Dear Family,
A week or two ago, a fellow member of our neighborhood’s informal cycling club was depositing his only child – a girl of extraordinary academic and athletic achievement whom Grace has known since elementary school – at a certain prestigious university in Pennsylvania. He shared with our group of mostly middle-aged dads (and a few moms) a photo encapsulating the chaos of the freshman move-in experience.
Then, referring to the fact that I was about to go through something similar with my youngest child, he added his understanding that once you’ve done this multiple times, “you just need to make sure you come to a complete stop when you drop them off.”
Various friends have expressed similar sentiments to me over the years, but that has not been my experience.
While some of the logistics grow marginally simpler with each successive departing child, the hardest part — i.e., the emotional toll of kissing them good-bye and driving away — doesn’t get any easier. Not for me, at least. Each kid leaves behind her own unique hole. We grow accustomed to living with and working around the hole over time. We eventually learn to ignore its existence. But the hole is always there.
The holes our children leave manifest themselves in various ways. In empty bedrooms and quieter pianos. In the number of gallons of milk we need to pick up at Costco. In realizing we can probably get by with just one pizza. In obsolete chore wheels. In the lack of random shoes, half-empty soda cans, and dirty dishes mysteriously strewn around the house.
Grace’s departure also severs one of my last remaining linguistic connections to English as it is spoken by the rising generation. This includes the use of words like slay and fire as adjectives. (Both seem to be used to describe situations or things they like.)
But what gets me most is the sudden and sad recognition of how much I had taken their presence here for granted. You’d think I’d have learned from the painful process of dropping Hannah at school nine years ago to treasure each remaining millisecond I had at home with her younger siblings. But nobody actually does that, I don’t think. And even if I had, I doubt it would have made the process of parting any easier.
And so early last Monday morning, fully cognizant of the emotional brick wall I was about to run headlong into, Grace, Crystal, and I began the 200-mile, three-hour drive to Southern Virginia University. I drove alone in my 18-year-old Toyota Avalon while Grace and Crystal followed in “Grace’s” 19-year-old Toyota Sienna minivan.1
It only now occurs to me that the two cars we used to drive Grace to school are both older than she is.
Most people have not heard of Southern Virginia University and therefore have no particular sense of where it is. The institution’s name provides an accurate description of its location, but not a precise one. A quick glance at a map will tell you that most of Virginia is “Southern Virginia.” (Most Virginians pack themselves into Northern Virginia, near us, but most of the real estate is down south.)
When describing the university’s location to my DC-area neighbors, I usually start by saying it’s in Buena Vista. But if you haven’t heard of SVU, then you probably haven’t heard of Buena Vista, either. And so I sometimes explain that it’s near Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute (both about 15 minutes away). Other times I say it’s an hour past James Madison University.
This works because most people around here are familiar with those other schools (W&L, VMI, and JMU) and either 1) know where they are, 2) feel like they probably ought to know where they are, or 3) couldn’t care less and just want this part of the conversation to be over. I usually can’t discern the difference. But in any event, they nod in either real or pretended cognition, and my geographical responsibilities are done.
And at any rate, hardly anyone around here has more than a vague notion of where Provo is, either. So I’m accustomed to packing my daughters off to universities that sound like they’re on the moon.
During the drive down, we learned the hard way that 150 of the 200 miles between here and Buena Vista come after the last Wawa. This is probably less of a tragedy than I made it out to be at the time. There is no shortage of Sheetz locations along the rest of the way, which is almost as good. (Sheetz don’t have the Wawa pretzels, though, which have become almost as indispensable to me on long drives as Diet Coke.)
I am embarrassingly unconversant with Spanish but am nevertheless given to understand that Buena Vista means “good vista.” (It’s also possible that it means “park anywhere you want.”) Either way, it’s a place that lives up to its name. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the welcoming campus offers lovely views in all directions.
We rolled into the parking lot of Grace’s new dorm shortly after 10 a.m. For some reason, I took note of the 11 license plates in my row. The cars were from: Florida, Georgia, Texas, Maryland (my car), Utah, North Carolina, Georgia, Georgia, California, New York, and Florida.
I don’t know whether this one row of cars on this particular morning was representative of the SVU school body. But if it was, then most of Grace’s classmates are coming from considerably further away than she is. We almost felt like locals, at least in comparison to how we felt dropping off Grace’s two older sisters at BYU. A three-hour drive isn’t nothing, but compared to a five-hour flight, it feels like she’s right in the neighborhood.
Move-in day included an excursion to the local Walmart, as it ever has, followed by lunch at Ruby Tuesday (I hadn’t been to one of those in years — I still like their salad bar). We puttered around campus a little and spent a little time with the choir director. Grace reports that choir practice is her favorite part of the day, a sentiment I can relate to. (She is studying music education and is attending on a partial music scholarship, which, when combined with her partial academic scholarship, brings her total freight down into shouting distance of what we’d be paying had she chosen to join Sophie in Provo at BYU. So that feels like a win.
