The Diploma I Earned at 64

What Eric Did Not Say

In those two years, Eric never once asked me about school.

I do not mean he was cruel about it. After that Easter he never brought it up again at all, not to make fun of it and not to ask.

It was as if I had never said anything, as if I were still just Mom who retired from the school kitchen and now had more time to babysit.

At Thanksgiving my first year, Amy asked me how my classes were going.

I started to tell her about the bait shop project, and Eric got up and went outside to check on the turkey fryer, which did not need checking.

At Christmas, Ray brought it up. He said, at the table, in front of everybody, “Your mother made the dean’s list.”

It was the first time Ray had said anything about it to Eric. I knew it cost him something. It was the “next time” he had promised me in the truck.

Eric said, “That’s great, Mom,” without looking up. Then he asked Ray if he had seen the Vikings game, and that was the end of it.

I was hurt. I will not pretend I was not. I lay awake that night next to Ray and I said to the ceiling, “I don’t know what I did.”

Ray said, “I don’t think it’s about you.” I asked him what he meant, and he said he did not know, he just did not think it was about me.

I thought about that for a long time afterward. I did not figure it out. It turned out I did not have all the pieces.

Jacob

My grandson Jacob was different from his father in that one way, and it surprised all of us.

In Minnesota, high school kids can take college classes for free during their junior and senior years, through a program the state pays for.

Jacob signed up for it his senior year. He did not tell his parents until the paperwork needed a signature.

So by my second fall, Jacob was riding to the same college three days a week in his own little car, a rusted blue sedan he bought with his summer money from detasseling and the lumberyard. He took English and biology and a psychology class.

Sometimes we ate lunch together in the commons. He would bring a sack from the gas station and I would bring a sandwich from home and an extra one for him, because no grown boy can live on a gas station sack. He always ate the extra one.

He asked me about my classes. That was the thing. He asked. He wanted to know what depreciation was. He wanted to know what Kenzie was like.

He asked whether I was scared the first day, and I told him the truth, which was yes, and that I packed my lunch twice.

He laughed at that. Then he said, “I was scared too. My first day here. I almost turned around in the parking lot.”

I said, “But you didn’t.” He said, “No. I thought about you on the bus at six-thirty and figured I could probably handle it.”

I did not know he knew about the bus. I asked him who told him. He said, “Grandpa. He tells everybody at the co-op.” I had to set my sandwich down for a minute.

That was how I found out Ray had been bragging about me at the scale house for a year and a half. To farmers. To truck drivers.

To anybody waiting on a weight ticket. The man would not say three words about it at the supper table, but he told half the county.