Daria Doering

Last weekend, Mike and I attended our middle son Jake’s graduation from UCLA. To begin with, it never occurred to me that he would participate in this commencement at all, since he is lacking five classes that he needs to graduate, and has not even declared a major yet! But that is apparently how things are done these days. Jake was happy to get to “walk” in the commencement with his friends from the last four years.

Jake had invited us to this commencement at the last minute, a week or so before it happened. Of course we told him we wouldn’t miss it for the world. We were already scheduled to go to San Luis Obispo that weekend to move our daughter, Nina, a freshman at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (SLO) home to San Diego for the summer.

So Mike and I took off in our old Toyota Previa van, with 260,000 miles on it, bound for SLO, six hours away. We said a prayer that our car would hold together for yet another trip. Our plan was to leave early, load Nina’s stuff after we got there, and spend the night at Morro Bay. The next day we would drive to LA (midway between SLO and San Diego) and attend Jake’s graduation.

Mike drove most of the way, while I finished reading Investing Online for Dummies. Along the way, we discovered that since we were not in our usual cars (this van is usually loaned to my mom’s caretaker), we were lacking a number of essentials that we usually keep in our cars: sunglasses, iPhone charger and Kleenex, to name a few. There were some very ugly sunglasses that my mother’s caretaker had left in the car, so I got to wear those, and luckily he had left some napkins in the car. Mike made jokes about how we looked like the Clampetts, and we sang the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies. I remembered all the words!

We got there around 6 pm, and decided we were too tired to move stuff, so we would just go to dinner. Last time we went to SLO we also stayed at Morro Bay, a cute little seaside town 15 minutes away that I fell in love with. It has a waterfront with boats and seafood restaurants, and is like a miniature version of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I had been waiting ever since that time to go back with the fam and eat at one of those restaurants again!

As we drove to Morro Bay, Nina looked at restaurant reviews on Yelp on her iPhone (our kids will not eat anywhere, ever without consulting Yelp), and chose a place called Tognazzini’s. We got there and all loved the look and feel and menu. We got our clam chowders, fish & chips and shrimp linguini and started to eat, but soon Nina started talking woefully and then burst into tears! Here I had thought she was doing wonderfully in college, but I guess she was only telling me half the story.

She sobbed that she didn’t have enough friends, Cal Poly was very white-bread and conformist, she felt she didn’t fit in, her department was mediocre, and she didn’t even know if she wanted to go back there. The dam had burst and she sobbed out all her frustrations. She was also mad at me for not calling her enough. I sympathized with her situation and feelings, but also told her I’d had enough of her accusing me of not calling her. I raised my voice a bit when I told her that if she wants to talk to me, pick up the phone!

Next a stranger approached our table and said, “I can see you’re going through a hard time here, but we are trying to enjoy our dinner at the table behind you, and could you keep it down?” Our jaws dropped and I don’t think we even answered him.

We continued our conversation, with an added topic – this jerk! I could think of a few choice things to say to him. Such as that restaurants are typically loud (my main pet peeve with restaurants), and we were not even being very loud, and who in the hell would say that to a sobbing teenaged girl and her struggling family? Someone with a hollow life?

After five minutes I managed to reframe my angry thoughts into something positive and self-affirming and marched to his table. I told this man, his wife, teenaged son and someone else, “Since you felt free to interrupt our meal, I have a few things I would like to say to you. I am really happy and grateful that I have a family who is honest with each other, that we can have deep conversations, and that we express our feelings to each other. It’s too bad this was so disturbing to you …” His wife smiled and said, “Oh, we totally understand, we just needed you to dial it down a notch.” She actually seemed so nice that I just said, “Okay,” shrugged and left. Our daughter thanked me for doing something. It had just felt like an attack that required a response.

Next we retired to the quirky “Masterpiece Hotel” (“Each Room a Masterpiece!”) hung with various works of art, telling Nina we would be at her place at 7 am.

The next morning, Mike’s alarm rang at 6 am and I told him – go back to bed, get some sleep, we’re on vacation! So we got to Nina’s dorm around 8:30.

We loaded the van and Nina’s car with two dressers and an unbelievable number of boxes and bags of clothes somehow acquired by our “clotheshorse” daughter. I thanked god that she did not attend college anywhere that was a plane ride away.

