We have to get out of here, we can't just be walking around by ourselves. I don't want to meet just about everybody's parents on campus."
"I'll probably just end up taking my computer over to Berry and just camp out over there. Why can't we just have a normal weekend?"
"Dude, we could hop on the bus and just go somewhere -- anywhere, anywhere but here!"
Those were snippets of the conversations I had with a small minority of my fellow classmates. This was before freshman family weekend when everybody was making preparations to be with their families and most had a legitimate reason to clean up their room or scout around Eastman's Pharmacy for some much needed air-freshener to spruce up the room for the ultimate litmus test. But us? We just had the free food and the undoubtedly long lines at Food Court to look forward to.
I quickly got used to the surge in the number of cars around the Choates and the random person walking around the lounge with an inquisitive look on his face; one particular parent, as a recall, was quizzically examining a stain on the couch. He was looking at it almost in wonderment, as if to ask himself, "Are these the substandard conditions my child is living in?" I would have laughed out loud, but I restrained myself.
The free food wasn't so "free" after all; I found myself analyzing society through the concepts I learned in Economics 1. The opportunity cost of waiting 45 minutes in line for free food definitely did not make it "free" in itself. I could easily have spent the time lying on my bed looking at the ceiling or even calling my parents back at home. When a little kid cuts the queue, one can't just ask him or her to leave the line. The law-of-hungry-bunnies applied in my case; a little kid in front of me quickly multiplied into an eager bunch of 20 children, all succumbing to peer pressure for another chance at the cookies. In addition to this, the negative externality imposed on me and my fellow brethren by the numerous, chirpy greetings of "Hey so-and-so, meet my parents. Dad, Mom, this is my friend, and we both live in the Choates!" made it almost painful waiting in line. And, of course, the last piece of the juicy watermelon that I had been coveting had to just run out when it was my turn at the food.
Of course, as Karen Tani's "Tats" comic strip notes, the multitude of parents in the dining hall was a sight to behold; I noticed one parent lost in Food Court, trying to decipher which were the lines for the grill, hot food and the sandwich bar. Of course, using cash to pay did not ease the speed at which the lines cleared. I can only infer that some of them got sick of all the long lines at the cookouts as well; but I realized too late that there were long lines everywhere too late. I found myself standing outside Lou's in the cold on a Saturday morning -- due to the long lines waiting for a table, the proprietors of the restaurant had decided to only allow one person to stand in line; the rest of the group had to go outside and wait. At times such detached humor turned into irritation. A friend and I were pretty miffed when, in the middle of our meal, we were forced to cram all the condiments and maple syrup abruptly onto one small table to accommodate a group next to us in the middle of our meal.
In the end, we managed to have fun in our own right. It was always interesting meeting a fellow '05 reading during the weekend; more often than not they were fellow members of the family-less freshmen on campus. It was fun being cynical for that week.
We even got a few (cheap) laughs out of parents that looked like exact replicas of their sons or daughters. It was funny to see the different behaviors that the presence of parents produced. Someone in my class was as attentive as he'd ever been all term, scribbling down notes with an intent look on his face, and I noticed that the amount of writing done was not related to the importance of the content but instead proportional to the sideward glances that his father took at his notebook.
The best laugh, however, was when another family-less friend and I happened to notice a fellow classmate who was showing his parents around. He went down one stairway, only to reappear the next moment and ask the librarian to point him to the correct staircase leading down to the lower levels of Berry. This, and after he had proclaimed proudly (and loudly) to his parents, "This is Baker/Berry, and me and my friends hang out here a lot."
It is my hope that the College will be generous enough to sponsor a bus-ride down to Boston next year for those '06s on campus who don't have the privilege of having their families visit them. The multitude of events planned for parents deserves to be praised; but how about those who don't have the fortune to participate in them? Call me a cynic, but somehow I suspect that the free bus-ride next year won't materialize.
