KNOWING YOU'RE HOME:TOM

It is something I have been saying a lot to my number one son and my number three son in the past several months.

“You’ll know when you find the place that’s home,” I’ve said.

Number one son Matt and his bride Melany have been house-hunting since the ground was buried in snow. More on their search in another post.

My number three son Tom, a high school senior, has been engaged in the college application process since September (if you don’t count the prep courses and the tutoring for two rounds of the SAT’s last year.)
I’ve been through this process twice before with my two older sons. As I’ve said before, it’s more work, more torture and more suspense than giving birth.

In September, we had a consultation with a private college counselor, Deb Shames of Upper Saddle River, NJ, to develop a list of colleges and universities to which Tom could apply. I felt confident we could handle the rest of the process…filling out the common application online, getting teacher recommendations and writing the all-important college application essay.
But Tom had taken the SATs twice, and was not able to crack 500 (out of 800) on the Math portion. I figured this was going to be a deal-breaker at many schools, although his writing and critical reading skills are excellent, and he is a fine student in many subjects.
Deb talked to Tom about his interests in creative writing, political comedy, journalism and history. She’s a big proponent of Loren Pope’s book “Colleges That Change Lives” (www.ctcl.org.).
With her suggestions and some others from Don Bosco school guidance director, Father Brendan Kilroy, we decided to have Tom apply to 16 schools: American, Bard, Catholic, Chapman in California, Emerson, Fairfield, Fordham, Goucher in Baltimore, Knox in Galesburg, Illinois, Lawrence in Wisconsin, Providence, St. John’s in Annapolis, Skidmore, Syracuse (where Tom’s brother Mike had graduated), University of Iowa (renowned graduate writing program), and Ursinus.

I was amazed to discover that a number of colleges allow you to say, “Don’t look at my SAT scores, ” including Smith, NYU, Wake Forest and Middlebury. (You can see the full list at www. fairtest.org.)

My oldest son was desperate to go to Holy Cross after he toured the college early in his senior year. But he was deferred from early decision, and ultimately did not get in there. So my strategy has become: We’ll visit a college once you are accepted.
We did, however, tour a number of colleges with Tom in the Washington, DC area in early December. When we arrived at St. John’s in Annapolis, he was given a letter telling him he was accepted. He flushed beet-red.
He stayed overnight in the dorms and went to one of the college’s vaunted seminars, when 20 students around a table pursue a discussion based on readings. There are no lectures here.
“Mom," Tom told me later, “One of the students came to Seminar in bare feet. The temperature outside was about 20 degrees. But I have to admit, he was a great contributor to the discussion.”
St. John’s has a fixed curriculum. All freshmen take the same courses, including Greek, and choir (heavy on Gregorian chant.) All sophomores, juniors and seniors also take the same set of courses. There’s no dropping a course and replacing it with something else. They’ve been doing this since the 1930’s.
Oh, and there are no textbooks. You read from the original Great Books. To study geometry, you read Euclid.
He liked St. John’s (and immediately put up the St. John’s poster with its stack of Great Books). But he worried that with a total enrollment of 400 students in Annapolis (another 600 on the Sante Fe campus), he could be limited socially fast.
And this is a school that de-emphasizes grades, doesn’t generally test, and doesn’t require research papers. Students write one long paper each spring. Tom wanted more writing.

On this trip, we also toured Goucher, which started out as a women’s college in 1885 and moved to an expansive campus in Towson in 1942. Goucher’s unique requirement is that every student do a period of study abroad. Tom really felt at home on campus. I don’t know whether it was the beautiful new student union building, or the cafeteria offerings or the fact that there were malls with Applebee's just off campus. Oh, and you can board your horse at Goucher. (Not that we have a horse.)
We also toured Catholic University (beautiful campus, nice admissions staff) and American University (big emphasis on getting political and governmental internships).

Tom was accepted at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois on December 20, and offered a merit scholarship of $10,000 a year.. He had also been accepted at the University of Iowa. (I joked to him, “There you pay your tuition in corn.")

We arranged to fly out to see the University of Iowa one weekend in January and then to drive the 100 miles to Knox College.
Iowa City turned out to be a pretty happenin’ place. The Hotel Vetro, where we stayed, had as modernist a sensibility as any boutique hotel in Manhattan. The floors were polished concrete, windows were floor to ceiling, and the bathroom with its big soaking tub had a barn-style frosted glass door that slid back and forth on a track. From our hotel windows, we looked down on street scenes of pedestrians making their way through snow in and out of coffee houses and eateries.
The campus of the University of Iowa was the city. We walked up and down streets in the freezing cold, and ducked into the university library and the student center. It was very quiet because it was winter break.

