Chapter Ten, The Mother Son College Odyssey

Friday night....Eli and I are holed up at Diane and Paula’s house is Melrose, a suburb of Boston. Diane and I were friends as babies and went to Sunday school together in first grade. It's a great bonus of this trip to see old friends along the way. Diane and I just made a stir-fry with brown rice. I’m SO happy to eat some real, simple, home-cooked food instead of another meal in a restaurant.  It’s 8 PM and I’m already in my flannel PJs with my teeth brushed.

Today Eli and I both slept in-me, till 9:30 and he, until 11:00. We started the day relaxed, but then got lost trying to find Brown. Apparently there are two different places in Providence that share the address 45 Prospect Street. We picked the wrong one. I got a little testy with Eli, and he did with me, for the first time this trip, once we realized we were lost. Once we reprogrammed the GPS, and got going in the right direction, the tension dissolved.

The only other time Eli snapped at me was one day when I didn't feed him fast enough. Some things never change.

We had lunch in a little falafel joint on Thayer Street that our friend Nona recommended. She got her PhD at Brown a decade ago and she gave us great advice. I had four of the best falafel balls I’ve ever had and a terrific serving of smoky baba ganoush. Eli had some kind of wrapped steak sandwich. I paid $6 bucks to park in the only guest parking lot on the Brown campus, we walked over to Admissions to get a map and headed over, with a thousand other people (I kid you not) to a big hall for the Admissions lecture. Eli’s first reaction: “I don’t like this place. There’s no campus.”

Chapter Nine, The Mother Son College Odyssey

8:45 AM: It’s morning in Connecticut. Eli’s taking a very long shower to wake himself up. While he's been in the shower, I checked all my email and got caught up on Facebook.

Eli’s sitting in on a class this morning at Wesleyan called “Inside Nazi Germany: 1933-1945.” He chose it in lieu of some techy or mathematical thing. “I don’t just want to sit in on math classes,” he said. “I like history, too.”

His leaning so far is definitely a school with a strong math and science department in a liberal arts setting.

I’m happy we’re just going to one school today. We spend the whole day here and then drive to Providence tonight. Brown isn’t in session; they’re on spring break, so Eli can’t sit in on classes there and the info session isn’t until 2 PM tomorrow. All Friday morning to loll about and relax. We sure need that!

Chapter Eight, The Mother-Son College Odyssey

8:15 AM: I’m sitting in a common room at Swarthmore. It’s early. No one is around. Eli is sitting in on a calculus class—his first experience of a college class aside from our local community college, Cabrillo. The admissions tour isn’t for an hour and a half. Right now, everything is locked up tight.

On the morning news on the way over, we heard about possible flooding in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the aftermath of yesterday’s storm. The National Guard is on standby. Sandbags are being stockpiled. We may be in for more of an adventure than we thought.

I’m sitting alone in a carpeted lounge on a comfortable, tasteful couch. There’s a baby grand piano in the corner and oil paintings of past Swarthmore presidents on the walls. Tall wood-framed windows line the walls. I’ve only been here 20 minutes and everything about the place screams “money.” This is obviously a very well endowed place. I think of the budget cuts destroying the UC system back home and find myself in a kind of culture shock.

Chapter Seven, The Mother-Son College Odyssey

Today was a freezing, rainy downpour of a day in New York. Eli and I got up, packed, dropped our suitcases off in the storage room of the hotel and then hiked over to 50^th Street to take the #1 train up to Columbia. We had one umbrella between us, not a very big one at that. Eli was wearing sneakers; I was wearing ugs. I had a wool coat and he had a “water resistant” jacket that didn’t bear up so well in the rain.

On the way to the 116^th subway stop, dedicated to Columbia, I said to Eli, “I’m so glad we did this together. I had so much fun in New York.”

“I did, too,” he said. "This was the most fun I've had in all of high school so far."

“I really enjoyed it, too. Thanks for letting me come along.”

We were both holding onto to the same pole, practicing our subway surfing. “Well, you didn’t embarrass me too badly.”

“Did I embarrass you at all?”

“No.”

Mark one up for me!