The check is in the mail

My son has made his college decision. The months of aptitude tests, application essays, and requests for references are over. All that is left is for him to show up. And for the tuition checks to be written. There's the rub.

I see television commercials that go something like this: parents and their young children are playing together on the beach and the father stops to tell the viewing audience that he is so glad they met with financial advisor XYZ before their first child was born and set up a college plan so that now they know everything is taken care of and all the money their children will need for college will be there when they need it. He then returns to dashing in and out of the waves with his children as the camera pans the shoreline.

Who knew that a single meeting and voice of intent could be so powerful? Of course, a healthy dose of planning is ideal. But I don't know a single family whose successful delivery of a son or daughter to college has been a straight shot from the prenatal financial advisor meeting to freshman orientation. Life has a way of disrupting our best laid plans.

In Living Prayer, Robert Benson writes, "Twenty-one days seems to be the maximum number of days that one's life can go smoothly. The average is more like four, but the limit is twenty-one, I think. It is hard to live more than twenty-one days without a car breaking down, a trip being canceled, a family member getting sick, a pet dying, a check bouncing, a tire going flat, a deadline being missed, or some other thing that scatters all of one's neatly arranged ducks."

The father and mother in the commercial can prudently invest a portion of their earnings every payday, but they can't insure against a stock market "adjustment," or a corporate reorganization (aka, job loss), or a disability, or a "call" to a less lucrative vocation, or a child who doesn't want to go to college, or a child whose scholarship earning potential makes the planning moot, or car repair bills that border on the ridiculous, or a divorce, or medical bills outside the scope of insurance, or any of the other kinks that life can deliver to a projected college fund balance.

Yet tuition checks get written. Enrollment forms get sent in. It's almost miraculous.

Remembrances of things past

It's the middle of April and the significance of this for a family that includes a high-school senior extends beyond tax deadlines. The greater significance is that there are only a few weeks left until National Decision Day, ie May 1, by which date seniors are supposed to decide which college they will attend (of those to which they've been accepted). This involves a flurry of activity–prolonged conversations between parents and students, students and students, parents and parents; reading and rereading of college view books and websites; deep analysis of financial bottom lines and savings balances; and cross-city or cross-country travel to have a first-hand look (or a second look) at the front-runner(s).

With a high-school senior in my house, we are in the throes of this final phase of the college decision process. For us it means all of the above in terms of activities. In fact, we just returned from a visit to a college, and a city, we'd never been to before. Both were impressive. I would have been happy to become a student again.

One thing I noticed as we were exploring, however, was that my husband and I often found ourselves saying to each other and to our son, "That building looks like [such and so building from our city]" or "Doesn't he look like [that guy from your high school]" or "Doesn't this restaurant remind you of [that restaurant on our last vacation]" or "Doesn't that smell remind you of [that time we visited ...]." And so on.

Why are we so eager to connect something new with something we are familiar with? Why is it so hard to just keep one's associative memory silent, one's mouth closed, and just take in a new experience as something fresh and unattached to a past?

Maybe the occasion of this weekend's travel made it particularly easy to fall into this pattern because although we may be preparing to launch an 18-year-old son to college, we certainly don't want to disassociate with all that has gone on before. We want to be reminded. We want him to be reminded, to be seeing links to his past as he moves into his future.

Hidden in the stacks

A few too many stacks of papers have been piling up in my office. My filing is way behind. To the rescue has come my niece, who has put in some hours over the last couple weeks making folder labels, alphabetizing, and filing. The stacks are going down and I can practically feel a fresh breeze coming through my office door. One of the benefits of getting caught up on filing is the discovery of interesting items that have been lurking, forgotten, in the stacks.

Consider this sampling of what I found:

–A print-out of a "Key Lime Pie" recipe from Brad Boydston's blog. I've not tried this recipe yet, but good key lime pie is perhaps my favorite dessert.

–A list of cold and cough  remedies. Here's one: 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper, 1/4 tsp powdered ginger, 1/4 tsp cloves, 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar, 1 tbsp honey (or to taste), 2 tbsp water. I've not tried this and offer a disclaimer to try at your own risk.

–A quote from Thomas Merton (from, Seeds of Contemplation): "The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet, interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility."

–A couple pages of ideas for journaling that I downloaded some time ago from Catherine deCuir's website. One of the ideas is to think back to times in your life that you wish you had written about at the time, but never did. It's not too late, encourages deCuir. Write about them now in your journal. She calls this a "Retroactive Journal". Another idea is what she refers to as a "Word Snapshot," for which she provides a printable form. "Print the form, seize the day," she writes. On the form is a list of prompts to write down what you are listening to, watching, wearing, learning, working on, etc, on any given day.

–A nutritional study conducted at Cornell University and published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry about the benefits of hot cocoa–which I think I'll get up and make right now. The study found that the antioxidants in hot cocoa are almost two times stronger than red wine, two to three times stronger than green tea, and four to five times stronger than black tea. Apparently, the key is in the heat. More antioxidants are released when the cocoa is hot than when it is cold.

–And finally–and I saved the best for last–an article entitled, "The Importance of a Well-Groomed Child" by Robert M. Sapolsky. The article begins, "It is a rare parent of a newborn who does not feel a panic built around the consequences that her or his actions now have. Developmental studies have indicated that the quality, quantity, and timing of infant stimulation can have long-lasting effects–and soon the anxious parent is convinced that one lullaby song off-key ensures that a child will not only one day be a sociopath, but will also never use dental floss." Every parent reading this can relate to the anxiety. This article confirms that such anxiety is well founded. In Science, Sapolsky writes about a study conducted by Liu and colleagues in which baby rats who were well licked and groomed by their mommy rats had life-long positive effect in their brain and nervous systems compared to the baby rats who were not well licked and groomed. In his concluding paragraph, Sapolsky writes, "Although the specifics of licking and grooming do not extend to humans, the broader point emphasizing the importance of early experience certainly does."

Here is my suggestion: If you have a child at home, run your fingers through his or her hair (ie, grooming), put your arm around him or her (a hug will be an adequate replacement for a lick), and then make some hot cocoa and sit down and drink it together. When your well-groomed and antioxidized child is tucked in bed, get out some paper and write about how pleasurable it was to boost the trajectory of your child's (and your) life.