After an afternoon of delaying the inevitable, we finally parted ways at some sort of meet-the-local-businesses event in downtown Buena Vista. The vibe on Main Street was probably exactly what you’d expect for a town of 6,600. But they had two games of Cornhole going, so…
Driving away was as hard as ever. I hope she doesn’t miss us as much as we miss her. All I know for sure is she really misses the dog.
I wish I missed the dog.
Sophie
Sophie also returned to school this month, albeit to somewhat less fanfare. Crystal and I drove her to BWI and dropped her and her luggage at the curb. (Fortunately, the poignancy associated with sending a child off to school for the first time does not seem to recur when they go back to school.)
Her departure concluded a delightful summer in which Sophie worked with me on Saturday evenings in the temple and for me (as one of my summer interns) during the week. I suspect she enjoyed both things (perhaps the first more than the second), but she could not possibly have enjoyed them any more than I did.
Sophie (behind me), me, and my other summer intern on the interns’ last day at the office. (With that view, you’d think I’d go into the office more often than I do.)
Oglebay
But before anybody went anywhere, everybody gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, for the biennial Willis reunion at Oglebay.
Well, almost everyone. I believe the final tally was 29, and we all fit into one (rather spacious) cottage: Mom and Dad, Aunt Coco, my 4 brothers and I, Crystal and my 3 sisters-in-law, my 4 children (plus one girlfriend), 6 nephews, and 5 nieces (plus one boyfriend).
The only absences were my nephew Sam (a missionary in Yuma, Arizona, where he is awaiting his visa to India), my niece Abby (at UC-Berkeley beginning her Ph.D. in economics), and my niece Anika (somewhere in Oregon).
But everyone east of the Pacific Time Zone somehow made it to West Virginia, including Hannah and girlfriend Emma, who finished their nursing shifts at the Utah State Hospital at 3 a.m MDT, caught a flight out of Salt Lake a few hours later, and landed in Pittsburgh (after changing planes in Orlando(!) around 5 p.m. EDT.
I imagine they were too exhausted to enjoy our loud company very much, but it was fun having them around for a few days.
The days were filled with traditional Oglebay family reunion activities – golf, ropes course, golf, the zoo, golf, fishing, golf, pedal boats, golf, rock wall, horseback riding, golf…
Mom has all the pictures. Here are a few.
Temples, Organs, and a Long-Lost College Roommate
I mentioned last month that my Saturday-evening shift at the temple was being discontinued. (Long story.) As a result, all of us Saturday-evening workers were asked to move to the Saturday-afternoon shift, which runs from 11:15 to 5:00.
I am finding the new shift somewhat more challenging. For one thing, finding a parking spot at the temple at 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday is about 80 million times harder than finding one 4:00 p.m. on a Saturday. But that’s not even close to the hardest part of it.
Here is how my last two Saturdays have gone:
5:00 a.m. – Arise, eat something, get dressed, etc., drive to Bethesda
6:30 a.m. – LSD (long slow distance) run with the Montgomery County Road Runners Club’s Experienced Marathon Program (XMP) – Last week was 20 miles, yesterday was 16 miles, next week is 21 miles.
Whenever that ends – Drive home, eat and drink as much as I possibly can, shower, change into church clothes
11:00-ish a.m. – Leave for the temple
11:15-ish a.m. – Arrive at temple and change from church clothes into temple clothes (i.e., from a blue suit into a white suit)
11:30 a.m. – Walk into preparation meeting (15 minutes late)
5:00 p.m. – Drive home from the temple
5:15 p.m. – Collapse
Actually, last Saturday night, Crystal and I drove to Annapolis for dinner after my shift and walked around the waterfront as the sun set because the weather was so nice. But last night (I’m typing this on Sunday night – have no idea when I’ll actually get around to publishing it) I was completely gassed and just collapsed.
I don’t know how sustainable this is, but it feels like what I’m supposed to do. There’s nothing about it I don’t enjoy. It just drains all the energy out of me. We’ll see.
From the office of amazing coincidences, among my new colleagues on the Saturday-afternoon shift is my old college roommate, Aaron. Our chance encounter in the temple last Saturday was our first contact since we were BYU freshmen 33 years ago. Aaron lives in Reston, but we subsequently determined that not only do we both work in Rosslyn, we work in the same building! He’s on the 19th floor, I’m on the 12th.
If you want to figure out the odds of one kid from New Jersey (me) and another kid from California (Aaron) ending up first as random roommates in Utah and then, a generation later, on the same temple shift in Maryland while working in the same office building in Virginia, it makes my head hurt.
It makes me wonder how many times we’ve been on the same elevator in the past five years and not recognized each other. We had to be in the temple.
The name tags probably helped.
Anyway, my Saturdays may be crazy, but I can’t remember a time when my Sundays were more relaxing. I guess the bishopric felt my job as the Primary pianist was not sufficiently taxing, and so they have also asked me to be the ward organist. A smattering of laughter accompanied the announcement during sacrament meeting (which is unusual – people don’t usually laugh when their fellow congregants are appointed to new positions) but the sustaining vote was unanimous in my favor (which is not unusual) and so I’m in.
Which means all I do at church now is play music. I am officially living the dream.
At least Ari is still around to see it.
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly