Mijn zoon is afgestudeerd!
My son graduated from uni and spent his last summer before adulthood with me
At the end of May, I returned to the US to attend Henry’s graduation ceremony at the University of Delaware, along with a large contingency of family: moms, dad, aunts, uncles, cousins and even two grandmas - one of them my mom. They came from all over the country to Henry’s little college town of Newark to celebrate, which I know meant a lot to him. As is my wont whenever I visit him, I spent a full day cleaning the disgusting house that he shares with his three roommates. It was all in preparation for a massive backyard blowout after the official graduation ceremony, one in which I would have to prep and cook for 30-40 people on a very old propane grill that is prone to occasional grease fires.
Learning to like graduation
Truth be told, I briefly considered not going to my son’s graduation. That sounds heartless, I know, but I’m not a fan of graduation ceremonies.
I didn’t attend my own ceremony at the University of Georgia. Which is not to say that I didn’t celebrate, once I finally finished. I grew more then than at any other time in my life during university, and I was extremely satisfied and proud of all of the time I spent bettering myself, reading literature and expanding my mind. I had a blast and learned a lot, but what is the point of buying all of these caps and gowns that are never going to be worn again? Such a waste.
I also didn’t attend a single football game while I was at school in Athens, which is a difficult achievement (subchievement?) because they are absolutely crazy about their Georgia Bulldawgs. However, I did cook and serve a lot of annoying drunk alumni their food after many football games, which reinforced my attitude that I didn’t want to be stuck in a stadium with 90,000 of them.
A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success.
– Robert Orban
Most of my liberal arts student friends in Athens also didn’t bother going to their graduation ceremonies, although the fact that so many of us took five or even six years to graduate may have had something to do with that. Nearly all of us had to pay for some or all of our education, which required a lot of work in service jobs, so it’s not surprising that me and my friends were not on a four-year track to finish school “on time”. Few of us even knew what kind of work we would eventually be doing. Most of us weren’t even sure in which direction we would light out once school was over, me included.
Generational shifts and drifts
This is in stark contrast to Henry’s friends at university. Most of them that I’ve met have chosen a business-related major that will quickly shuttle them into some kind of corporate job, which they angle for through college internship programs. Henry is no exception, pursuing a degree in Finance with the idea of working in the banking world, this despite the fact that he was never very good at math, just like his father. As a child, he initially learned math at French school and then had to switch back to learning more advanced math later in English, so he has a much better excuse than me for being bad at math. Maybe he just needs to get a banking job in Paris, I suggest. I continually make these kinds of hints to him as he plots his future. It’s all part of my selfish attempt to woo him toward a life in Europe.
It’s hard to blame Henry’s generation for considering university as a gateway to gainful employment instead of as a time for deep learning. Once they’ve completed their pro forma degree, they want to focus on certainty and security rather than following their bliss. They see how stacked the deck is against them financially in all of the statistics. They’re worried they’ll never be able to buy a house. They wanna make some money.
Yet, it still makes me slightly despondent to listen to them speak about their future imagined lives, which I always ask them about because I like to ask a lot of probing questions. While chatting with Henry’s friends during graduation week, I heard a lot of talk about their next five years, and I heard a lot of carefully plotted work hurdles and smart financial decisions that probably lead to a house and kids in the suburbs surprisingly quickly. “But what about finding yourself and fulfilling unreasonable dreams?” I always want to ask them.
In other words, I hung out with a crew of GenX restaurant workers, amateur musicians, and slackers, any one of whom would drop everything for a cross-country road trip just because it sounded fun, but Henry hangs with a (literal rowing) crew of GenZ mainstream achievers and salesmen-in-training who see the ever-widening divide between rich and poor in America and are going to make damn sure they don’t land on the poor side. My crew didn’t bother showing up to graduation, but Henry’s crew had been taking celebratory group photos in their caps and gowns for weeks in the run-up to the grand ceremony, and I assume posting them on Tik-Tok.
Even though I wasn’t a fan of sitting in a brutally hot concrete stadium at the beginning of summer to listen to an NFL player give a commencement speech that was probably written by AI, these mainstream kids relished all of the details around the traditional American college experience, especially roof-raising graduation celebrations. Graduation was a big deal to them – and to Henry – so I gave in to the idea of attending his graduation relatively early, especially when I heard the all-star roster of family attendees who promised to attend, which included my mother. She, unlike me, is normal. She definitely wanted to go. I never invited her to my college graduation – because of course I didn’t even go. It would be an unforgivable folly to screw this up a second time, wouldn’t it?
