying to avoid getting sick just before we left.

“Uh, that’s not a good idea,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Because you are going to be exposed to additional people.”

“Well, I have an appointment and I’m going. I want to do this before I go to Michigan …”

As he was emphasizing the importance of keeping his tattoo appointment, I pressed the little red button on the bottom of my phone screen.

Bloop!

End of conversation.

“Wow,” I thought to myself, “I guess I’m a little more stressed than I realized.”

When I got home, he let me know he didn’t appreciate being hung up on and asked if I was going to apologize.

My response: “What???”

Then I yelled myself hoarse. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of how I had canceled all kinds of plans and stayed in the #$%^ing house for ten days to make sure I was able to go to Michigan with him and he didn’t seem to give a #$%^ about avoiding Covid. At the end of my speech, I slammed the door to my office and sat down at my desk.

“Nice apology!” he yelled.

After briefly considering homicide, I took some deep breaths and decided to move on.

The lease on the apartment where my son lived for the last year ended a few days before Christmas, and he had moved home on the 22nd. His classes at Michigan would start the first week of January, so our plan was for him to drive with his dad and his things to Ann Arbor. I would be flying to Detroit that same day and meeting them there.

The two-part move during the holidays and the surge in the pandemic made for a tense ten days. We’ve had a lot of conflict over the last few years; that pattern was compounded by the strain of living together again – even briefly – and the nervous anticipation of the upcoming move.

Part of my stress was about fear that something might go wrong for him in this next grand adventure. When I saw this ceramic sign a few weeks before Christmas, it dawned on me that I was more worried than he was. I decided to buy it for him, but in truth it was really more of a reminder for myself that my glass-half-empty approach was not serving either of us.

Mercifully, we were all able to avoid getting sick, and last Sunday we traveled safely to Ann Arbor.

Even in freezing weather in early January, the campus was striking. Ann Arbor is a cool town, with lots of little shops and restaurants and things to do. As we walked around, I was pleased for him that he will have any number of places to explore over the next two-and-a-half years.

I was also so proud of him. If he had listened to me, he would’ve taken a gap year after high school to work and mature and then started college last fall. When I made that suggestion partway through his senior year, he asked, “What’s a gap year?” and then flatly rejected the idea.

Instead, he enrolled himself in the local community college, worked harder than he had ever worked before, and earned excellent grades. He researched four-year schools and decided where he wanted to apply, then worked with a friend of mine who does college planning to fine tune his applications.

After getting into Michigan, he lined up off-campus housing for himself – an independent unit in a large house with 11 other guys, where he will have his own kitchen, bathroom, and living area. As his dad and I helped him settle into the house, it became clear that it was a great place.

We had not spent this much time together since we were a family of three 17 years ago. As my ex-husband worked to fix a frozen pipe and I arranged things in the kitchen, it felt like the best parts of what we had been as a couple were on display. My ex-husband and I both wanted to be there to send our son off. It wasn’t discussed, but I sensed that all three of us were comforted by the time we had together as we quietly worked to set up the apartment.

After I got back to the hotel that night, I happened to hear Cat Stevens’ On the Road to Find Out, a song about a young man leaving his family to launch his life. I immediately felt a lump of emotion in my throat as the significance of the moment started to hit me.

The next morning my son and I spent a little time together before my flight home. As I was saying goodbye, I started to tear up. Not wanting to do that in front of him, I told him I loved him, gave him a hug, and left quickly.

I cried the whole way to the airport. I was grateful that I was alone in the rental car so I didn’t have to feel self-conscious or explain the groundswell of emotions to anyone. I wasn’t even sure I understood how I felt.

After all, my son moved out a year ago. He’s almost 20. He is at a great school in a vibrant town, and his housing situation seems perfect for this first semester. This is the right step for him. Plus, embarrassingly irritable middle-aged women and 19-year-old young men with ants in their pants do not make good roommates, so I was not questioning the wisdom of his leaving home.

But there is something primal about leaving your child in another part of the country and heading home on your own that drives home the point that a life stage is ending.

Parenthood is a humbling experience. We care about these little people, expending more time and energy and angst and hope and love than we knew we were capable of, and then eventually we have to stand back and let them make their own way in the world.

Linda Pastan’s beautiful poem captures the experience of these watershed moments when we watch our children wave goodbye.

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

The house where the boy now lives now with 11 others

The middle of campus. There is a superstition that stepping on the M leads to bad grades

Downtown Ann Arbor — a stone’s throw from Central Campus

One of the many places to get Michigan gear. I do love the colors and the football helmets

Last week I was in the Albany area in New York on my way to spend the evening at the home of a friend from college. I had arrived in town early and decided to walk around the campus where we went to school — Siena College in Loudonville.

My visit coincided with the start of a college search for my son, who is looking to transfer from our local community college to a four-year school in another city next spring.

As I walked around campus, so many good memories washed over me and I found myself thinking that wherever my son lands, I hope he finds what I found at Siena.

I was on the low end of the maturity scale at 17 when faced with the decision of where to go to college. More than a little apprehensive about leaving home, I actually announced to my parents that I might not go to college at all. Their response: I was more than welcome to take a year off and work … and then go to college. That did not sound appealing so I quickly rethought the idea.

