Here’s a letter mom wrote me in the first semester of my freshman year of college. I must have been panicking about writing a term paper or something; I was always dramatically overwrought about my grades during my first couple of years of college. (I was worried about losing my many scholarships if my grades slipped, and without them there would have been no way for me to afford to stay in school.)

Anil was my roommate in the dorms. I have no idea now who Catherine was or why I would have visited or written to her.

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Mom dropped me this quick note before work one day in the Fall of my freshman semester at UF. I guess my answering machine was broken, which is pretty funny to think about now. I don’t even remember having a phone in my dorm room, but I must have.

It’s also funny that both mom and dad refused to ever learn how to spell my friend Lanie’s name correctly. I can’t recall now – but highly doubt – whether I drove to New England for that first Christmas. And what was up with mom so often writing to me about the politics of my little sister’s friendships in high school?

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Mom wrote me this letter after I’d come home from college for a weekend visit. I don’t regret not getting a class ring and don’t even remember particularly wanting one very much. I do remember that R/C 4×4, though.

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Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performed in concert at the O’Connell Center on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville, Florida on the night of Saturday, October 26th, 1991. I spent several hours before the concert playing a drinking / card game called “Asshole” in the dorm room of a friend in East Hall and was so drunk by the time the show started that I threw up in the bathroom and then passed out in my seat; I effectively missed the entire concert. I woke around two in the morning in the upper decks of the empty arena and stumbled back to the dorm. I remember all this quite clearly.

What I didn’t remember – until reading this letter – was that my mother, grandmother, and little sister came to visit me on Sunday morning. I must have been disgustingly hungover and ruined the day, and mom wrote me this letter not too happy about it.

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The title of this post is printed on the outside of a Current® “Country Folk Art” greeting card with a hand-drawn illustration of a very old barn, surrounded by apple trees, horses, pigs, ducks, and rabbits. Inside the card is, oddly, a photo of me and mom, a girl named Noël, and a girl named Elizabeth, taken shortly after I’d apparently been weeping uncontrollably (at a COR retreat) at some point towards the end of my senior year of high school.
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Being a parent is hard work.

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