Page 488 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Mature Father then do when his son very convincingly described his analysis and ended with, I might add, some trepidation, “I’ve decided to apply early to Brown”? What did I do?
Why, I spontaneously started to weep, that’s what.
Pretty convincing, no? And, as I assume you know, my unpremedi- tated sobbing had its effect. History will record that Danny made what he didn’t realize at the time was the inevitable decision and that, thank- fully, in May 1992, when Danny addressed his senior class at commencement, he didn’t mention one of his primary motivations for attending the “College on the Hill.” (It was a different type of crying that occurred on the corner of Broadway and West 61st in September of 1987, as Danny and I embraced, and I waved him aboard the M104 to go to GCT and Scarsdale, there to be driven by his mother to his new life in Western Massachusetts.)
There was real payback for my response to the Brown-Amherst conversation. I decided to go up to Amherst for Danny’s first Home- coming Weekend: to be with my college man, to see the Amherst-Williams game with him, and, to round the weekend out, to stay with him over- night in Stearns Dormitory. Pretty easy for me, an Amherst man, right? Wrong! The times, they had been a-changin’. In the fall term of 1975, Amherst had admitted seventy-five women (I still thought that they were girls, but don’t tell any of them that), and by the time Danny entered, almost half of the class of five hundred or so was female. And guess where many of them were housed. That’s right. Stearns was a coed dormitory, and not one with alternating floors of men and women. The mix was complete, and a guy my age (me) found the bathroom situation almost intolerable.
That was not the worst of it, however. At about 2:00 a.m., I awoke to the sound of the fire alarm that, I guessed, had been set off as a prank by Williams students. Likely prank or not, the dorm had to be emptied, and in short order. Danny must have handed me something resembling a robe, and I thereafter had the joy of standing outside of Stearns for about twenty minutes in a very chilled cluster of young men and women. I was forty-four years of age, and something tells me that if you were playing
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