Education While on Vacation, Sandy Came Home!

Last Friday my father and I drove to Franklin and Marshall college in Lancaster to pick up my son Sandy.  He had finished his three week Chemistry CTY-Johns Hopkins camp.  My father wanted to keep me company and be helpful just in case my car had some troubles during the two and a half hour drive there. 

“Your ninety year old dad can help change your flat tire?”  One of my friends jokingly asked me. 

“Hey, with my dad, I might get quicker help from the passersby! Unlike me, he won’t be shy hollering for help!”

We had an uneventful ride to F&M just as I had experienced alone three weeks ago with Sandy.  David had been en route in the air to Australia then, and he was on a flight back from Arizona on this day. 

My father still drives and is an extremely careful or “conservative” driver.  I don’t think he believes my “rule of thumb” in keeping my car about five miles, or sometimes about ten miles above the speed limit.  More than ten miles and you will get a traffic ticket, but at the speed limit?  Why spend more time on the road if you don’t have to? 

My father, on the other hand, tends to drive even slower than the speed limit!  I remember “diving” below the dashboard as a front seat passenger in my father’s car,when I was growing up in Ohio, whenever a car passed by and its driver would then pull right in front of our car, as if he wanted to teach my father a lesson.  I didn’t want to be seen as my father was driving slowly with his car in the left lane! 

Well, it turned out that every few minutes during our ride to Lancaster, my father was nagging at me.

“You are driving too fast! I learned from my Transportation class at Northwestern University that, at 50 mph, you have to keep 50 feet behind the car in the front!  You are not 50 feet behind!”

My father was at Northwestern University for these classes more than fifty years ago!

At some parts of our trip, I was driving nearly 75mph.  To keep my car 75 feet behind the car in front of me, I would never get to Lancaster!  Sandy will be in camp for another week, I told myself.

As my iPhone, being used as my GPS for the trip, rang twice, I could hear my father from the back seat, without me touching my phone:

“Why are people calling you?  You are driving!  Don’t answer the phone!  Keep your eyes on the road!  The police would tell you how cell phones are the number one cause of car accidents!”

As we were passing the exit leading to Harrisburg, I thought about the one month my father and I and our family had to stay in Indiantown gap, a military camp-turned- refugee camp in 1975.  That was our first stop in America after the one month on Guam Island.  I used to hang out from our barrack, where several families stayed in a two-level building, with my five siblings and “made-shift” friends, none of whom we still keep in touch with 38 years later.   I remember the friendly local people from Harrisburg who stood outside the camp’s surrounding fences, handing out ham sandwiches to the Vietnamese refugees who were still trying to adjust to their daily canned tuna or corn beef and rice diet in the camp.  My siblings and I enjoyed those ham sandwiches because, as wealthy kids from South Vietnam growing up in the capital, we were familiar with Western food.  We used to eat “Croque Monsieur,” the French version of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, in the French restaurants or the Swim and Tennis club our parents took us to every weekend.

I have not visited Indiantown Gap since 1975, knowing that it still exists, maybe for the same reason that it is sometimes difficult for me to listen to “Hotel California” playing on the radio.  I believe the band “America” even visited the camp one afternoon and played for the refugees.  Almost daily, we could hear on the loudspeaker, the Eagles and America playing their songs several times.  I didn’t understand the songs back then with my very limited English, but their melody sounded melancholic or, could it be, with my mood at the time, all songs would have sounded melancholic? 

We arrived at the Franklin and Marshall campus about one o’clock and many students had already vacated from Schnader Hall, Sandy’s dormitory.  Sandy looked happy and relaxed and obviously, he had made many friends.  As we walked out of the building, a classmate who was a head taller than Sandy, came up and gave him a long, big hug.  Sandy introduced me to his friend, telling me that his friend came from Boston.  He promised to his friend that he would keep in touch and that, being Red Sox fans, our family might even make a trip to Boston to visit his friend! 

“He came all the way from Boston?”  I asked Sandy.

“Why are you so surprised?” Sandy was puzzled. “ One kid came from China!”

