On Parenting & Taking a Child to College

Having never been a parent before, there were quite a few surprises in the early years of raising three boys. Removing an overflowing diaper and a poop-smeared onesy was a doozy. There were a few times I decided to cut the onesy off with a scissor and peel it off because I knew, from prior experience, my son could wind up with mustard colored crap all up his back and in his hair. How needy kids could be in a restaurant was another rather interesting surprise. We learned about the child’s penchant to want to do, or say, the same thing over and over and over again. My God! Luckily my kids never got stuck on one book, which apparently happens fairly often. They did however have their routines. Heading North on Interstate 87 for our annual Adirondacks Vacation, we would always stop at the same Wendy’s just north of Albany in Clifton Park. We always, if it’s open, stop at Donnelly’s Ice Cream, just northwest of Saranac Lake on County Road 86. And once we got to the house, EVERY day, EVERY day, the boys would want to pile into the row boat or a flotilla of kayaks and canoes, and paddle to the dam.

The dam was ¾ of a mile away, and there really wasn’t much to it, if you were an adult. If you were a 3 or 4 year old boy, the concrete structure, the water rushing over the top and crashing on the rocks and sticks 15 feet below, was impressive. It was my idea to go to the dam, the first time. Then it was the boys’ idea to go to the dam the next two hundred and eleven times. We would row over, paddling around Nick’s Island, (my boys took to naming the islands around the house after themselves) tie the boats up, climb onto the clean-lined concrete structure, throw sticks into the water to watch them float down the waterfall, to go careening down amidst the spray and onto wet rocks below. The first few trips to the dam, Kira and I would hover over our boys, hanging onto a collar or hand to make sure they didn’t go the same route as the sticks. But as they got older, we relaxed. Over the years, I started to wonder, with each trip to the dam, do my boys not desire novelty? Why don’t they want to do something NEW? As I rub my eyes, exasperated with the next day’s request, my inner voice is screaming, “Jesus Christ, another trip to the dam?” Now of course I smile and would give anything to go back there and take one more trip to the dam with those little boys.

When the boys were all under 6 years old, we started going on an annual camping trip with our friends, The Boyles. The first trip was such a hoot, it became an annual trip to Hickory Run State Park in the Pocono “Mountains” of Pennsylvania. One of the highlights of raising our boys, these annual camping trips, when the boys were in their single digits to early teens, out in the fresh air, roaming the campground, discovering streams and making little wooden rafts, seemingly away from the watchful eyes of their parents, was worth the effort. Like our Adirondacks trips, the camping trip had its patterns and traditions. Every year we’d book the entire cul-de-sac so that there were no other campers near us. Elaine Boyle had found a secluded area, shaped like a fish hook that held only 6 campsites. The spot was far from the teeming citronella and Marlboro-infused masses.

Our meals were convenient, tasty, and we had plenty of good beer. Often we’d bring chili, stew, something that could just be put on the campfire, and of course the staples, hot dogs, hamburgers and steak. After dinner, we’d sit around the fire and play games and talk. Every camping trip, that first Saturday afternoon, we’d convoy the cars over to the Boulder Field, this cool geological anomaly, “placed” there by a massive glacier, some 12,000 years ago. Does it seem like everything is caused by glaciers or is it just me?  We would hike, hopping boulder to boulder, under a relentless July sun, a half mile across the Boulder Field and back. The kids always finished faster than the adults, they’re more nimble and not worried about turning an ankle or breaking a leg.

After the Boulder Field, we’d rest, hydrate, and drive the snake of family roadsters to another trail head. We’d hike in about a mile to a very cold pool of water that you could swim in, for about 4 seconds. The selling feature of the swimming hole was not the swimming but the cliff diving, as there were multiple areas in this ravine where you could jump into the ancient Appalachian pool. Our boys started on the smaller 7 foot cliff, and aspired to jump off the higher ones. The pool was a natural amphitheater, and people from all around would come to jump off the various cliffs. There were always some locals who were really good and fearless and could do all manner of tricks, flipping, somersaulting, twisting, and landing, whoosh, in the pool. If these guys put a hat out like the breakdancers in the city in the 80’s and 90’s, they would have made a fortune. Every year after watching the show, and jumping off successively higher cliffs, the boys would swear, “Next year I’m jumping off the highest cliff.”

By the fifth or sixth year, my desire for novelty was beginning to surface.  The trip was always fun but the Bill Murray/Groundhog Day thing was driving me out of my freaking mind. Driving to the Boulder Field again, jumping from boulder to boulder in the hot sun, I’m thinking, Is this the fifth or sixth year we’ve done this? Next year we need to do something new. Let’s go to Acadia National Park in Maine? Then we go to the waterfall, again. And we’re traipsing down the trail and I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, aren’t our kids getting bored doing the same thing every summer?

