Sarah has the tough outer shell of the oldest child (the one on whom you make the highest percentage of your parental mistakes) and the inner caution of someone buffeted by the rotor backwash from the helicopter hovering overhead. My daughter didn’t want to apply to Stanford.
That’s not exactly true. She didn’t want to be rejected by Stanford.
“Well,” I said, “there’s only one way to guarantee that you don’t get in. Don’t apply.”
She applied for the Class of 2014, and she got in. Revealing the maternal instinct, as well as our settledness on the East Coast, Meg said, “It’s too far away.”
“It’s too far away,” my mother said in 1977. (She said this in Alabama, little realizing that the geographical gap, considerable though it was, never gaped as wide as the cultural one.)
Of all the wisdom I ever heard my father utter, this ranks near the top. He looked at my mother and said, “If it’s too far to drive, what do you care how long he’s on the plane?”
I escorted Sarah to Admit Weekend last April. She would have been fine by herself, but Meg wouldn’t hear of it. “One of us,” Meg said in her best Mama Grizzly voice, “is going.”
Sarah stood behind her, mouthing to me, “Not her.”
“I’ll go,” I said happily.
I blew off the most important parental meeting of Admit Weekend to stand in front of the alumni center for 90 minutes and talk to one of my dearest Stanford friends. Funny how you return to campus and revert to old habits.
But that was the reason I wanted to go, to see if any of my friends were there with their kids. No one tells you the protocol. Is it bragging to tell your Stanford friends that your kid got in? What if their kid didn’t? I emailed a couple of my closest friends. I called some, looking for second-hand information about others. I didn’t want to make any parent feel uncomfortable, especially me.
“Where is your daughter going to school?” people asked.
“Stanford,” I would say, my tone even. No matter—the awe would descend over their countenances like motorized window treatments. Their eyes would glaze. They would congratulate me. To which I would think, “Hey, I couldn’t get in now.”
During the months between acceptance and orientation, I tried to let Sarah contemplate Farm life on her own. I acted the way parents who respect their child’s privacy act. I waited until she left the house before I read the material Stanford sent her.
But when she received her dorm assignment in August, eight months of pent-up parental helpfulness spewed forth. “Dad,” she said, her voice hesitant because she didn’t know whether the news was good or bad. “I’m in Trancos.”
She pronounced it as if she were speaking Spanish: TRAHN-cos. Not only did I correct her, saying it with the flat a, as God and Wallace Sterling intended, I added just one word:
“OhgreatdormIwasinWilburHalltooandyouknowAlanhewasinTrancosit’scloseby
everythingyou’llloveit.”
Did her eyebrows raise ever so slightly? I pledged, at age 50, that I would begin to think before I spoke.
The last two weeks of summer blossomed into a wonderful interlude. Sarah’s friends left for their schools. Her summer job ended. Sarah hung around . . . with us! Thank you, quarter system.
While Sarah was navigating the shoals of high school, Meg and I regularly reminded her that all she had to do was endure it. Of all the boys and girls in her life, only one or two would remain there into adulthood. The rest would fade, resurfacing only when she went to a reunion and couldn’t remember their names.
But as her provisions for the trip west accumulated, I realized that the world Sarah was leaving behind included us, our rotors beating against the air. She is selecting the cast who will star in the rest of her life. They will be names in conversations and texts, names without faces, personalities that we try to keep straight in our heads from 2,500 miles away. As her world expands, it expands away from us.
That’s when I found Stanford as a source of solace yet again. Alma mater, I am reminded, is Latin for nourishing mother.
IVAN MAISEL, '81, is a senior writer for ESPN.com
