Great Expectations
Warning: Hairpin turns, steep drop-offs, falling boulders, and unfamiliar perspectives up ahead.
Earlier this month I escorted our eighteen year old daughter, along with a tidy sum of ways and means, off to begin their freshman year of college. She’s our second child, and our youngest, too. It was a pensive occasion, if not for her, certainly for me. The two days drive gave us time to talk about the things that matter - good grades - while also having a few laughs about the things that don’t - the sum of all efforts required to achieve them.
The journey also gave me an opportunity (no audience was ever more captive) to deliver long awaited - by me, not her - speeches about the importance of knuckling down, staying clear headed, eating all her vegetables, and wielding extreme prejudice where young men are concerned. This, I deadpanned, would best be achieved by simply avoiding the college boys and their frat-boy ways, lock, stock, and barrel. At this last suggestion she cast a waxy eye-roll that only served to embolden me to delve into the reasons why.
The distance alone, just over thirteen hundred miles according to her odometer, made this pilgrimage more somber than the last when we transported her older sister, now a senior in college, off to a different but equally overpriced institution of higher education. Hers was only four hours south, in Virginia. In the first two years or so of her college experience nearly all of the classes she was enrolled in were, thanks to COVID, virtual. Which were ostensibility just as valuable as in-person classes because we never received - and we looked, trust me - any discounts whatsoever for coursework perfunctorily phoned in by professors all too eager to sit at home exulting in dusty sweatsuits and unbarbered hair.
Keep in mind, this fledgling class of incoming college freshman carry the distinction of being the class of COVID-19-PTSD-2023. They spent the bulk of their high school years either wearing a mask, or suffering through some form of dim and distant “learning,” all while having their most formative of high school years highjacked and canceled by well intentioned politicians and community “leaders.” Sports, proms, homecomings, plays, concerts, and graduations were mostly ixnayed for two, and in some cases three, years, out of a super-abundance of COVID risk avoidance.
Holed-up in their bedrooms wearing the same pajamas a week or more at a time, not showering, and obsessively watching TikTok videos (COVID was to TikTok what WWII was to American Industry) these kids didn’t know which way was up. Neurotic adults - parents, grandparents, teachers - dreadfully afraid of getting COVID besieged them on all sides, informing them they couldn’t hang out with their friends. They couldn’t go to school. They couldn’t go outside. They couldn’t be kids.
Meanwhile, they didn’t know what all the fuss was about since they and their friends felt just fine. They wen’t getting sick. They were just weary, or worse, of their parents and the lack of social intercourse - itself a punitive action. That they atrophied and languished during those three years isn’t really the question - they did. The question is, to what extent did this unprecedented event affect their long-term mental health and social development? The jury’s out.
I realize that anyone blasphemous enough to criticize the handling of COVID matters in this way is often unfairly labeled any number of pejoratives to include Trumper, Anti-vaxer, Flat-earther, Conspiracy-nut, or just plain Murderer. And so, for the record, and for those of you who like to put people in boxes because it’s neat and easy, and doesn’t require nuanced thinking, I’m none of these. I’m many things, just none of the things listed here. Nonetheless, I’ll type it out loud; Closing schools was a colossal mistake with implications we have yet to fully understand. And with that said, I’ll move on.
Now then, to grease the wheels of our lengthly drive to this beacon of higher learning we opted for the abracadabra of Apple CarPlay, together with Waze, as our chief source of navigation. Like so many other modern day utilitarian apps - Duolingo, PhotoMath, AllTrails, Tinder - Waze has proven to be of considerable benefit for everyone and anyone - in this case, those looking to go halfway across a continent.
Waze, perhaps the most useful tool ever developed for traveling the highways and byways since the invention of the wheel (I’m deliberately omitting the internal combustion engine in this value judgment to avoid hate-mail from the greenies) is owned and operated by the omnipotent and omnipresent Google, a.k.a Alphabet, a.k.a, hi-tech juggernaut that insatiably devours your privacy.