We drove out to northwest-central Illinois on Sunday. The town was founded by Reverend George W. Gale, a minister from New York State who wanted to create a college to educate ministers who would spread the gospel to the prairies. The college opened its doors in 1841, and was the site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
On Sunday, Tom insisted we eat at a sports bar in town called “Crappy’s.” The food wasn’t crappy.
On Monday, Tom attended a number of classes. His assessment? He really liked the school, but it was in the boonies. “But you’re a train ride away from Chicago,” I reminded him.

On the drive back, it started snowing 30 miles into our return trip to Iowa City. In the final 70 miles, we passed no fewer than 25 cars that had spun off the road into ditches, along with one truck snaked into a chain-link fence on the side of the highway. My fingers were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
When we (finally) got into Iowa City, city streets hadn’t been plowed either. “They like to do only one pass-through with the plow,” said the Hotel Vetro clerk. “So they wait for the snow to stop.”

Back home in New Jersey, we received notification from Ursinus College that Tom had been offered a $10,000 annual merit scholarship.
One of Tom’s friends had been dismissive of Ursinus. Since when is a 17-year-old suburban prep school kid the authority on colleges, I asked Tom. On the other hand, one of Jim’s partners had graduated from Ursinus.
“We’ve got to tour Ursinus, Tom,” I said.
We arranged to meet our son Mike, who lives nearby and attends law school at Villanova. Ursinus was another beautiful campus with venerable red-brick buildings co-mingling with shining new buildings, including a sports complex. This was the school that offers freshmen the chance to live in the dorm room where J.D. Salinger lived the one semester before he dropped out of Ursinus. Tom wasn’t impressed.

By mid-December, Tom had been accepted at St. John’s, Ursinus, Knox, and University of Iowa. By the end of January, he was saying his top three schools were St. John’s, Goucher, and Knox. By mid-March, he had also been accepted to Catholic (with a $14,000 scholarship), Goucher, Emerson in Boston (which Jay Leno attended), and Fairfield in Connecticut. He was deferred from early action at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, a very good school no one ever heard of.
My husband kept saying he had a gut feeling Tom would go to Providence College. (Jim thinks he’s psychic. The rest of the family knows he’s not.)

At some point in February, on a sunny Sunday when the whole world was dripping melting snow, Jim offered to drive us to Bard College, about an hour north of us on the New York State Thruway. We wandered through the campus, particularly the library. Afterwards, we stopped at a sports bar, where Tom said he had the best cheeseburger he’d ever eaten.
Tom then asked me to book him a real tour of campus. We toured early in March and chatted with a well-spoken associate admission director who looked just like Sigourney Weaver. (“Loved you in Aliens,” I wanted to say.)
Tom loved Bard’s emphasis on creative writing and creative endeavors of all kinds, including performing. The school also requires a three-week writing course for freshmen in August, called the Language and Thinking Program. And all seniors have a required senior project, which is bound into book form and kept in the library.
The students seemed quirky and free-wheeling. But the student body was large enough that Tom felt he wouldn’t be limited to the same small group of quirky folks.
The associate admission director said the college would send out acceptances and rejections the week of March 28.
“And they are all letter-size,” she said. “No big packages for acceptances and letter-size for rejections, the way other colleges do it.”

Tom decided that Bard was his first choice, but calculated his chances of acceptance as very low. "The Fiske Guide says Bard is highly selective," he said.

As March wound down, Tom got more acceptance letters, a few wait-list offerings (Fordham, Syracuse, Skidmore, Lawrence) and one rejection, from American. He also was offered a $15,000 annual merit scholarship to Chapman in California.

On Wednesday March 30, the mail brought a letter-size missive from Bard. I could feel cardboard inside. Was it a return postcard for the wait-list?
I waited until 2 pm, when Tom usually gets home. But he didn’t pull up the driveway. I ripped open the envelope. The cardboard was an ornate red sleeve that proclaimed in gilded letters:“Congratulations!”
I texted Tom, only the second text I’d ever done. U got into Bard.
Tom pulled up at 2:03. I walked to the driver’s window.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked.
“You were accepted at Bard!” I said.
“Very good, very good,” said Tom. He is very laid-back.

