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Lemons Into Lemonade, or How The Kid Got Into College
There is a saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”
The problem is, there is really no manual on how to do that in terms of many lemony bitter circumstances.
In August 1992, an interlocking set of obligations and unexpected circumstances tossed me more lemons than I could handle.
Lemon No. 1 came about on a pleasant Saturday afternoon when my landlord called to let me know that the condo where my son and I lived would be the perfect place for his sister and brother-in-law to take up residence while they waited for the birth of their first child. I could expect a 30-day “quit” notice to come in the mail during the following week.
The second bunch of lemons was that several close friends were leaving the San Francisco Bay area to go and live in Oregon.
The third bunch was that my son was entering his senior year of high school, with all attendant activities like applying for college and touring campuses. Along with those items came the intense anxiety of whether the quirky teen who balanced his drama classes with computer and science classes would land acceptance letters from the universities he cared the most about.
While I scoured the want ads for available rental housing to encounter the few available little, tiny apartments in the overpriced housing markets of the San Francisco Bay areas, my friends were excited about their Oregon real estate finds.
“Just think,” reported one friend, “I took the $3,500 that would have been my first-month, last-month, and deposit payments here in San Rafael and made a down payment on a house. It has three bedrooms and sits on a hill above a waterfall.”
I made happy faces and oohed and aahed over the description of the friend’s new home and how she had a 10-minute bike ride as her new daily commute. I waited to hear how her weekends would be spent riding unicorns and water painting with dolphins.
It was against that backdrop that I first saw my new residence at the aptly named Huevos Verdes Apartment Complex in northern San Rafael. Pleasantly situated in the middle of a busy freeway median, it had little of the peace, quiet, and charm of the condo I was about to vacate. There would be no sea-fresh breezes from Richardson Bay, no airy living room overlooking the canal, nor did it have oversized bedrooms one reached by scampering up the plushly carpeted stairs.
Instead, the entire new residence could have easily fit inside the condo’s downstairs floor plan. This was not a step down — this was an express elevator ride to the inner circle of Hades.
Friends grokked the torment I was coming face to face with. “You can find something else. We can help you look.”
“Thanks everybody. There are some nice apartments I looked at, but I have to stay inside San Rafael. That way Gabe graduates with his classmates. And lately everyone who rents wants to be in the San Rafael high school district.”
“Well, wouldn’t you and Gabe like to live by me in Oregon?”
“If it was a different year, any other year but senior year, I might agree, but for senior year of high school, he really needs to stay put.” And so, the next 10 months were to be spent living at Huevos Verdes.
Our first week there started out with a joke on the utility company. I owed 400 bucks to PG & E, the utility conglomerate. But the hefty fees of first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and the deposit had wiped out my bank account.
We decided to do some community theater to secure the utilities. Three days of living with only cold water and no electricity was already rather tiresome. So, Gabe played the part of a computer entrepreneur who was managing his startup company. During the PG&E workman’s visit, Gabe wore a pair of glasses borrowed from the high school’s props department, so he looked older. Also to give his business street cred, a new neighbor showed up and applied to work at the “startup.” His credit, of course, was excellent, and the utilities were turned on in his name.
Many months later, when the utility firm realized he was not old enough to have a utility account, it sent a notice as to how he couldn’t have an account, but if I coughed up the back charges I owed, it would keep the utilities on in my name.
That agreement was fine with us both.
As the year progressed, I threw myself into work. As though the universe wanted to give me a break, my eldercare clients were exceptionally smart, kind, and interesting. Also, Gabe was allowed, by her family, to visit the local lady I worked for, so the three of us ate dinner together several nights a week.
Still a good part of what makes life worthwhile is comfortable housing. I noticed Gabe’s friends did not visit very much, as the apartment was too cramped. I missed the background noises of video games and the horseplay and jokes of young men goofing around.
My friends called when they could, but their lives were different now. They had homes in Oregon to remodel and were busy plugging into their new jobs. Meanwhile, my life was in a holding position. My focus was to just try and make it through the school year.
For Gabe, he had put together a bulletin board to track the places where he had applied for college. He applied for and was offered a few small scholarships, but his big hope was something ambitious: to be a National Merit Scholar.
By the holidays that year, he had achieved that goal. Also, by then, he had toured several colleges as well as UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego.
He kept his sights focused on the responses of three schools: University of Chicago, Rice University in Texas, and Northwestern University, just north of Chicago in Evanston.
He also applied to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. After he got his acceptance letter in January, one of the admissions people called to tell me how much the university hoped he would choose it. With that woman on the phone, I queried her as to what type of scholarship monies, loans, and other things might come his way if he decided on that school. She filled me in, but what struck me the most was her friendliness and enthusiasm. I realized if “the big three” rejected Gabe, he might end up being very happy there.
By the end of February 1993, he had gotten word he was on a waiting list for Rice in Texas. Right after that, he received the acceptance letter from University of Chicago. He and his closest friend had always planned on going there together, but that friend was not accepted.
