My Father’s Gaze Forward

When I was growing up, I thought I’d go away to college. I dreamt about it, checked out and read tens of novels from the library about it, looked over innumerable catalogs—it never dawned on me that I wouldn’t go.  Not once.

But when the time rolled around for me to apply not only to colleges, but for scholarships and  financial aid as well, my parents refused to fill out the financial forms.  “I know what they’re going to say,”  my father said, “They’re going to tell me that I should sell our home, and I’m not doing that to send you away to school, when there’s a good college right in our backyard.”

To say I was devasted is not to overstate my feelings. I watched as my high school classmates made plans and moved away. I so lacked enthusiasm to go to the college “in our backyard,” I went there but graduated in three years, only attending the campus for two and doing independent study for the other.  It was a good education—but not the experience I wanted.

Now, decades later, as I see students graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt; people spending twenty years after their commencement paying off a loan that  exceeds the original amount; liabilities that threaten the economic well-being of this country; financial balances that have crippled friends’ ability to buy a home or have a family; I am grateful to my father who gazed into the future and chose a path for me that ensured my financial freedom and, my ability to buy, with nary a second thought, as many novels as I wish.