So we just got back from Joe's final college visit, this time to the University of Pennsylvania (not Penn State). It's a small campus, or seem that way, with very old buildings and lots of money. What a joy to be there on a beautiful fall day for their homecoming. Images: boys in khaki pants and blue jackets standing around looking awkward; tall thin man yelling at his family, the tattoos on his neck stretched and uglier than before; Joe talking to me, reading to me, telling me jokes all the way down there and back. It's a fancy school, very competitive and cliquish, but not a bad place for Joe. The whole Ben Franklin idealism and activism might not be as vibrant day-to-day as it is on campus. But it was a very lovely, demanding and strong campus. It would change Joe's life to go there.
But the reason I'm writing is because soon after we parked, far up the block the marching band started. Their double drumming and keyboards sounded like like a war starting, or a party, or both. It was hard not to dance to it. And Joe realized his polymath friend Jacob might be in that crowd, so we ran ahead -- sure enough, there was Jacob. He was so happy to see Joe, and hugged him. That small gesture, the welcome, the friend who make it all real, could have been the moment Joe needed to help him make his part of the decision of where to go to college (the college itself makes the other half, of course). And I think I saw it there, as we wound through the campus at the tail of the marching band, a little celebration in progress: the small moment where Joe steps up into a new future, as if stepping into an invisible bus that drove his future off but left him walking next to his friend. A small moment. I was moved by it, and proud. Again.
