Parents Weekend

The leaves fall every October on the gorgeously landscaped green of Ohio University, the setting of our next unfortunately true story. It’s a quaint college town straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie. Exposed brick adorns the architecture, and local businesses line Court Street, where students descend every year to buy their schoolbooks. It’s where I spent my first two years of college and home to one of the biggest Halloween parties in the country. In such a Gilmore Girls-esque town filled with artisanal coffee shops and young adults fighting the Ohio chill with oversize sweatshirts, it’s shocking to see nearly thirty thousand partygoers dressed like Austin Powers and promiscuous nurses every October 31. The beauty of Ohio University is the yin and the yang of the town. It’s cozy and beautiful yet filled with debaucherous students drinking like fish. I’m talking the biggest boozers in the world. I’ve never seen humans drink the way they do in Athens, Ohio.

College and drinking go together like mac and cheese. Young people are finally free from the shackles of their parents and surrounded by coeds their age who are all looking to socialize. They have four-ish years to do keg stands and power hours, theme parties and ice luges. Ohio University turns the hobby of drinking into a sport, and the students are some of the best alcohol athletes in the entire world.

Not only are the Halloweens wild, but there are various other weekends that are strictly boozing holidays. Street festivals where your entire job is to black out and family weekends where relatives and loved ones come to visit, stay in the dorms, and wake up without a memory of the night before. Many of the students come from a long line of Ohio University grads, so the parents get to arrive in Athens and relive their youth on these special occasions. They drink as much as if not more than their kids, and you often see moms falling down the stairs, dads hitting on their kid’s friends, and bar tabs reaching the high heavens. My parents, Linda and Gary, visited together my sophomore year and couldn’t quite hang like some of their contemporaries.

Mom and Dad drove down on a Saturday afternoon from their Cleveland suburb. Dad had a green-and-white football jersey, and Mom brought me fall word art to hang in my dorm: a wooden sign that listed autumnal buzzwords in various fonts. Pumpkin. Football. Patch. Grateful. Apples. Autumn. Leaves. Bonfire. Harvest. Pie. Sweater. Hot Cocoa. Hayrides. And in the center? Home.

“Dan, I brought you this for your room. A little slice of home for when you miss us,” Mom said as she leaned the cheap frame against my combination microwave-refrigerator.

“So what kind of trouble are we getting into?” Dad asked.

“We missed the football game, but my roommates got a table at one of the places on Court Street, so we can meet them there and eat!”

“Should I change? What kind of restaurant is it?”

OU didn’t really have restaurants, just dive bars that served pizza and a little buggy that made burritos until 2:00 a.m. That’s about it. I lived with three straight guys who started drinking early with their folks, and I knew Gary and Linda wouldn’t be able to imbibe for long, so it was a good thing we were running a bit behind the rest of our group. By the time we arrived at the bar, my friends had a booth and a handful of empty beer steins in front of them.

“Danny! Over here!” my roommate yelled when he saw us walk in the door.

I nodded and pulled my parents aside, away from the crowd.

“Now, look, OU students can get a bit wild—”

“You think Mom and Dad are too square for your cool new friends, huh?” Dad said.

“No, I just want you to be prepared because a lot of the parents drink with their kids, and I know I’m not twenty-one, but—”

“I’ll have a brewski with my son, no problem.”

“Gary! He’s underage!” Mom argued.

“I don’t have to drink. I just wanted to tell you everyone else might be a little wild.”

“Hold on, Dan. I think I got gum on my shoe,” Mom said as she looked down at the underside of her Nina Wests.

“It’s not gum. The floor is just sticky.”

“Why would we go somewhere with a sticky floor?”

“Every place here has a sticky floor,” I told her.

Mom didn’t go to college, so she largely missed out on the experience of sticky bar flooring. She met my dad when she was eighteen, and they married before she even turned twenty-one. She was pregnant with my oldest brother when other people her age were walking to stage in their caps and gowns. My two older brothers went on to undergraduate learning, but their college experiences were a bit different from mine. They bypassed the dorms and went to a school that wasn’t as isolated as Ohio University. My oldest brother didn’t live on campus, and my middle brother played basketball, so he was usually traveling or practicing when other students were taking part in parents weekend or pledge week. My dad and I were the only ones who experienced a traditional college lifestyle.

When we sat with my friends and their parents, Dad fit right in with the crowd. He ordered a Blue Moon and started chatting everyone up like they were longtime besties.

“Can I get a glass of your house red over ice?” Mom asked the server as she took off her jacket.

As the drinks flowed, each mom began to tell the tales of their wild nights. To get to know each other, they shared intimate details about what they were like before parenting.

“I got so drunk one time, I woke up the next morning in the middle of a cornfield,” Tonya said.

“That’s nothing. I was so drunk one night, I ended up puking in the back of a cop car,” Harriet added.

“My son better close his ears for this one, because one time during my junior year, I screwed the entire floor of a frat house. Five guys. Like the burger joint,” Trish said.

Each mom story topped the previous, one-upping the others in their drunken glory. The only mom left at the table to tell a boozy tale was Linda Pellegrino. I tried to change the subject, knowing Mom probably didn’t have anything as juicy as the others, but she chimed in over me to fit in with the crowd…

“Well, my Danster doesn’t know this, but my husband, Gary, and I went to a wedding a while back, and my best friend, Chris, was at our table. Chris went to the bar, and she came back with two drinks. She said, Lin, I got you a drink. It’s called a Long Island iced tea.’ I thought it was like Lipton! So I took one sip, and then I immediately turned to my husband and said, Gar, we have got to go. And then we left. Before they even did cake!”

Everyone at the table’s eyes lingered on my mom, waiting for the rest of her story, but she was done. There was no rest of the story. That was it. A wise prophet (Kathie Lee Gifford) once said that everyone has a story, and Linda’s ended with a car ride home and a mostly full Long Island iced tea that was not, in fact, like the Lipton she was used to.

As time goes on, I find myself morphing into my parents and even inheriting some stray qualities from the generation prior. I fold gently used tinfoil to use later like Grandma Rose, I swear like Dad, and I quite often find myself being fully satisfied with just one glass of red over ice like Mom.