UCLA, Class of 2021

Fifty years ago, semi-active in the back of my mind, was a vision of attending UCLA. Then the vision activated a soapy, silly short story of an undersized, Dvision III college quarterback transferring to UCLA after his little upstate college abandoned its football program, much as my dream of abandoning the winter barrens of Binghamton for the sunny clime of southern California, while living the life of a successful college quarterback playing in the Rose Bowl. In one ironic twist, one of the opponents for my fictitious career was the University of Kansas, where I would end up on the Memorial Stadium football field ten years later, not as a football hero, but as a finalist for the Kansas faculty HOPE award in 1980.

So when Gaby earned acceptance at UCLA in March 2017 (one of a class of 8,000 first-year students out of more than 100,000 applicants), my joy for her echoed in joy for my long-past aspirations to attend UCLA. So I became a UCLA dad rather than a student, or an alum. In many respects, I think the reality was much better than my short story. And seeing Gaby walk across the graduation stage in Drake Stadium in four days is a much better outcome, for both of us.

I would not have handled UCLA well had I attended in 1969. The transportation costs alone would have been a major challenge and, assuming I made it there, it is hard for me to imagine how I would have managed life on campus and in Westwood, with limited resources and a sea of 30,000 plus UCLA undergraduates, even with the sunny weather, the opportunities, and the adrenaline that, I must also assume, would have likely converted shortly after my arrival into sheer terror, a fear of failing, a profound sense of loneliness, an inability to fit in, and the struggle to just pay the bills, even with California tuition a small fraction of what it is today (over $40,000 a year for out-of-state students). My $1,000 American Legion scholarship probably would have paid for my plane ticket to Los Angeles, maybe even just one way each year. And the idea of coming home at Christmas would have been a significant challenge.

Another irony is that my Binghamton last (1973-74) college room mate, Gary Levine, now lives in Santa Monica, and we will dine with wife Maxine and Gary two days from now, in an approximate way of coming full circle with that 1970 dream.

The end of this week, which is also the end of this four-year journey for Gaby, one that really started when we asserted ourselves into a UCLA campus admissions tour group during an impromptu visit in April 2016 and carried through four years of fires, earthquakes, a pandemic, and 24-hour take home exams, will be a real joy for me, perhaps the best moment of 2021 for me, not just Gaby, and the remarkable close to twenty years of paying private (Catholic) or out-of-state public tuition for Jane and Gaby, and more appropriately the real commencement of true empty nesting for Dena and me, as Gaby moves to New York city and Jane continues her Alaska sojourn, both so far in time and geography from their years living with us at 601 Oak Farm Court.

First Jane, with her Marquette international affairs and Spanish degree and honors just three years ago and now Gaby, with her UCLA applied mathematics and computing degree, graduating with a GPA almost identical to mine from May 1973.

Dena and I leave ATW at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday and return five days later, at 9:00, with four nights at the Luskin Conference Center hotel and one sleepy red eye leaving LAX late Sunday night. Diar arrives LAX Thursday at 12:15 p.m., Jane twenty-four hours later, from Juneau. There will be meals, the Drake Stadium walk, and a five-hour party on iconic Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills Saturday afternoon.

As 'they' say, the culmination of a dream....