Early Glimpses of the Empty Nest

by John Ettorre

A few years ago, when our oldest son was still of middle-school age, we signed him up for a weeklong basketball camp a couple of hours away from home. As we drove away after dropping him off with his friends, I felt a lump forming in my throat. Imagine what it will be like when it comes time for college, I thought.

The whole experience gave me a shiver, but I quickly forgot about it when we dove back into the busy routine of family life.

This summer, though, I got another glimpse, that next stage of preparing for the empty nest: the first college visits. On the way to a vacation on the east coast, we took our high school junior and sophomore sons on their first college tour, a swing through a half-dozen schools, just to give them an idea of what it all looked like.

When you mention to friends and family that you’ve taken a college tour with your kids, people tend to ask about what your teenagers are leaning toward, what their preferences for college might be. Do they want a city school or one in the suburbs? A big state university or a smaller private college? Do they want to go far from home, or are they thinking about staying closer? My stock reply: they’re not thinking about anything having to do with college just now. It’s actually their parents who are thinking about it constantly (driven largely by the prospect of those outlandish prices).

Since I had worked at a college for a time, I knew the drill. The Admissions Office tries to lure you to campus, where you’ll be sure to read the lavishly produced "view books," glossy visual celebrations of the campus. Then you take a tour with a student who is supposed to serve as both a soothing reminder to parents that sullen high school kids transform into promising young adults at this institution, and as an example of Joe or Jane College to your kid.

This is no easy thing to pull off, since while the generations are nominally in the same family, they’re also inhabitants of different planets.

I thought one school pulled it off best. The upperclassmen boy and girl who led the tour had a practiced banter that was half serious and half in jest. Their timing reminded me of actors on a well-oiled TV sitcom, but they also served up plenty of good information.

That pair probably didn’t impress my sons in quite the same way. I’m guessing they preferred the glassy-eyed cutie at another school (which my sons will attend only if I die first) whose shirt was too short to cover her belly and who had one too many body piercings for my taste. She seemed to know remarkably little about her own school, I thought—she had this annoying tendency to gesture to important landmarks like the library with a bored wave of the hand—but my boys didn’t seem to mind.

When you see one school after another and experience their sales pitches in rapid sequence, you can’t miss the spiraling arms race nature of the competition. Unfortunately it isn’t so much centered on who has the best library or the most experienced faculty. Instead, the schools accentuate their snack bars and cafeterias, with a dazzling array of cuisines that surely didn’t remind me of my own college cafeteria line, with its old women in fishnetted hair, spooning out canned ravioli with a wan smile. And the workout facilities, the equal of anything you’d find in a high-end Manhattan fitness club, are a key selling point these days.

My wife couldn’t get over how one school referred to an optional maid service in the dorm rooms. That might be considered a plus for some yuppie families, but it was an instant turnoff for us. We’ll be damned if we’re going to send our sons to college at a place where there’s maid service after we spent their formative years constantly reminding them that their parents—well, okay, their mom—isn’t their maid.

Mostly, I’m just trying to prepare myself for the day when we drop my two boys off at college. I’ve had a few years to steel myself against the emotional body blow, but I’m guessing that won’t be enough.

My friend Leo, a homegrown philosopher on many subjects, but an absolute whiz when it comes to assessing the relative strengths of men and women, has a theory about all of this. He often observes that, contrary to outward appearances, women are really the strong ones emotionally, while men are the cream puffs. He thinks that goes double when it comes to anything concerning the family.

I think he’s on to something. I know I’ll be bringing along a big box of Kleenexes for that fateful first college moving trip that’s now less than two years off. Sorry, honey, but I’ll probably need more than my half.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has also worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. His online weblog, Working With Words, can be found at www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.