That night, our final night at Hickory Run, we’re relaxing around the camp fire, and I broach the subject, “Next year we should try something new. Let’s go to Acadia National Park up in Maine.”  Lisa Quilty says, “Yeh, that might be fun. Let’s find some new adventures.”  And then the kids, looking as if I suggested putting down our perfectly healthy dog, chime in. Nick, in an adolescent’s sing-song voice, “We HAVE to come back to Hickory Run. I mean, we ALWAYS go to the Boulder Field.” 

Brian his echo, “Yeh, we do this every summer. We have to hike to the waterfall and jump off the cliffs.”

Declan, “We HAVE to come back to Hickory Run to check on our camping spot and check for our initials in the tree, and hike to our stream, and float things over the waterfall.” 

So I surmised that a new camping spot was a bad idea…

Sadly, the tradition of our Hickory Run Camping trip came to an end, not because the kids got bored but because our beloved friend Elaine Boyle, the driving force behind so much, but especially of our camping trip, passed away suddenly a few years ago.

Fast forward a few years….The Spinner family had a blast during Nick’s college search. We made adventures of each campus visit. We started at University of Rhode Island during early summer, and we hit New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware, Penn State… over the next few months. We started with a, “One Day’s Drive Rule.” Because there are so many great schools around here, the rule was, we had to be able to drive it in one day. Well Nick was pretty much settled on a big school and was fairly excited about some, Delaware, New Hampshire seemed like nice options to him but he wasn’t gaga over any of them. So when he got into Michigan State and Indiana, he asked, “Dad, I guess I could see myself going to Delaware, or New Hampshire, but I’m not feeling it just yet. I got into Michigan State and Indiana. You said if I got in, we could go visit them. So?”

Nick and I plan a three day trip to Michigan State in East Lansing, then we’ll cruise over to Indiana University in Bloomington, before heading home. Early on day two we are pulling off the highway in East Lansing, I’m getting really excited for Nick but also for me. Hey, I’ve never been to Michigan State either, a place I had only heard about on TV and in college football/basketball lore!

As you are heading into the Midwest, an interesting thing happens to the radio. Right around western Pennsylvania, Jesus and Blake Shelton take over the dial.  Every time I hit the scan, we heard twangin’ songs about beer and trucks and a whole lot of Jesus talk. So I told Nick to hook up the Iphone to the car radio. I was expecting a Rap vs. Rock battle but Nick says, “You can choose Dad, I actually like some of your music.” I decide this should be a teaching moment, to expose him to more cool music. Based on the fact that he likes Tom Petty, and The Beatles, and that the rolling plains of the Midwest are whizzing past I say, “Pull up some John Mellencamp, I bet you’ll like him.” So we hear “Pink Houses” and “Small Town.” As we’re pulling into East Lansing, you can start to see some of the campus buildings, I hear the beginnings of a song called, “Key West Intermezzo.” That probably doesn’t mean much to most of you, some of you will know it, especially by the chorus where Mellencamp says,

“I saw you first,

I’m the first one tonight.

I saw you first

Don’t that give me the right

To move around in your heart

Everyone was lookin’

But I saw you first”

This is one of those songs that tugs at my heartstrings. When Nick was a baby, I would play music and dance with him in our living room. There were a few tunes that would get him animated and this was one of them. Must have been the tempo, but for me, it was the words. It’s a romantic tune about Mellencamp and a girl but in the ways of music and meaning, I had made the song my own. For me, the song was connected to Nick’s birth.

As Nick’s due date neared, Kira and I had discussions about my role in the birthing process. There’s a bit of old-school in me so I said, “My father wasn’t in the delivery room when I was born. Christ, he was in a bar waiting for the phone call. And I turned out okay.” Kira was adamant, “I’m going to need you there. I want you there. This is your son too.”I parried with a few lame arguments and Kira was having none of it. When the time came I was there, and like so many things Kira has MADE me do, I loved it. Here’s where Mellencamp’s song comes in, Nick comes sliding into the world, they hold him up like so much blue fish, clean the schmutz off, and swaddle him in the hospital-issue blanket. Because they are working on Kira, they hand him to ME! I was the first one to hold him. So every time, over the course of our lives, when I hear, “I saw you first” it means so much to me. I was the first one to see him, to hold him. Doesn’t seem fair because Kira did all the hard work. So “Key West Intermezzo” comes on as we approach East Lansing and I flash back to those memories. And I am thinking about all of the times, as he was growing up that I would put that song on and dance with him. And now here we are, 18 years later, driving to visit Michigan State, looking at COLLEGES! Geez, it had to be THIS song?  I turn my face to the driver’s side window. I don’t want Nick to see me sad. This is a happy time! We’re excited! We’re going to see Sparty. Nick’s radar is pretty active, “Dad are you crying?”  I have to come clean. “Mmmm, Hmmm, pretty much. This is a song….”