As we began looking at colleges, my main goal was to find a place where I felt comfortable. I was looking for a small school within a few hours of home, with access to public transport so I could easily come home for long weekends. I looked at a handful of schools, getting a cold feeling at one college in Connecticut (no one even looked at us or said hello as we walked around campus), and a slightly warmer feeling from a couple of schools in Pennsylvania, but I didn’t like how difficult it would be to travel home without a car. I visited Siena and stayed over with a friend from my hometown who was a sophomore there. She and her friends could not have been nicer, and I finally felt I had found a school that was a good fit for me. I applied, was accepted, and decided to enroll.

Fortunately, I played field hockey and that made the transition from home to college infinitely easier. I had to report to campus a week before other freshmen for preseason practices. Though I struggled to introduce myself on the first morning of practice (I mumbled my name and hometown and was mortified when I was asked to speak up and repeat myself), the people on the team were very welcoming, and it didn’t take long before I felt that I was going to be ok.

That was the beginning of four happy years in Loudonville. What I had seen on my overnight stay as a high school senior was exactly what I found as a student. As a downstate New Yorker, I was amazed that it was the norm for people to make eye contact and say hello around campus — even when they didn’t know each other. Stunning!

Two young pups on the first day of freshman year

Because the school only had about 2,600 students, including commuters, and most people were friendly, it was easy to meet people and settle in. Life on campus was simple and manageable: classes during the weekdays, mostly in one building; meals in the one cafeteria on campus; and studying in the library at night.

On weekends, the social life mostly centered around parties in the dorms followed by trips down the hill to a cheerful establishment called Dappers. Fake IDs may or may not have been required.

It was in this environment that I not only had a ton of fun and learned a lot, but also built friendships that have lasted for more than three decades.

I know I am not the only person who went to a college, big or small, and came out with fond memories and lifelong friendships. I’m not exactly sure what it was about those four years that created such a bond, but Siena did feel special, and I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the time and place.

Not only did we not have Smartphones or the internet, most of us didn’t have cars or TVs, and we didn’t have phones in our rooms. We got to know each other so well in part because we interacted and connected for longer periods of time than many people do now. I usually called my parents on Sundays from one of the payphones in the hallway on my floor and occasionally wrote and received letters. Otherwise, there weren’t a lot of outside distractions. We lived in small cinder block dorm rooms and we figured out how to keep ourselves entertained.

As an aside, rooms seem especially small when your roommate tips over the dresser while curling her eyelashes and a bottle of Obsession perfume smashes all over the floor. But I digress.

Part of our entertainment involved music. We arranged the beds to accommodate my giant 1980s stereo system. We occasionally removed one of the windows so a speaker could face outward and play music for anyone below. (You’re welcome, everyone who lived on the quad from 1987-1989. I hope you enjoyed Sweet Home Alabama.)

Today I would be hard pressed to live with that many people in such a small space. Share a bathroom with 70 women? No thank you. But at the time, I felt I was living large, staying up as late as I wanted, cooking noodles in a hot pot at midnight, and looking for high jinks around the dorm. We were a bunch of Catholic kids away from our strict parents and there was a lot of fun to be had.

Some of the best times I had at Siena were playing sports, field hockey in the fall and lacrosse in the spring. In addition to the games and practices, it was hard to beat driving around upstate New York in a van on the way to games at other schools scream-singing Build Me Up Buttercup, Sweet Caroline, and other classics. I still miss being on a team.

I wore number 56 in honor of Lawrence Taylor, my favorite linebacker

There were other parts of my four years that enriched my experience. I spent the spring semester of my junior year in Spain, and though I was insufferable when I came back for senior year, thinking I was sooooo worldly after having lived in EUROPE, it was an incredibly interesting experience that helped me grow up and expand my point of view.

I also had an on-campus internship during my senior year with the sports information department that involved writing articles for the basketball program, compiling statistics, and working in the office. One of my most profound takeaways at the time was a fascination with this newfangled thing called a fax machine, but it turned out to be valuable preparation for the work world and led to a job immediately following graduation with an Albany-area branch of GE.

The friendships I developed are what I appreciate most from my time at Siena. There were so many great people, and though I have lost touch with many of them, I still smile when I remember things we did. I’ve maintained close contact with most of my roommates and a few others. I had the good fortune of meeting a bunch of Chatty Cathies who were fun, smart, and loyal. Over the last 35 years, we have seen each other through all of life’s events — weddings, births, new jobs, moves, divorces, illnesses, and deaths. I always know I have a crew behind me for whatever comes up.

Places change over the course of 30 years; there are new buildings on campus and other shifts in the landscape, but I was struck by how the place basically felt the same as I strolled around last week, even in late July when the campus was nearly empty. There still seemed to be a palpable sense of belonging that was so present while I was a student.

After I left campus last Monday I spent the evening with two close friends from Siena. We did what we always do — laughed really hard and told stories and gave each other lots of free advice. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, we pick up right where we left off and it’s as if no time has passed.

Picking a college can end up being a pivotal decision in a young person’s life, setting a course for where they’ll live, who they’ll marry, and friends who will stay with them for the long haul. Siena was the ideal school for me at that point in my life. My wish for my son is that he finds a place where he is enveloped into a community as I was, one that grounds him and provides him with a foundation that has a positive impact on his life.