In a family way: Good morning. Now what?
June 15, 2009 by Erika Stutzman
Filed under In a Family Way
The Wall Street Journal recently challenged academic leaders to answer their own admission essay question. One question spoke more to me than all the artful prose in response.
Barnard College: “Please describe a daily routine or tradition of yours that may seem ordinary to others but holds special meaning for you. Why is this practice significant to you?”
A half-dozen personal routines spring to mind, each distinct and so defined I can practically smell them.
W
hen I reminisce about my life — the entire thing up to this very day — I think about the morning.
I’m still in my footie pajamas, and my siblings and I wake up earlier than everyone to sneak downstairs to read the comics, and play Donkey Kong on our TV game console. Years pass. Now I’m in middle school and then high school, sitting at the kitchen island with my father. My mom prepares cold cereal or Wonder Bread toast, and my dad and I read the entire newspaper together, cover to cover.
It smells like flavored coffee, sticky-sweet Apple Jacks and the Aqua Net hairspray that keeps my spiral perm aloft.
More newspapers follow, scattered on the cold floor of my dorm room, on the table at my sorority house, around the living room of my college apartment, which is so close to the Chicago El train that the windows rattle every 15 minutes.
A first job beckons out East. I work for a newspaper and I live in a little cottage alone, for what turns out to be the first and last time so far. There are no siblings to play with, no father to discuss the news with, no roommates rushing about. I wake hours before work, slowly and methodically making coffee with the cappuccino maker my future in-laws gave me for graduation, and reading every page of two or three newspapers.
It is so quiet.
Flash forward 14 years.
There are more toys on the floor than I care to admit — evidence of our failure to contain last night’s fun. I try to read sections of the newspaper; now there are two little doggies and a 1-year-old competing for space on them. I turn a page, and furry paws or chubby little baby feet stomp all over the headlines. My cell phone is ringing, my TweetDeck is chirping, my husband is talking over the television, which is tuned to a rousing “Olivia,” to which a 4-year-old cheerfully sings along. Loudly.
I would never have pictured this chaos, mess and noise; I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I imagine a future routine, though if history is my guide it won’t look anything like I imagine it now. The children will be grown and gone, maybe with children of their own, their happy households littered with too many toys and happy careers littered with too many obligations. I won’t have anywhere to rush off to, no pressing professional obligations pulling at my attention and my time.
These morning routines — coffee and newspapers, really — are so ordinary and common. But my memories of them contain everyone I hold dear.
Media prognosticators keep telling me that print is either dead or dying; I hope not. In those faraway future mornings, I want to sit next to my husband, sip my coffee and read my papers. I’ll finally have time to get through them. I’ll think about all those long-ago mornings with my parents, with myself, with my little girls who are growing up so fast it makes my head spin, and I will smile.