For what it’s worth, I also didn’t attend my high school graduation or prom. I was a seriously sullen teen, more cynical than I am now, if that’s possible. I knew even back then that I wasn’t part of the mainstream and didn’t want to be. I was of the ilk who rarely attended any official school events. In some ways, I’m still that same too-cool-for-school refusenik. I’m such a grump that it’s a wonder anyone even wanted to invite me to this celebration. But I’m so glad they did because it was a banger of a family get together.
Lambert clan, assemble!
The truth is, I don’t enjoy going back to America. It’s too busy, too hot, with too much of everything, with the notable exception of restraint of any kind. The worst part about visiting the US is that getting to anything requires another ride in a goddamned car. I’m approaching five years of living in the Netherlands, and I still haven’t ridden inside an automobile while in my new adopted country – only bicycles and buses and trams and trains. I’d like to keep that streak going for as long as possible.
But of course, despite the many cars I had to ride inside during that graduation week, I had a wonderful time, like I always do when I stretch myself to be included in group gatherings. Henry’s crafty aunt Kristine made rub-on tattoos for everyone from one of my photos of Henry, and she brought her man Chris, who I also saw last year in Florence. He’s a smiley police detective who dresses surprisingly like me, like an All-American Boy in t-shirts and skinny jeans and retro 70s sneakers. His mother, Leslie, brought a tiny little printer so we could print out photos from our phones, which we festooned everywhere in a celebration of my son’s achievement.
I reconnected with my ultra-successful, jet-setting niece Sami, the one with the top-secret government job, who I met up with in London earlier this year when she was there on a state visit. My Julliard drop-out nephew Jake, the creative musical genius, played his usual outstanding role as stand-up comedian (he literally did that as a teenager in high school). He brought a friend with him, his fun and wry roommate Neil, a singer and actor in a traveling musical. This led to many late-night sing-a-longs with Henry’s California New Age grandma Celedra, who is becoming forgetful in her old age, which has a wonderful side effect: She is radiant and excited whenever she hears one of her favourite songs, even if she just heard it 10 minutes ago (“When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day”). She’s become a fountain of joy in her old age, and it is infectious to be around. William, her man, a kind, creative soul, takes good care of her.
All week, the jokes flew fast, the laughter flew faster, and we shared our top memories of Henry’s upbringing. Grandpa Earl even came all the way up from the depths of the Florida peninsula. Most importantly, my mom had a blast, which is as it should be, and perhaps could have been for my own graduation, had I cared enough about family back then.
Home is where the balcony is
After Henry’s graduation celebrations, I flew back to Amsterdam, where Henry joined me a few days later. I was blessed to be given five weeks of his time, his last summer before beginning the crushing drudgery of adulthood (volwassenheid). I say drudgery because he is already lined up with his first job at a corporate bank, which I assume will either make him rich and happy or enslave him to filthy lucre for the rest of his life. I’m rooting for the former, but beware the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism, son.
Of course, I would have to work during the five weeks of his visit, so he was tasked with making his own adventure from time to time while I went about my normal life. He settled into the slow lane of Amsterdam immediately, staying up too late and sleeping in past noon and lazing about despite his initial plan of jogging every morning. When pressed about his laziness, he defended his actions as his last chance to goof off, to play video games online with his friends, and to drink too much Apple Bandit, a syrupy sweet beer. I granted him that he had a point. The last summer before adulthood should be whatever you want it to be.
This was also my last chance to play doting father and attend to his every need, attempting to please him with food, hanging his laundry on the line, picking up his discarded detritus. When I wasn’t spoiling him, I was bellowing at him to return the growing pile of sticky beer bottles to Albert Heijn for the statiesgeld deposit.
It turned out to be a jam-packed month, ramping up immediately when my former boss James visited from the Bay Area, the man to whom I owe my presence here in Nederland. He hired me. Were it not for him, I would not be here. This was his first time returning to Amsterdam since returning to America, and he brought along his delightful lady friend Kellianne, a mom from Berkeley, a hairdresser with impeccable feathered, dyed hair and bold, brash, chunky 70s retro sunglasses. She immediately fell in love with Amsterdam. “Could I live here?” she asked one day playfully as we all cycled through one of my favourite hidden gems, Prinseneiland. I love watching other people experience this city in the same way I did when I first visited, dumbstruck by the fairytale cobblestones and the fully laid-back attitude of the place.
Back on the Dutch chain gang
Henry had to find things to do by himself on his visit at times because I had just started a new Dutch class at Koentact. These five-week immersive classes absolutely destroy my ambitious plans in life (like writing these posts). I end up spending nearly all of my free time scribbling out huiswerk, studying vocabulary, or consuming Dutch YouTube videos about grammar. This time around, I had a brand-new teacher, Marjan, who is smart and interesting and wise, but also tough and strict. Like myself, she is a journalist at heart and a parent who also writes in her spare time. She’s lived on the same houseboat for something like 20 years, and she’s written books about food and culture. Sounds like a pretty good life. Ze is een echt Nederlander en Amsterdammer.