We drove to LA, using Google Maps on my phone for guidance. The route was pretty much Highway 101, but after some time, Google Maps wanted us to turn off on state 154. “Ignore it,” Mike said. Then he got tired so I took over driving, right before the 154 turnoff. “I want to try it,” I told him, thinking it would shave a bit of time off the somewhat winding Highway 101. And okay, I have a taste for trying new things.

So I turned onto the 154, and immediately could see that it was a two-lane highway; actually not what I would call a highway at all. Oh well, Google Maps must have told us to turn here for a reason, right? We drove past large estates with horses, which I was excited to see, being a horse nut. Yet another part of California that I never knew existed … just north of Santa Barbara.

Then the road started taking us uphill, and the hills became mountains. It was beautiful – the Cleveland Forest with thick stands of pine trees – but then there were drops of thousands of feet on either side of us, and this was taking a long time. What the f___?

Mike was periodically yelling at me for my folly, and texting Nina, DON’T TAKE THE 154. That was before both our cell phones went dead, with no car charger — no more Google Maps. But I was enjoying seeing a new route, grateful it was not quite as scary as the mountain roads in Yosemite, cursing Google Maps, and remembering to never take this route again …

Finally we were back to the 101, which was choked with traffic. We inched toward Los Angeles at 4 pm on a Friday, bummer. After hours, we arrived at Jake’s apartment to pick up the parking passes for commencement. He did not seem to want me to go inside. I went inside anyway, since he was in the shower, and saw a male figure sleeping on the couch (always), towers of empty beer bottles in the living room, more in the hall, stacks of dirty dishes in the kitchen. So what did I do? Took photos! I had the urge to “document his lifestyle” …

We managed to get to our hotel and change, navigate the college maze and park, and arrive at the commencement almost on time. It was in Pauly Pavilion, venue of legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, with Wooden’s statue outside, hung with banners of some of his sayings. “Make each day your masterpiece.” “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” We were treated to some speeches, and watched most of it on a huge monitor hanging in the middle of the stadium, which wasn’t bad. The one speech I remember was the chancellor saying that no one ever remembers commencement speeches, so he had decided to highlight a few students instead. He described two African American students and an Asian student who had overcome a lot of obstacles to attend college and were doing a lot to give back to the community.

Afterward, our daughter asked me what I thought of the proceedings. I told her – “Well, commencements are notoriously boring, almost like torture. So they were trying to do something different, which was good. But it was the usual politically correct garbage. What about profiling a white kid who has busted his ass his whole life to get into UCLA, put up with the unbelievable obstacle course that a UCLA education is these days, and has made it to graduation? It was an insult to us.” She said “Yeah, I thought it was shocking, but I just never know what to think.” I told her, “Yeah, it’s hard to know what to think … the world is full of propaganda from all sides … and this is just my reaction. Everyone is trying …”

The next morning we went to the School of Psychology commencement (Jake is getting his BS in Cognitive Science, a “newfangled” major that includes classes in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, computer science and more). There was one really funny speech by a professor that I wish I could reprint, and a great speech by a student. Then they called all the students by name for their diplomas. I would say that 75% of the names were Asian, and there were small smatterings of Hispanic, Indian, Iranian and European names. I can tell you that “John Smith” is dead. Nothing remotely like that. But gotta love those Asians for the work ethic and drive that has gotten them so far …

Our poor daughter was again puzzled. Where were people like us? I explained to her, “Rich people and poor people (on scholarship) attend private colleges. The middle class can’t, for the most part.” We discussed how public colleges have changed so vastly from the time that Mike and I graduated from San Diego State. California colleges used to get 75% of their funding from the state, and now they get only 10%. Why? Perhaps a research project for a future column. Fees used to be a few hundred dollars a year and now they are $12,000. Way more than the rate of inflation. Why? Public colleges now must seek every international student they can get, since they pay out of state tuition that is vastly higher than local kids. The new PC mantra is that every kid should attend college, which gets a lot of airtime, while others (including me, a former teacher) think it is misguided.

Mike perhaps summed it up best when he said, “China doesn’t need to invade us. They’ve already conquered us.”