April 6, 2006
ThursdayÂ
Ron answered the phone Monday afternoon. “Oh, she’s away at school,” I heard him say, and “That’s okay,” and then he hung up.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Some guy from Stone Cold Creations.”
“What?”
“Stone Cold Creations, or something. He wanted Lynn.”
I picked up the handset and checked the call log. The Caller ID window said “Cold Stone Crea” and indicated a number in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“That’s Cold Stone Creamery,” I said. “She probably applied for a job.”
Lynn attends Millersville University, part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. It’s the same school I graduated from thirty-seven years ago. It’s just under an hour from where we live, and about ten minutes from Lancaster.
Millersville has become well-known as a first-rate regional public university science center. When college application time came around in 2003 and Lynn expressed an interest in MU and only MU, I tried to make it clear that her options were wide open, that we would do everything we could to make it possible for her to attend any school she wanted. “If Millersville was good enough for the best mother in the whole world, then it’s good enough for me,” she said. (I’ve probably mentioned this before. You can be assured I’ll mention it again.)
For the past two years Lynn has lived in a complex of four dormitories that was brand new and state-of-the-art back in the mid-sixties. Over the years the structures have undergone some changes, most notably going co-ed, with men and women alternating floors. They were renovated the summer before Lynn got there. At least the rooms were repainted and air-conditioning was installed. The hallway sides of the room doors are still pretty shabby, and the accommodations seem dingier and more cramped than I remember.
It’s the hope of most upperclassmen to get out of the dorms and into some off-campus place. By the end of her freshman year Lynn was tired of the noise and of walking through groups of individuals playing Nutball. (According to Everything2.com, Nutball is a sport that involves two male players, one at either end of a narrow space, such as a dorm hallway about fifteen or twenty feet long, who throw beanbags or hackysacks or some other spherical object at each other’s testicles. The goal is to make your opponent cry out in pain. I am not making this up. Do a Google search on “playing Nutball” if you want to see pictures of other people’s tuition dollars at work.)
Lynn and two of her friends have rented a town house a few blocks from the campus. They take possession in late May when the spring term ends, and they plan to stay there the rest of their time at Millersville.
“She did apply for a job there,” I told Ron. “It’s an ice cream place.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ron said. “Out in Colonial Commons beside the theaters.”
“Well,” I said, “the one Lynn’s applied to is in Lancaster, in the Park City Center.”
He frowned. Park City is forty-six miles from our house. “Won’t that be a long way to drive for a minimum-wage job?” he asked.
“Ron,” I said gently. “Lynn isn’t staying here this summer. Or the next summer either. Lynn doesn’t live here anymore.”
I’ve been telling this story all week as a funny story about a father’s cluelessness regarding his postadolescent daughter.
Three years ago I used Malvina Reynolds’s “Turn Around” as the theme for a piece about Lynn’s junior prom. “Where are you going, my little one, little one?” I asked, saying that I had restrained myself from getting all “fizzy” about the prom because I knew that it was the first in a 15-month chain of events that would lead to her really going out the door.
And tonight it hit me. She’s not going out the door. She’s gone.
And it’s not a funny story anymore.
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