It wasn’t easy trying to meet her high standards, but her teaching style immediately began making a difference in how much I could comprehend. She put the heat on us by making us walk up to the board and write new sentences from prepared sentences that had lots of tricky (lastig) mistakes, which was invaluable learning for me. Such a simple, old-school technique, as if we were children, which we still are in terms of language skills. She also encouraged our group of new, interesting people to attempt to speak up to her level. She graciously indulged my opinions about politics and the pitfalls of America, which is not something most Americans are willing to do these days.
If memory serves me correctly, this class was my tenth one at Koentact, the school where I’ve taken all of my Dutch classes. As the levels have progressed, the number of students in each class has thinned out, but no matter what, I almost always find at least one friendly returning face, usually Edna. A kind Columbian expat with two dogs and a new Dutch husband, Edna and I seem to have been in almost every class together. We’re somehow conquering these classes on the same schedule, although she has a real leg up on me with the Dutch husband. She has rapidly outpaced me since getting married.
This class was the second-to-last one the school offers, bringing us all up to about B2 level of fluency, although I am more like B1 level. I’m always a bit behind everyone else and struggle to keep up. Partly, this is because I sometimes take breaks between courses to keep what I consider a sane work/study/life balance. I gotta have my bike rides and European lifestyle. But mostly it’s because I don’t spend enough time speaking it every day.
Each Dutch course includes two Saturday field trip excursions to learn about a different Amsterdam neighbourhood, like a trip to the Amsterdam Hilton where John and Yoko had their honeymoon bed-in. But perhaps the best part is the course borrel, the Dutch version of drinks and snacks. It’s a chance for our class to hit a local cafe and have a drink one night, ordering and speaking only in Dutch the entire time. My teacher generously invited my son to our class’s borrel (I guess I talk about my son a lot in Dutch class), where we joined another class of students from a lower-level course (phew). Somehow, Henry agreed to actually attend, although of course he speaks no Dutch. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years trying to learn this wacky language, and it was delightful to show my son that I can have real, ongoing conversations in another language.
Hoe kan dat??
But alas, on the final day of class, I was devastated when my teacher handed out our certificates of completion. Some expats need these documents to show to their employers who pay for their classes, but otherwise they are worthless in any official capacity. So while the grade doesn’t matter, it was crushing to receive the lowest grade I’ve ever received in one of these classes. My teacher explained to me, in a very Dutch direct way, why my grade was low, but I was so dumbstruck that I embarrassingly didn’t hear the entirety of what she said. I could only stare back and forth at the grade and her moving lips. It reminded me of the many middling report cards I’d received as a younger me, the ones that always essentially said, “Eric has so much potential, but he doesn’t always put in the effort.”
It’s true. I can accomplish incredible things when I’m ready to, but if I’m not feeling inspired, I dilly-dally and procrastinate, waiting for inspiration to strike. However, I do sincerely appreciate the teachers who point this out to me because I think they can see that it’s not laziness per se. I put a lot of unseen effort into my work because I am simply unable to do things in a simple, straightforward way, try as I might. I feel compelled to make everything I do a little extra creative and clever, even if that’s not what the instructions call for. So you can add “doesn’t follow directions” to my report card, as well.
But it still hurt. I couldn’t quite square the amount of hours I put into studying, which was substantial, with the final grade, which was underwhelming. I completely bombed the final exam, so the grade wasn’t unwarranted, but I sadly did not get any extra credit for all of the time I spent watching the local AT5 News, with its endlessly fascinating man-on-the-street interviews about traffic work in the city or from browsing the neighbourhood minibibliotheken during breaks on my bike rides, when I like to try and decipher the book titles and marketing blurbs. If only the final exam had been about road closings in de stad or Jip en Janneke.
Once these classes were all completed, my plan was to find a dedicated teacher for one-on-one classes, but my middling performance in this one made me wonder if I should even take the last, and final, course. They’re not cheap, these classes. If I’m too slow to keep up, maybe finding a personal tutor right now would be better.
Gaul-ly, Lyon is nice
I licked my wounds while preparing for the highlight of my son’s visit: a trip to France to see Henry’s old au pair in Lyon, who neither of us had seen in many, many years. Lyon is a very old city, founded in 43 BC, all the way back in Roman times, when it was an important Roman outpost (original name: Lugdunum). Lyon is France’s third-largest city, and the one from whence Gaul culture originates, which means it is where all the good food and snobbiness comes from. Not surprisingly, almost nobody in Lyon spoke English, but my son, who attended French school as a child, was able to get along quite well considering he hasn’t used the language all that much over the years. Both he and I were gobsmacked at how much he remembered. It felt good to have him order for me at restaurants and comprehend signs and ask for directions, the kind of things I do for him in Amsterdam.