Applying to college is not only a drawn-out series of steps and forms and fees. It's a psychological process as well, for both child and parent. Like a pregnancy, it all seems so unreal in the beginning. You’ve always been together, living in the same family, bound by genes and proximity and shared history and stories of crazy uncles and aunts who were the bong queen.
And now you are taking steps to separate, to wake up on your own in the morning, find your own meals, do your own laundry, live your own life, be your own person.
Come back to the womb, the mother wants to shout. Let’s do this all over again. It was something, wasn’t it?

Here, by the way, is Tom’s college application essay. I think it's why he got into so many schools, despite his Math SATs.

There’s an old saying that goes,”Hire a teenager –while he still knows everything.”
Sarcasm aside, I could identify with the sentiment. I felt that nearly 12 years of classroom education had given me a broad and deep comprehension of the world around me.
My teachers spent years sharing their knowledge and perspectives and teaching me how to see society as a product of mathematics, morality, history, literature and science – the cornerstones of knowledge and civilization. My knowledge base gave me an unshakeable confidence and a sense that little was beyond my grasp.
And then I volunteered with Alzheimer’s patients at a Potomac Homes facility, and found myself in an existential crisis. What is the use of knowledge if you can’t get at it because of gunk in your brain? Who are you if you can’t remember who you are or what you’re doing?
My venture into the hazy minds of the nation’s elderly began as innocuously as one would expect. My mother drove me outside the building and with a sigh of good luck, let me off. I casually glanced at the surrounding buildings and approached the entrance. When I was buzzed in, the exterior gate burst open and immediately there stood before me a sight I would surely never forget: A 65-year-old woman in footie-pajamas. Unaware footie-pajamas were produced for anyone over 6 years of age, I was compelled to pay her a compliment. After all, they were the first and finest adult footie-pajamas I had ever seen. Looking her straight in the eye, I said “Miss, if I may be so bold. I should think you may very well be the best-dressed in this house.”
Unhesitatingly, she responded with a warm smile and an overwhelming hug. Before I could say another word, I was treated with what seemed like an endless flow of compliments. Told I was both “a beautiful daughter” and a “handsome son” and even in some cases “a wonderful mother,” I knew suddenly what these animated ladies lacked in accuracy they more than made up for in their desire to connect.
I pushed open the door with one hand and entered the house, my other arm occupied by the woman who had greeted me. As I entered the living room, an eclectic mix of smiles was cast my way, welcoming me into their realm. Having spoken with the house manager, I plopped myself and the woman in the footie-pajamas down on the couch. As if I were the missing link, the women surrounded me, studied me, prodded me, and bombarded me with questions. Eager to rise to the occasion, I answered their questions enthusiastically, even if I didn’t know the answer. Knowing that many of the answers they desired were embedded in a sorrowfully unavailable history, I painfully concluded my obligation to their momentary satisfaction superseded any to truth. Theirs was a world of uncertainty and I could make them happy, if only for a little while. The most common questions shot at me were “Who am I?”, “Are you my son?”, and “Where am I?”. Respectively, I would answer “A wonderful and charming woman,” “ No, I’m not handsome enough,” and “Right here with me, the luckiest kid in the world to have a moment of your time.”
Sweet beyond all measure, the house was a haven for my rapidly expanding ego. Indulged with praise and acclaim from every member of the house, I began to feel almost unworthy to be among such affection and warmth.
This is not to say there weren’t hostilities and power plays, subtle or outright. The lady in the footie-pajamas, Gladys, would often pick fights. Claiming she was the boss of the house, Gladys would threaten anyone who would approach me, saying “I run this place and I’ll have them kick you out lickety-split.”
When I would ask why she was being so hostile, she would say “Because you’re my daughter,” to which I would reply “Sounds reasonable.”
Over time, the antics and wit of these sharp-tongued women began to wane in amusement as stark reality set in for me. Deprived of many of their memories and much of what some would call identity, these women challenged my understanding of the human being. Slowly, I began to grow confused over what exactly constitutes the core of personhood. Like a painting broken down into tiny pieces, I studied their mental profiles in the hopes of gaining some defined sense of humanity.
I asked them questions about current events they’d been told about but couldn’t remember. I queried them about a past that was at best a tenuous string of random events. I began to pity them. I began to dread that condition. I began to fear what they represented – the slow deterioration and prolonged death of the mind. School hadn’t prepared me for this physical and psychological draining away. If the condition of the immortal soul was dependent upon the character of the mortal mind, how could the soul be eternal? And, in the here and now, what is the self if you can’t remember the last 5 or 10 years of your life, or who or where you are?
I became angry and frustrated by the lack of answers until one day I finally realized that I could deny their mental stability but I couldn’t deny the fact that they were eagerly and happily partaking in questioning me, like scientists with limited tools. Despite what I said or what I confessed, they looked at me in the same admirable light, giving me the same caring and considerate compliments, and loving me regardless of who I was. I realized the disorder didn’t wear away their personality; it winnowed away what wasn’t their personality. Time and their condition allowed them to revert to who they really were, not bound by lies or past, but liberated into the ever-present. These ladies were not to be pitied. They were to be enjoyed as they enjoyed everyone else.
My time at Potomac Homes put me in crisis, but ultimately gave me a new comprehension and admiration for the human spirit. Experience was my teacher; hardened thought and preconceptions needed to be burned away, unlearned.
Good schooling can give you the tools to mine experience for truth and to be of service to others. I look to college to delve further into great thoughts and great minds, while understanding that the experience of curiosity and concern for and connection to others are the greatest tools for lifelong learning---even if you’re a little hazy about who you are.

