I used to enjoy having the same breaks as my wife and kids but now we are on different schedules. Nonetheless, when Amy and the kids are on break, even though I still have to work, the pace of life and work changes. Yesterday, for instance, I only went in for some afternoon meetings and then my late afternoon class, and since the day was so nice, I actually walked to work. (It takes about 35 minutes from home to office). On the way home after teaching, I bumped into a student on his way to the dining hall. We walked and talked about class, his writing, the approaching end of the semester. On the verge of graduating, he just won a nice award.
Today I took the day off, sort of. Amy and I have a good friend from college who now lives and teaches in Paris. We hadn’t seen her in years before last summer, when we spent a terrific day walking around New Haven, where I grew up. As fate would have it, our friend has a beloved student who will be attending Yale this fall, and Amy also has a student who will be there. To make a long story short, this week was Bulldog Days at Yale, a sort of incoming freshman orientation, and Amy and I—with the kids in tow—headed to New Haven to meet Helene and Kevin (and their mothers), introduce them to each other, and spend the day touring the campus.
Both students were incredibly excited to start this next phase of their lives. At one point, Kevin and I were crossing Wall Street near the Beinecke Library when he pointed to a bench and said to me, “Just yesterday I sat on that bench to people watch, and some kid sat down at the next bench, broke out his violin, and just started playing.†Kevin was enthralled by this simple but beautiful experience.
Later, over coffee in Claire’s Cornucopia, Helene said to me that one of the main reasons she was excited to attend school in the United States was because she’d get to live on a campus where students congregate and socialize, and where everyone pursues at least two years of liberal arts courses. She pointed out that in France there are no campuses, and students make career-oriented decisions about education much sooner, so that you only see students studying the same thing as you, and you only see them for classes. There are no quads or dining halls where students toss Frisbees or where a pre-med student like Kevin can listen to a music major play his violin.
Both Kevin and Helene were drunk with the possibilities that lay before them, but Helene was perhaps even more so. Kevin was clear that he wanted to study neuro-science and ultimately go to med school. Helene, by contrast, had considered a pre-med major, but when I asked her what she was considering now, said, “I think I would like to double-major, perhaps something like math/philosophy [she said this as if it were a unified major] and literature.†When I asked what literature, she said, “Well, I could do French of course, or British or American, but I’d really like to learn Russian and be able to read Tolstoy in his own language.†Truly, her height of her dreams were only matched by the breadth of her ambitions. Not that she couldn’t do it. Her English was impeccable and colloquial. She said she learned it in school but also from watching every episode of Friends over and over again.
The other thing that was sweet to see was the reaction of Helene’s mother, who will be sending her only daughter to school thousands of miles and an ocean from home. Sophie was clearly delighted and contented to know that her daughter was happy and excited, that she was meeting people already, and that there were adults here who were good friends of her daughter’s favorite teacher, and that we could be available in some sort of unforeseen and unlikely emergency.
At the end of the afternoon, the two soon-to-be freshmen walked off together toward an orientation class of some sort. Kevin’s mom headed home. Amy and I and the kids walked Sophie up Chapel Street to the British Art Museum, where she wanted to buy things in the gift shop to bring home to her youngest, a seventeen-year-old boy. And then Amy and I met up with another former student of hers, about to finish his sophomore year. He’d just gotten out of the last English class of his first year. He walked us past the library, chatting about his plans for the summer, till it was time for him to head to the dining hall and us to head home.
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