Jill had been Henry’s mother’s au pair (I was more of a DIY co-parent), so I only saw her from time to time those many years prior in San Francisco. She was still a teenager back then, but I knew from the moment I met her that she was a special person. She’s highly creative, an artistic soul and an excellent photographer with an effortlessly cool sense of style. She took us on a personal cycling tour of her home city with her five-year-old son in tow in the back seat, stopping at outdoor markets for delicacies and returning to her plant-filled apartment to indulge in one of her lekker vegetarian meals. After many years of trying, I finally found fresh black currants at an outdoor market, which are banned in most of America. They are not nearly as delicious as red currants. Now I know. But everything else I ate in Lyon was exceptional, natuurlijk.
Among many other things, Jill runs Instagram accounts for a few local businesses, and she took us to one of her clients, NAPL, to take photos of artisanal pizzas. We had to do the tough work of sampling six different kinds of specialty pizzas made just for her camera, washing it all down with fancy house-made spritzers. Jill also interviewed Henry for an upcoming episode of her podcast, The Au Pair Club, where she shares her experience as an au pair in interviews with young, working au pairs. I don’t understand hardly any of the words, but she has a silky smooth voice, and I can’t wait to hear the episode. What insights will she be able to coax out of my son, he who prefers not to speak deeply of his feelings?
After we returned to Amsterdam, Henry left for New York City, and I was all alone again. He decided to sublet his cousin Jake’s roommate Neil’s room in Harlem for the rest of July because Neil was travelling with his musical troupe. What a wonderful way for Henry to spend the last bit of his last summer. So many of his old childhood French school classmates from San Francisco happen to be in New York City now. One of them is a DJ who takes Henry to gigs. Henry even ran into his old pal Eli with his two dads while walking down the street one day. Plus, Henry has a girlfriend now, who is spending the summer at her parents’ house in Long Island. The game of adult life is afoot.
In a matter of a few weeks, it will be time for Henry to move into his new house in Newark with his new roommates, ready to begin his first job as a big-shot banker. We bought a bunch of clothes in Lyon. He’s ready to shine.
De zomer begint met zonsondergang
After his departure, I got back to my routine of obsessive cycling and introspection, spending my evenings roaming far and wide (zwerven) and digesting all of the thoughts and emotions and experiences of the past two months. Would the rest of the summer be as exhausting and satisfying as the first half? Should I take that last Dutch class in September? I couldn’t decide, swerving back and forth between the two choices on the fietspad in my mind. But then something happened that finally brought my decision to a head.
One evening, as summer was just beginning to fade after its peak, I was out riding my usual route on a Friday night for a long after-the-work-week ride. It was another slow-burn summer sunset (zonsondergang) as I wound my way along the waterfront, zooming past Centraal Station and up the long bridge climb towards Piet Heinkade. Blasting tunes and shaking my booty, I passed everyone on the way up and over. While sitting at the next red light, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Francesca, my old classmate from one class prior. I had rooted for her during her first time speaking in front of a large crowd at Mehzrab one story night. She was on her way back to Mehzrab, in fact. How fortuitous that we bumped into each other. Was she going to take the last and final class in September? She was.
Then, unexpectedly, a second auger. I was featured in the Koentact newsletter when the school included my Het Inburgersexamen article about passing my integration exams in their latest quarterly missive. So satisfying and gratifying. I felt indebted to their kindness and interest.
And then, I heard from my old classmate Edna. She wanted me to watch one of her dogs for a day. Was she going to be taking that last class in September, too, I wondered? Reader, she was.
That settled it. Three portends. How can I not take that final class? I’ve come further than I could have imagined with my Dutch, but I still have a long way to go. Ik ben heel ver gekomen, maar ik moet nog ver gaan.
I have so much potential, and it still needs fulfilling. Sign me up.
Furthermore…
I made a playlist for Henry’s graduation, Henry is afgestudeerd! These 20 songs have been in heavy rotation on my bike rides all summer. Listen via Apple Music or Spotify.
How exciting to make a mention in this famous substack! I hadn't realized my glasses were brash. And to think I only brought my "everyday pair"!
I think it's pretty natural to want to spend another year in Newark after leaving UD. It'll likely lose its shine in general. I did a stay in Delaware until I was maybe 25, and then? The world. How nice that you were able to parent for one last long spell. Maybe there will be more? Maybe it never ends? I know I still prefer my mother's pasta sauce above all others.
I just hate bullshit ceremonial garbage like that.