Fast forward to the summer of 2017, our boys are now all teenagers. 2017 was the summer of, “Remember When.”  We couldn’t get around it, something was looming there all summer long. Departure date. August 15^th. We circled it on the calendar, the day we were to take our oldest boy, Nicholas, to Indiana University. By all counts: weather, family trips, tasty meals, fun times, it was a great summer. But August 15^th was there, a dark purple cloud in the sky, for all of us. Dark purple cloud is a bit extreme I suppose because we were also looking forward to August 15^th, excited for Nick’s, our family’s, next adventures. So, a purple cloud with a rainbow?

My boys are naturally nostalgic, it’s in their genes, so summer 2017 also became the summer of, “Remember when we used to do this…” Nick and his high school friends savored every minute together, every pool party at Rob’s or Mike Murg’s, every trip to the beach or to play hoops at Community House Park, was cherished with the knowledge that, next summer things will be different; they’ll be college boys. Some of the boys in Nick’s crew might be moving; leaving behind their high school days, and their hometown, which added a bit more urgency to their dwindling days together.  

Nick kept asking questions, “Dad, do you think I will keep in touch with my high school friends?”  He looked for my high school yearbook. “How do you lose touch with someone?”  As if it didn’t seem possible. Another interesting thing about parenthood is it makes you relive some of your childhood. I recalled, just like Nick, as I was graduating from Immaculate Heart of Mary, a school I had attended with the same neighborhood friends for 8 years, that I became nostalgic. May 1977, I was wondering the very same things Nick was wondering. I knew, because many of us were scattering around to high schools all around Brooklyn and Manhattan, that we might lose touch. So I found my mother’s yearbook and asked her about the young boys and girls who wrote all those endearing things in her yearbook. It was heart-wrenching to find out that my mother had no idea where many of those kids, in those black and white photos, were. It pained me to think that I might get to the point where I wouldn’t talk to Jimmy Quinlan, or Bobby Sullivan, or Chrissy Ryan, or Jean Ann Powers, or Carolyn Leaver…people I had seen every school day for 8 years. So I had to say, “Nick we do lose touch with people but the friendships that matter will endure.”

Then it’s early August, it’s a week and a half before Nick leaves for Bloomington and the preparations are making it very real. The thoughts are flying, and the memories keep surfacing. The boys are caught up in it too. Nick and Brian and Charlie and our neighbors, The Jorgensens, talking about, “Remember when we used to go hang out in the Secret Fort?”  “Remember when we used to play Manhunt and Kick-the-Can?”

Listening to these conversations was rewarding, powerful, to realize how much our boys loved their childhood in Middlebury. Brian said to us, “Dane and I were talking about what a great place this was to grow up in. About how we wouldn’t change a thing. That we had a great childhood.”  Music to my ears. To see my boys looking back so fondly, on all of these things we’ve done together…

Having a son go off to college makes you reflect, on the job you’ve done. Is he ready? Will he succeed? Christ, he loses his wallet and the car keys three times a week how will he handle a full slate of classes, doing his laundry, eating right, making good decisions….? You start to think about the Big Ideas about family. What is my role as a father? What is Kira's role as the mother? And the role of the family unit? I’m thinking about all of these special times from our lives, the things that the boys really appreciate, the stuff that they kept talking about that was so special to them, the annual camping trips and our Boulder Field hikes and Cliff Diving excursions, the picnic lunches in the secret fort, kick-the-can games…all of those simple things, the 211 trips to the dam in the Adirondacks...I realized then, that my boys were not allergic to novelty, they were just finding comfort in the traditions, in the predictability of our lives. And I thought, in this sometimes crazy world, maybe that’s one of the things kids really need.

We had a Graduation Dinner/Going Away Party with The Jorgensens; we have been raising our boys together, Joel and Carrie also have three boys. Nick and Peter are leaving the nest, Nick to Indiana and Peter to Iowa State.  Kira bought sparkling cider for the boys and adult libations for us. I knew I wanted to say something special to Nick and Peter as they are readying to leave. And the comments the boys were making all summer about “remember when we used to” made me realize what we have done for our boys, the role of the family. What our kids appreciate is the predictability of our love, they are thankful for the safety, warmth, and caring, that we have been providing. They didn’t have to worry about anything, not about food, or road side bombs, or the business cycle. We were very lucky, they were free to be boys, to fret about school work, the bus ride, sports team tryouts, to just hang out with friends and play. I remembered a quote from a Greek Philosopher that I thought would be perfect for a toast. So I found the quote, read it over and over and readied to say it on the Jorgensen’s deck after dinner, “I now know what we did as parents, and our job, with Peter and Nick is close to over. Raise your glasses. Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a firm place to stand, and I will move the world.’ Well boys, that is what we gave you, a firm place to stand, now it’s your turn to move the world…”