From my soapbox I pointed out to her just how fortunate she was to have this and other gee-whizz technologies at her fingertips, and how we Boomers had nothing more than coffee stained paper maps to navigate from, which, nowadays are instead being repurposed as a form of zeitgeisty wall art (minus the coffee stains), and being sold for an arm and a leg and sometimes more.
In between fatherly speeches about what and what not to do as a college student, I entertained her with stories of how, back in the day, gas was only 25 cents a gallon and how seatbelts were thought to be extraneous. I told her how automobile air-conditioning wasn’t a thing when I was a kid, and how in-car radios were all Lo-Fi, AM/FM, crap. I further explained that “road rage” was a term once used to describe drivers who excoriated their front-seat passengers - often conscripted navigators - for failing to give immediate and confident directions as to which exit to exit, which way to veer, and which road to take - Straight ahead or get off here?!?! Left or right?!?! This exit?!?! She had no idea the front seat passenger experience could be so exacting.
Our two days drive also gave me time to prepare for the near at hand heart-wrenching goodbye that parents experience during times like these. The one in which both parties, ambivalent parent and wannabe college student, are each keen for and yet angsting about the unfamiliar order of things going forward.
Still, like most parents, we’re hopeful the college experience goads her preconceived notions and challenges her assumptions. We trust she’ll hear contrasting points of view from well-grounded liberals and clear-headed conservatives. The university, we’re hopeful, will invite speakers thought to be controversial because they espouse provocative yet intelligent points of view. This is what colleges and universities are supposed to do for your kids - expose them to the discerning heretical voices of this world, those with deeper registers, and those who will put forward new ideas and challenge previous apprenticeships.
Beyond learning how to gulp down Jello shooters from the belly-buttons of coeds, or perfecting their Beer Pong shenanigans, parents universally believe their college student, regardless of academic discipline, would benefit from an understanding of topics like Adam Smith’s, Invisible Hand, and John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money.
Colleges and universities should be indoctrinating our kids in Masterclass level critical thinking, which remains the only scaffolding upon which any sound decision or great idea can be build. Our children would benefit from knowing who Locke was, that Medieval times is much more than a hammy jousting match and dreadful meal. They should know that Frankenstein isn’t so much a halloween character as a beautifully written tragedy, and that The Odyssey isn’t just a minivan, but part of an epic story.
And what of basic civics knowledge? If our democracy ever fails it’ll surely be because public schools dispensed with teaching, and young people couldn’t be bothered to learn, anything whatsoever about it. According to Forbes, the average price of tuition has increased eight times faster than wages since the 1980s. Yet sadly, we appear to have little to show for it. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the rise in the cost of tuition and the knowledge college students have taken possession of. One need only walk onto any college or university campus and ask any cross section of students a few basic civic questions to understand just how little these students and their parents are getting for their overpriced education dollars.
Nevertheless, after thirteen hundred miles of Spotify playlists, twenty hours of laughing, spirited banter and some quiet sadness, one night in a hotel, a few brilliant speeches by me - which she amicably endured - along with numerous anecdotes about yesteryear and yesterher, we had finally arrived at our destination. The university made quick work of moving her into the dorm room where I kept busy, helping best I could, doing whatever small task I was assigned.
Eventually though, it was time for me to take leave - she had an education to pursue after all. And so, just as it was with our oldest, the hugs and tears and see-you-laters came next. Difficult. She dropped me off at my hotel where there was more bawling. Mostly mine. More difficult. The ride to the airport the next day was as agonizing as anything I’ve ever done - I’ll never forget it.
Moments like these are generally more acute for parents, given the time we spend envisioning the thousand-and-one ways in which this or that thing might go sideways, or end disastrously, rather then conjuring up expectant vignettes about what might go well, or end pleasantly.
And in this way parents can seem pessimistic. Anxious even. We don’t mean to. Though we want good things to happen, of course, we nevertheless fear bad things might happen, and so worry ourselves into a breathless sense of foreboding about events that are not only beyond our control, but also unlikely to ever happen. Such are the millstones parents carry until kingdom come.
Meanwhile, back home, our house feels empty. It’s too calm. Too quiet. And a noticeable feeling of sadness, and loss, hang in the air.