I blinked; now the little girl’s college-bound
THEY CALL THIS a fair? There’s no cotton candy. No basketball toss. Just hundreds of prospective college kids, wandering booth to booth. College night is the only fair where parents supply the prizes.
“Over there, Dad,” says my daughter, pointing to a place to park.
“Where?”
“There,” she says.
Her demands of a school are fairly modest. She hopes to attend a college where she won’t run into too many guys like her father -- guys who make a joke out of everything. Guys who can’t walk by a ballgame on TV without stopping. Guys who always take too much bread at dinner.
“Honey, bad news,” I say.
“What?”
“Guys like me are everywhere,” I explain.
“Seriously?”
Right then, you can see a little of the life go out of her. Her eyes turn dusky and her perpetual solar smile collapses. I mean, she’s spotted other guys like me here and there. She thought she just grew up in a bad ZIP Code.
“We might be stuck here forever,” I warn as we get cornered in some parking garage cul-de-sac, unable to turn around.
While stuck, we see a young male driver clip the back corner of a minivan, then drive on without stopping. This is the kind of crazy punk my daughter will soon be surrounded by, day and night.
I yell at the driver to stop, then get a partial license plate. I vow to tackle him if we spot him at the college fair. I plan to point him out to the reps in the Harvard booth, which is probably right where he’s headed.
“I will detain him until the authorities arrive,” I tell the little girl.
“You do that, Dad,” she says.
Frankly, I don’t like these college fairs at all. Nearly 100 booths, full of college reps who want to whisk your kid away to some far-off place where the kids will don togas and drink the worst punch you could ever imagine. Believe me, college is no place for young people.
“Don’t ask silly questions, OK, Dad?” my daughter says as we walk toward the entrance to the college fair.
“Me?”
“Try to look engaged,” she says.
Engaged? I’m not even in love. But that’s a story for another day. I’ve never been very good when it comes to love. Posh wanted a big romantic marriage, 80 kids at least. I tapped out at four. Now she sits on the couch in her Sarah Palin reading glasses and wonders what might’ve been.
“Dad, over here,” says the little girl, leading me to the first booth, for some dump named Yale University.
Evidently, it’s a weak pool of schools. I look at the list of colleges in attendance and note that my alma mater isn’t even here.
“Where’d you go again, Dad?”
“The School of Rock.”
“Um, how many times are you going to use that joke?”
“Our school song was by Led Zeppelin,” I say.
That’s a father for you, full of quips and advice and lame-brain philosophies gleaned over four or five decades. I mean, who needs that? Is it any surprise that she’s shopping for another life?
In truth, she has been looking for the right college since the second grade. Someplace with great libraries and pep rallies and broom ball in the quad.
By senior year, her mind is still here, but her heart is in places like Ann Arbor or New Haven, off to tiny bunker/dorm rooms, probably made of cinder block. Bad mattresses. Worse flooring. No towels in the loo.
That’s her dream and she has studied hard to make it happen. To enhance her resume, she has joined every club you could imagine. I’m pretty sure she’s a Shriner.
Then there is The Essay. By gawd, the SAT essay, the worst tyranny we foist upon our stressed-out Little Einsteins. We’ve turned youth sports into Dickensian labor camps, and kids’ favorite toy -- the computer -- is a landfill of smut and semi-truths.
But that is nothing compared to what they face with The Essay. Imagine having to be profound, insightful and wry at age 17? I’m almost 100 and can’t pull it off. I cower at the thought of trying to craft a document with the gravitas of the Declaration of Independence. That’s what we ask of them at 17.
“We offer financial help to out-of-state students,” a rep from Michigan State is telling her.
In the end, I don’t expect much from her college. I just want her to find a place that loves her as much as we do. One that beams at her smile, or the way she plays a backhand, or turns every day into Christmas. Really, that’s all I want from her stuffy, overpriced college.
“Dad, over here,” she says, dragging me toward Cornell.
Sorry, Cornell. She’s out of your league.
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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.
