College Freshman as King of the Hill
/The Boston Herald
He came home for the weekend, the college freshman, carrying his dirty laundry stuffed into a garbage bag. (I've got a present for you, Mom!) the smile on his face so huge and relaxed that, "How's school?" and "How are you doing?" didn't need to be asked.
He was great. School was great. Life was great. He sauntered into the family room, sprawled on the couch and endured our eager and assorted questions.
"Did you miss me, Bro?”
"I missed you, Brain," he said to his little sister.
"When are you gonna invite me up to visit?" his other sister asked.
"Maybe next month," he said.
"What are your classes like? Is it hard? Do you like your teachers?”
He fielded questions with adult deference, pacifying instead of antagonizing as he might have just a few months earlier. He was a king home from the hunt and we were his court eager to listen to tales of his adventures, curious to know all about his new life that didn't include us.
His friends stopped by, other college freshmen home for the holiday, who in September went away tentatively, untried kites being let out slowly, held taut by worried mothers and fathers, soaring now, buoyed by a current that was self created, elevated by their own, new rising confidence.
They walked taller, these boys who looked more mature than their high school pictures. They spoke with authority and ease. They should have. They earned this right, having gone out and made friends and survived in a place all by themselves, most for the first time.
No mothers were there reminding, "Did you finish your homework? Have you had breakfast?" No fathers were demanding that the TV be shut off, that they put down the hockey stick and hit the books instead. Only their own young voices guided them.
Peter, just a boy when he left for Tucson, showed us pictures of his girlfriend. "She's beautiful," we said. "I know," he replied in a man's voice, in a tone no longer full of question marks.
Yes, he was doing well in school and yes, he was happy in his fraternity and no, he hardly missed home at all. Danny, Mike, Frank - they all said the same things, all comfortable in their expanded lives, in the realization that they can, and have made it alone.
I watched all weekend and listened not just to what was said but to how it was said. And I realized that for these new freshmen this was a moment of perfect happiness.
I wished I had a magic wand so I could have waved it over these boys so they could have kept the moment, always. For doubt and setbacks and ambivalence will rear their heads again.
But there will always be the memory of this one weekend when the high school boys they were met the men they will become for the first time.