“I’m holding out for Northwestern, Mom. I never wanted University of Chicago, at least not to go there alone. But boy, I really want to go to Northwestern.”
I wanted that, too. At that time, Northwestern University had a campus overshadowed by towering, majestic trees and endowed with immense green lawns. It had the feel of a small private college and also had Lake Michigan as a neighbor, whose waves nibbled away at the campus’ northern edges. (Sadly, by the turn of the century, many of the trees and grassy spaces on the campus had been ripped up, and it became known as Parking Lot U.)
One of the amenities for Gabe was that his grandparents lived in the Chicago area. If he needed a home-cooked meal or just time chilling with Grams and Papa, they’d be at the ready to come and pick him up.
I kept trying to stay in touch with the dream, but the lemons were in the way. So, the winter dragged on, and I woke up one Saturday morning with a combination of dengue fever, leprosy, and the flu. (Okay, I joke. It was only the flu.)
I was so tired of the situation. Every decibel of highway noise drained me. The lack of soundproofing meant every toilet flush on my side of the building echoed inside our place. Two friends kept reminding me that what I was doing was important. I knew staying in place for my son’s sake was important, but I just was not enjoying my life.
How could I? My life sucked!
I nestled in bed, feeling like a loser. I idly wondered if I should try and make my way to the bathroom and throw up.
And then the bedroom door was thrown open. “Mom, look! It’s here. It’s Northwestern. I got the acceptance letter.” He edged me over in bed, his typical teenage reluctance to be anywhere near his mom in bed swept away in his excitement.
Next, he spilled the contents of the fat, oversized white envelope onto the bed. “Look, everything is paid for. For all four years! I’m not kidding! Everything! Except $800 annually for my health insurance. You have to pay that.
“But the tuition and housing at the dorm and meals at the cafeteria, all of it is paid for.” He tossed his body sideways and flipped his legs in the air, stood, and did a summersault from the bed to the floor!
“Oh, you need to sign this, right away. It is about the big weekend, okay?”
“The weekend,” I said groggily. The flu had gone away. It had gone away the moment the professional-looking binder explaining the scholarship monies for tuition, for the housing stipend and meal stipend, all of that being paid for — but not by us — had been spilled out across my bed covers.
“What is this about a weekend?”
“Oh, it is a tour-of-the-campus weekend. I can meet my classmates and maybe my roommate for next year, and it’s in May, right about six weeks from now.” He was trying to grin a bit less so he could explain it clearly, but his words weren’t registering.
He handed me a brochure on the introductory weekend. Among other items of text, I read the expression, “Cost of weekend is $260.” This one price tag stood out.
Except nothing made sense. Nothing. The idea that for four years $23,000 worth of university amenities would be met by a combination of National Merit Scholarship monies and matching funds from the university itself was spinning around in my head so quickly I could not take it in.
“You look funny, Mom. Aren’t you happy!?”
“Not if they expect me to pay 23,000 bucks for you to spend a weekend there.”
For a moment, my offspring thought I was joking. But then he realized the shock of it all was too much. For five months, we had both been gypped on such a massive level that at any moment the sound of a semitrailer on Highway 101 or a neighbor yelling at his wife could be reverberating into our lives, knocking words out of our mouths when we tried to talk to each other or even to think quiet thoughts if we were by ourselves, and now in contrast, the fickle finger of the universe was in one glorious swoop sweeping in and turning all the lemons into lemonade. The shock was proving to be too much.
He put his hand against my forehead. “You might be running a fever. Would you want some soda?”
As he left the room to get a cold drink from the fridge, I closed my eyes. My family had been in a car accident when I was 7, and once my mom was in the hospital, I consoled myself with the thought, “It will all be normal when I wake up from the bad, bad dream in the morning.”
Now I repeated the information my son had offered. “Twenty thousand bucks plus — for four years. Paid for by someone other than us!”
I felt a surge of pure joy running through my body like I had become a live wire of happiness.
And I thought to myself, “When I wake up, I hope I remember how being extremely happy and extremely relieved actually feels.”
(But thankfully, I never woke up from this particular dream.)
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Published in Group Writing
What a well-told and empathetic story! Thank you for telling us. Glad it had a happy ending!
When life hands you lemons, throw them back in its face!
How wonderful, Carol Joy! And it sounds like you have a terrific son, too! A whole lotta lemonade!
Keep an eye on that young fella. He’s going to do great things.
I wish to offer thanks to whatever moderator here tidied up the text as the essay made its way to the main page.
The cleaned up version is greatly appreciated.
Carol Joy, I have a pretty sensitive editing eye, and nothing jumped out at me–at least nothing to make me roll my eyes! ;-)
We are currently looking at colleges for my daughter and she is gravitating toward the same schools as your son. Interesting about the trees Northwestern. I’m learning that so many schools, including my own college, have changed so much since I was applying. I don’t know about my daughter getting scholarship money, but I hesitate to pay some of these places anything at all for what they currently teaching. I might need to write a separate post to ask for Ricochet advice!
Meaning the school is gone, or it just sucks now?
A free ride at Northwestern may be worth it.