When did our children get older than we are?

It was April 5, 1981, a Sunday. I was working for Channel 5 News in New York City and heading to a shoot with my camera crew when the voice of the assignment editor crackled over the radio.
“Mary, your mother called,” he said. “Your sister had the baby.”
“Which sister?” I asked.
“What?’ he replied.
“Which sister?” I reiterated.
“Dunno,” he said.
Margaret and Marian, my identical twin sisters two and a half years younger than I, had gotten pregnant roughly the same week on two different continents. Margaret was in Portugal with her husband Greg. Marian was living in Tucson with her husband Michael (or “Benny”, as we call him) and her toddler son Michael.
By the time they were ready to deliver, Margaret and Marian were both in Tucson. As it turned out, Marian gave birth first, to Louis Rocco (named after his maternal and paternal grandfathers).
On April 9, Margaret gave birth to her first child, Hannah Leah, named after her maternal great-grandmother Hannah Hickey.
Margaret and Marian roomed together at the hospital. There was some sibling rivalry, as I recall. Baby Louis initially had some problems, as I recall, including a big bump on his head. But those issues resolved.
We Amoroso girls have always been wild for babies, and there was much rejoicing over the double blessing of two new family seedlings.
Louis and Hannah didn’t really grow up together. Hannah’s family lived in Romania for two different periods, because Hannah’s dad had diplomatic postings. And they moved to the Washington, DC area, since Greg worked for the Department of State.
Louis’ family lived mostly in Arizona, though there was a 5-year period when they lived in Northern New York so that they could be near Marian’s family.
Many of us were in Maryland for Hannah’s graduation from St Mary’s College in 2003. I remember Margaret introducing us to her new in-laws from her second marriage.
My own firstborn, Matthew, who joined the pack in 1982, became very close to his cousin Lou, and they traveled through Europe together in their early 20s. Matt moved to Phoenix to live with Lou for a short time.
Lou went to work in the restaurant industry. His strong work ethic and sunny disposition have helped him advance.
After college, Hannah went back to school at Johns Hopkins to get her bachelor of science degree in nursing. She works as a surgical nurse and has had graduate training in nursing informatics (using computer technology in nursing).
Hannah lives with her boyfriend Brad in a beautifully renovated rowhouse in Baltimore. Louis patiently waded through the process of buying a “short sale” home outside of Chandler, AZ and now owns a hacienda with pool that he purchased for half its original price.
I have gotten to spend time with Hannah in recent years at my house during the holidays and at Margaret’s house in Maryland for Hannah’s twin nieces’ birthday party in May. Hannah is smart and drole and feisty, and she is the great beauty of the family (although her sisters are right up there in the looks department).
I have seen a lot less of Louis, because he is so far West. But he was here for my son Matt’s wedding, and I am happy to report that he remains a sunny, easy-going guy with awesome people skills. This is the boy whose mother insisted he was potty-trained when he was only two and who peed on my rugs. I guess it added character to the rugs.
And now Louis and Hannah turn 30 this week. They are both responsible and full of life, and are on track to put their elders into nursing homes when we dodder off into the sunset.
Happy birthday, you full-grown flowers of our family.