He didn’t remember to mention his other friend who came from Korea with a suitcase full of ramen.

The way back to Washington was slower, with the heavy afternoon traffic starting in Baltimore.  Sandy was listening to his music while my father relaxed on and off. Whenever he didn’t relax, his gaze fixed on the road.

“Thu, why are you still in this middle lane?  I just saw the sign to 495 exit, it’s coming up! Before you know it, it will be too late for you to move to the right!”

Too late to move to the right?  I just saw the same sign to 495, we were SEVEN miles away from the exit!

“Slow down, Thu, and don’t tailgate the car in front of you, everybody is slowing down in front of you!”

My iPhone rang and I quickly gave it to Sandy.

“Answer your dad and tell him to stop calling while I am driving, it’s dangerous for me to talk on the cell phone while driving!”  I told Sandy.  Finally, I had been brainwashed by my father.

As we dragged the suitcases from the driveway to our house, my dad shook his head.

“Look at the flowers in front of your house.  They are so tall they make your front yard look like a bad haircut.  People do not put tall flowers in front of the house.  I have been watching so many beautiful landscaped areas.  The tall flowers should be in the back, the shorter ones in the front.” 

My dad was complaining, of course not for the first time, as he was trying to avoid being touched by the Black Eye Susan, the main flowers on my walkway.  They bloom profusely at this time of summer.

“Look, Thu, these plants are so tall they are leaning into your walkway, bringing the bees even closer to you now.”

I have never thought of having bees being closer to my body as the flowers were leaning into my walkway.  Only parents would think of this kind of danger to their children!

When I told David later that night about our trip to Lancaster, and how my dad was preaching so much about my driving, he had minimal sympathy for me!

“Now you know how Sandy felt on the way to Lancaster when you constantly lectured him about the value of education!” David laughed.  

I didn’t even tell David how my father talked at length about parents choosing a career path for their children. 

“What do children know?  Let them pick whatever major they want and they end up not finding a job after graduation!  All that money going to waste!  Pick a career for them and they will have a better life!”

Hmm… This lecture sounded familiar from several in our household, between a free-spirited David and a more “traditional” me.

“If everybody thinks like you, we wouldn’t have any writers, photographers, musicians, no Beethoven!”  David usually ended our debates with the same sentence.  My father probably would have told David he could have lived without Beethoven.  At least, he would have three meals on his dining table a day, a usual reference to an “adequate” life. 

“Sandy, so you loved your camp!  What did daddy and I tell you?  It is a great educational summer camp!”  I told Sandy that evening, feeling triumphant after all that bargaining and debating before he went to camp.

“I liked it even more this time because I liked the kids in my dorm!” 

“Do you think you would like to go back next summer?” I asked.

“I probably will, but I still think I should have the right to pick what subject I want to study!”  He responded firmly.  “By the way, my RA who was voted the best out of all the RAs might be the TA for physics” he added.

The right to choose?  Democracy in our household when it comes to education?  I tried to keep David’s advice in mind. 

“Be cool, Thu, don’t stir the pot, at least not yet.” I told myself, trying to look composed.

“Sure, we will give you the chance to pick what you want” I reassured Sandy.

Notice, I said the chance, not the “choice.”

Hmm…maybe there will be some degree of democracy next summer.  Maybe we will narrow his chance to two choices.

Physics, or Advanced Physics?

You see, as “good” parents, we need to be in control.  As my parents would ask you:

“Looking back, do you still believe you were really wiser than your parents when you were fifteen years old?”

Hopefully, not too many of us believe that we were indeed wiser than our parents when we were teenagers.  Frankly, I think we are never too old to learn from our parents.  After all, how many of us know or remember, to leave fifty feet in front of our car at 50 mph?  Obviously, I did not.

Saturday morning, while my friends and I were exercising under Troy’s direction, my father was busy trimming the bushes and cutting down some Black Eyed Susans.  He was a good hairdresser for my front yard, as I noticed there were less flowers leaning into the walkway, keeping the bees away from all of us.  My father, at ninety, showed me how the father’s work is never done.