It’s closed.
So it only lasted from 68 to 83? That’s not very long for a college.
Well into puberty.
You probably put more importance on this than it needs. I went to a new high school every year, and, while I didn’t enjoy it, I did fine.
One thing that helped us out was that Gabe’s high school had an excellent college counselor. She had so much advice for him and for me. Gabe and I began a relationship with this wonderful lady while he was a junior.
Without her encouragement, my son would not have been enthused about studying so hard. She carefully implanted in his heart and mind that he could get high enough scores on his SAT’s to be a National Merit scholar & that would be the big ticket to pay for his college. Her encouragement gave him the needed nudge to hit the books when other kids were out partying. (Not that he didn’t do some of that too.)
Many states also provide some scholarship monies to the top tier of students. In Illinois, there is a basic grant, $2,000 back in the 1970’s. I have no idea if the grant program still exists or not. But if still exists, I imagine the monies are substantially more.
How the Illinois grant worked was this: any student in the top ranking of the SAT program was notified they were going to get the grant even if they did not attain National Merit Scholar status. The student does have to indicate to the Illinois college they choose that the grant is theirs and the school should claim it. (The student doesn’t get the grant if they go to school out of state.)
Pell grants also used to exist. (Of course so did Pell loans.) I think Gabe got a Pell Grant. In the 1970’s, I used one to attend electronics school.
There are also tax code matters to consider. Various costs are tax exempt. Tuition paid for by scholarship monies are tax exempt. However, dormitory/housing costs are not exempt. In our case, had he attended college through the UC system in Calif, the housing costs stood at 3 times what they were in the Chicago area. So even if UC San Diego had paid his housing, I’d have paid more to the IRS than by his attending Northwestern.
It is also important the student not be coerced into being someone they are not. If they really want to be a chef, an airplane mechanic, or even a neighborhood car mechanic, that is a career path that might hold more benefits if they don’t spend 4 years at a liberal arts school learning calculus or French lit. Especially if the 4 years sets them on the sad path of having massive student loans to re-pay.
While hoping I am not boring the life out of you, I’ll finish my riff: Also any decent counselor takes the time to understand who the student is. Then they play to those strengths.
They don’t over stress academics if the student has a shot at a football or a swim team scholarship but only a B- average.
If the student shines at doing graphic design or award winning art, the counselor understands where the scholarship and grant money is for those talents.
They are careful not to put a round peg in a square hole. Their goal is to help the student attend the type of advanced education program that sets them on the road to a happy successful life.
Anyway good luck to both you and your daughter. As shocked as I was over what tuition was in 1993, I find it even more extremely expensive than it was then.
Unless these places have cracked the alchemical secrets buried since before time began and they are now teaching students how to turn table salt into gold, I don’t see how the prices can be justified.
Great story Carol. Our daughter same age as your son and we lived close by. San Fran. But different as ours was in a small private Catholic girls schools with over 30 motivated kids working for the big college ticket. So made the Ivy League rounds, Stanford, etc. She was accepted into UC San Diego (nice scholarship offer) and UC Berkeley. Didn’t get accepted to Princeton despite lobbying by one of the Fishers (son of the Gap founder, Sarah was his favorite babysitter). But the boyfriend was at Duke. So there she landed. BF gone in a year (later in NY with a wife and 4 kids he wanted to meet up again, she said FO). Turned out well. Just bought her first house in Nashville. Hope your son is doing well. Our two boys had rougher roads but wound up happy.
This true-life tale of surprises is part of October’s group writing theme: October Surprise. You are invited to play off of “surprise,” “October,” or both. Stop by today to reserve a day. Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
But did you really? 😉
Sure. Though I guess it depends on how you define “fine.” I graduated 16 out of a class of over 700. Started on the varsity football team at every school I went to. Had the ordinary number of girlfriends.
I wholeheartedly agree. I am trying to help guide her decision-making, but it’s her future. I appreciate your insight, and I need to look into current scholarship programs in Texas. She doesn’t necessarily want to stay in Texas, since we haven’t been here that long and she isn’t particularly attached. The loyalty that locals have for their schools is so intense that it’s a bit alienating for newcomers. Also, she has declared that there are not enough trees at A&M!
Yesterday, she met with a rep from U of Chicago and came away feeling like she could rule it out. She’s interested in music and their program seems too general. Also, the rep mentioned that Bernie Sanders went there, which I did not know, and other students at the meeting were seemingly excited about that and the Obama connection to Chicago. They didn’t promote the connection with Thomas Sowell. Thankfully, the Bernie Sanders association doesn’t impress her.
Trying to get my daughter to consider Nashville with all its music opportunities! And selfishly, it seems fun to visit. Have you made it out there yet?
DePaul has a good music program. Lincoln Park, baby! There’s the zoo, and Second City over in Old Town, and the Biograph Theater, where Dillinger got shot …
We were hoping to go for Christmas but logistics not looking good. Wife has some blood clot issues and can’t fly until the docs say the thinners are working. So she will probably come here. She lives close to Vanderbilt and was impressed by the campus.