Page 15 - WTP Vol. IX #5

few small ones near the ceiling, and I can see how it would take on a dungeon-like atmosphere, how any visitor would be a surprise, someone you would pull back from, squint at, rescuer or executioner. But he recovers from this momentary alarm, and a pleasant conversation ensues. Students can combine philoso- phy with other disciplines, he explains. They can cre- ate their own majors. Which seems promising, this openness, but it’s frustrating to my daughter, who is searching for something hard and fixed, a fact that will give her a reason to say yes or no to this place.
Eventually the conversation lags, and she looks down
“She wants something distant, different,
wants an adventure, but adventures are scary.”
at the legal pad on her lap, scanning her list of ques- tions.
“Why should I choose Vanderbilt over the University of Iowa?” she says.
The professor leans into his chair arm and stares at the ceiling for some time. Then he comes back, squinting as if he’s about to reveal something pro- found.
“It’s not as flat here,” he says. “And we don’t have snow. Not much, anyway.”
Iowa is not flat, I think, and you do have snow, in the form of dogwood blossoms. But I don’t say this because it would sound strange, and I like the guy.
I agree with his tacit assertion, that the choice between Iowa and Vanderbilt may just as well be about topography and climate as anything else. But my daughter frowns, looks down at her notebook, searching again for the question that will make everything clear, the one that will reveal the truth about what school she should attend and what major she should pursue and what, exactly, she should do with her life. She never arrives at this clarity, even later as we are driving home, flying north on In- terstate 57. Months of searching and applying and deliberating and she still can’t decide.
“What if Vanderbilt were just two hours from home?” I ask. “Then what?”
“Then I’d want to go there.”
“So it’s the distance.”
“Yeah, I guess. But—”
She looks out the window at a jagged limestone wall, a hill sliced open to allow passage of the interstate.
“I dunno. If it were close, it would be less like itself. Less exotic.”
And this is the paradox at the heart of her delibera- tions. She wants something distant, different, wants an adventure, but adventures are scary. And there’s an added pressure, an idea her generation has bought into, that choosing the right college leads to success and happiness, and choosing the wrong one brings about years of misery, as if the trajectory of your life is determined by this one choice.
“You’d do well at either place,” I say. “Go with your gut.”
She nods but reinserts her earbuds, unconvinced. Which is fine. The decision is hers. My job is to offer advice and fake peppiness, as if I’m excited for her.
I am excited, but at the same time I don’t want her to leave. Even Iowa City is too far. And this is the paradox at the center of my experience. I must help her do this thing I dread, this severing. I try not to think about what it will be like after she departs, but at times I get a sensation of sinking through water that is at first light green, then blue, then black. I wake in the middle of the night to a suffocating pressure on my chest, the reality: she will be gone in a few months.
~
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