[elder cooking / college tour]
So, Kavi and I are spending spring break at my parents’ house. My mother, you may remember, has advanced dementia and is in a memory care facility; we’ll be visiting her tomorrow, but she’s unlikely to recognize us. She knows a friendly face, though, and we’re very lucky that she has loving sisters nearby who visit her close to daily, bringing her lunches of familiar Sri Lankan food.
We’re also lucky that my dad has recently found a cook / housekeeper — mostly cook. She’s an older Sri Lankan widow who won the green card lottery (she applied seven times!), and is now working for him, making sure he has delicious, familiar, nutritious food.
Yesterday for lunch, for example, she made him pittu (the breakfast food of his childhood), and later, made several vegetable dishes for him, and some beef & potato curry (my favorite) for me. Not as good as Amma’s cooking — or at least, not the same. But Amma was a superlative cook, and Rathy Aunty (as we call her) is very good. And of course, it’s nice for my dad to have someone he can talk to, instead of being completely alone in this big house (which he loves).
I wish it were easier to find eldercare for immigrants that offered competently cooking their home culture foods. It makes such a difference.
***
I think if I spent much more time here, my Tamil would improve too, as she speaks some English, but mostly Tamil. I understand a fair bit of Sri Lankan Tamil (very different from Indian Tamil, after 2000 years of divergence), but I have to keep asking her to speak more slowly, and occasionally asking my dad to translate. And I can’t speak hardly at all. Being around her forces me to practice. (My Spanish has gotten notably better since I started my shop at Sprout, in a majority Hispanic neighborhood.)
Sunday when I arrived, my dad had invited two young Sinhalese families to lunch — he loves to host, and he can finally do so again. It’s a lovely, symbiotic relationship — they have a well-established older Sri Lankan to advise and help them out in this new country, and he has young people who love to listen to his stories. (I get my storytelling skill from my dad.) They’re also super-respectful to their elders by American standards, which I’m sure is nice for him. 
Monday, my elementary school friend Dan Foster came by to help me make some sense of my parents’ financial / legal situation — their paperwork is very complicated, and very tedious, made harder by the fact the my sisters and I all live out of town, and because we need to use Amma’s signed power of attorney to close her old accounts — it just slows down the process a lot. I start feeling like I’m drowning in papers, but I do think we’re making progress. Slowly. Maybe I can come back for a few days this summer and do some more.
*****
Yesterday was all college tour with Kavi — no pics of her, but you can scroll back in my feed for the Mt. Holyoke pics. I got sort of nostalgic for Miss Porter’s School walking around — it had a VERY similar vibe. It’s still on Kavi’s list, but I’m afraid it’s not near the top, mostly because although it’s very pretty, it feels VERY quiet to her.
Our Kavya likes to party. (Not in the drugs and alcohol sense, though, thankfully.) She likes to go out to do fun urban things with a big crowd of friends, and there’s just not much of that in tiny South Hadley (a few good restaurants, one or two good coffeeshops, a movie theater). Even if she takes the bus (or we get her a car and she drives) 15-20 minutes to Amherst or Northampton, they still seem pretty quiet to her.
***
I was realizing yesterday that she’s been a little spoiled — Oak Park is really a fabulous place to live (which we knew). She has a 30 minute walk home from high school, for example, and along the way, she can either go mostly through parks and quiet neighborhoods…
…OR she can go down some of the main streets, in which case she’ll be passing two dozen very good restaurants, several coffeeshops, a bunch of clothing and jewelry stores, cute boutiques and housewares (granted, she’s not as excited by those), a movie theater — and a block or two further west, and she hits major drugstores, Target, and big grocery stores.
And if all that isn’t enough, she can hop on the subway in downtown Oak Park, and be in the heart of Chicago in 30 minutes (which she does pretty often these days). It’s going to be hard for most college towns to compare.
I think if you’re a homebody who appreciates a really beautiful campus, and will be happy doing student clubs for your entertainment, Mt. Holyoke would be a lovely place to nest, but I’m not sure it’s for Kavi.
***
Also, her high school was 3400 people, and Mt. Holyoke is 2300, and she’s having a hard time with the idea of going to a smaller college than her high school. We’ve been trying to convince her to really consider it, that it probably won’t feel small and empty, but it’s a bit of a tough sell.
She’s got two more small liberal arts colleges on her list: Kalamazoo and Oberlin. We’re planning to tour Kalamazoo this month (student population 1200, so even smaller!), since it’s in an actual city, and apparently there are lots of student activities (sports games, etc.) with the big state school right next door. Maybe that’ll be a happy medium for her?
***
She’s also looking at some mid-size and big schools. It’s funny — I never found big state schools appealing (I was a geek, and the popular / sports kids bullied me some), but Kavi is a popular girl, and she thinks she’d be perfectly happy at a big state school, maybe joining a sorority.
I am having visions of heavy drinking and roofies at frat parties, but Kavi is cautious, so I’m trying not to freak out too much about that. Just a little mental culture clash happening here — but in the end, we want her to go where SHE’LL be happy, not where WE’D be happy. Complicated.
Kevin assures me that there are pre-med sororities. Maybe that’ll be the happy medium — a group of girls who enjoy makeup and dressing up and taking selfies, but who also know they need to hit the books and skip a party sometimes, if they want to get into med school?
***
With weather notes (if no note, similar to Chicago):
Big schools : U Wisconsin-Madison, UC Davis (warmer than here, less winter), UIUC.
Mid-size schools: UC Denver (lots of sunshine) Loyola-Marymount (S. Cal beach).
Small: Kalamazoo, Oberlin, Mt. Holyoke
We’ve gotten the best merit funding offers from UIUC and Kalamazoo (significantly better than anywhere else), so that will factor in too.
We have about a month to tour as many of these as we can fit in the schedule. She has three wait-lists, but apparently very few kids get in off the wait list, so I think we’re probably not going to count on those. We haven’t heard from a few reaches yet, but expect those to be no.
***
We applied to a LOT of schools, as you can see. In retrospect, I think we could have skipped some of the safeties, but generally, I think applying to a lot was a good choice for us — Kavi’s had some ups and downs in her high school grades, and we just really weren’t sure where she was likely to be a contender.
If you’re thinking of applying to a lot of schools, remember that you can request to have application fees waived if they’re a financial hardship. My impression is that they’ll usually say yes, if you qualify for need-based aid.
I’ll probably do another post or two on these as we tour over the next month, so if you’re fascinated by it all, keep an eye out. Amusingly, one tour weekend, Kavi has a fake baby for her child development class, so we’ll be driving hours in the car with a crying fake baby. That will be fun.
This has all been much more complex and stressful than I remember it being when I applied! My parents weren’t involved with my application process at all, and I don’t think they’ve ever thanked me for that. (I had a great college advisor at Porter’s, which helped.)
*****
Plan for today — I’m really behind on some of my own paperwork, so I’m going to sit in my childhood bedroom and put my head down over my laptop and try to get through the worst of it.
Alternating with a little knitting and Elementary when I need a break. Though I knit for an hour yesterday, and ended up ripping it all out — it’s been a while since I used this kind of yarn, and I didn’t allow enough tail for my long-tail cast-on, and THEN I knit too tightly, so that it was very difficult trying to work into the stitches.
There’s a recommendation to use two needles to address that problem, but then I think maybe I need to allow even more yarn for my cast on…hopefully I won’t have to rip out 180 stitches a THIRD time. Wish me luck!
Kavi has gone off to the office with my dad; she’s going to shadow him today. She promised to send me a selfie of them in their matching lab coats, so we’ll see if she holds up her end of the bargain…
