Sharon Harrigan

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Thirty-two


The other day I went to a birthday party for a friend. That morning, I told my son about it. “She’s turning thirty-two,” I said. “So young.”

Predictably, he said, “Seems pretty old to me.” To a seventeen-year-old, when you’re thirty-two you’re practically in your grave.

I know how he feels, actually.

Thirty-two was the year when I felt the oldest, when every day my mortality hit me more keenly than it ever has before or since. It is the age my father was when he died, and it still seems strange that I should live to be older than he ever will be.

By

Scary Night

As darkness overcame Charlottesville, vampires, zombies, and witches trolled the streets, followed by a few frighteningly cute ballerinas and creepily kitschy Pillsbury Dough Boys. But for me, the real scary moment came when I watched my seventeen-year-old son click the “Submit” button on his college application.

When the application process began, I vowed to be hands off, a promise my son reminded me of daily. I would let him make his own choices, write his own essays. And I did.

Yet it’s hard to let go. I want to tell the Admissions Committee about this person I have lived with and cared so deeply for all his life, but there is no place on the application for me.

I want to tell them about the time last summer when my son called me from his job as counselor at a sleepaway camp. “One of my campers had an asthma attack in the night and the other counselor took him to the emergency room,” my son said. “Now I’m in charge of the whole cabin by myself.” He called me again two days later, in the same situation. He told me about helping one of his campers with dialysis and recounted the story of another boy who started the session having tantrums every time he didn’t want to move from one activity to another. None of the other counselors wanted to discipline this troubled boy, especially since he was the son of one of the camp trustees. My son said, “At first I couldn’t stand the kid. But then I realized he just wanted attention. He was homesick.” He sat with the boy and described his favorite foods—stacks of pancakes dripping with syrup—and gradually the boy came around, and the tantrums stopped. “After that, he became one of my favorite kids,” my son said.

But the story of moving from child to parental figure is not the one my son wanted to tell about himself. Instead, he wrote about overcoming his fear of insects after watching the creatures treated with reverence and made beautiful through the lens of a Terence Malik film. He also wrote about the short distance between “harasser” and “enforcer” at the camp waste stations, after moving from one role to the next in a year. He described seeing his former self—his ghost, perhaps, since he wrote it on Halloween—in the mischievous smirks of the kids who kept trying to get away with ever more elaborate pranks.

He wrote about how he sees himself, not how I see him. And that is how it should be. Dear Admissions Committee, I hope you agree.

By

Basil

The basil, waning in my garden at the end of its season, reminds me of the first basil I ever planted. Nine years ago, I filled a pot with a seedling and kept it in a sunny corner of the back deck. I had just moved into the first non-apartment of my adult life, a charming hundred-year-old, two-family rowhouse in Brooklyn. John, our contractor (and my husband’s second cousin), was renovating our kitchen. The basil grew like a tree.

When the kitchen was finished, the basil died. I can’t believe I was naive enough to think the two events were coincidences. John set me straight and told me he had been watering the plants twice a day.

What strikes me about this anecdote (besides how foolish I was) is how John’s behind-the-scenes helpfulness is like what parents do every day. John had every reason to believe I would be savvy enough to continue to water, but I wasn’t. I want to be careful not to assume that my children will know how to take over the invisible work my husband and I do every day to keep their lives running.

By

Money (II)

“Are we middle class?” my eight-year-old daughter Ella asked me.

“Yes. Why?”

“At camp, when I told one of my cabin mates we don’t have cable TV, she said we must be really poor.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“That we just don’t think it’s worth the money, but she didn’t believe me. She wanted to know if we don’t have a phone or refrigerator, either.”

Later that day, Ella watched me pull the New Yorker out of the mailbox. The cover showed a ship like the Titanic sinking while men in tuxedos smoke cigars and drink champagne in a lifeboat, laughing at the demise of the suckers left behind.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

I explained how we’re “all in the same boat,” the middle class and poor people, as the rich escape the recession unscathed, even better off. “The gap between the very rich and everybody else has never been greater than before the Great Depression,” I said, quoting my economist husband.

I showed Ella the book her dad was reading, Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Since we don’t have the distraction of cable TV, I should be able to find time to read this book and give Ella numerous examples of how that New Yorker cover is a picture of twenty-first century America.

But all you have to do is read the newspaper—with stories daily about how companies selling $250,000 playhouses and renting private jets for summer camp visits are booming—to see that the very rich are weathering the shipwreck of the recession.

“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Ella asked.

It’s hard to explain to a child why income inequality is allowed to grow unchecked. But I tried: “Because it’s in the best interests of the very richest people, and they have enough money to buy political influence.”

From her face, I could tell it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Ella is a patriotic girl, wrapped up in a halter dress that looks like a flag. I thought she wanted her country, like her parents, to remain infallible, at least for a few more years.

But maybe I was putting too many of my thoughts in her head. “What I meant,” she said. “is why can’t we get cable TV?”