Our apartment was around the corner from where Maddy lived at the time, and while we didn’t plan it that way, we’d gotten to know the neighborhood and liked it. Their experiences, along with Maddy’s gap-year internship for a fashion designer in NYC, sealed Richard’s midlife crisis decision to sell our house in Albany and squeeze into a tiny NYC apartment full-time. Rather, he ended up in New York City, and when Maddy graduated in 2014, she followed her friends to New York City as well. I told Richard, “Had he chosen to study that weekend, he would have ended up in our basement.” He called up one of his friends from that IU party weekend, and his connection landed him a job. But that was the Tea Party election and in early November found himself out of work. Derrick had graduated and took a staff job for a Democratic congressional campaign in 2010. They had fun, but Richard and I wondered why Derrick didn’t spend what was probably his only non-party weekend on his campus catching up on classwork.įlash forward four years.

One of them had a friend at Indiana University, so they showed up there for a big party. It was tempting to interfere, especially when Derrick proudly told us that he and some friends faced a slow weekend party-wise at Emory, so they went to the airport in Atlanta, asked about the cheapest last minute round trip ticket, and bought ones to Indianapolis for $40 each. As a college professor, Richard occasionally encountered both of these parental types and therefore stood aside as Derrick and Maddy went off to college and made their own choices. Or Snowplow Parents, clearing the path so their children don’t encounter obstacles in the first place. Much has been written about Helicopter Parents, hovering over their youngsters, guiding their every move and trying to resolve every problem.

Derrick and Maddy at their grandmother’s house in Queens, 2007.

The runaway bunny