Biljana D. Obradović
We
began preparing for my only son’s college in his eleventh grade. His high
school, Benjamin Franklin, the best public high school in the state of Louisiana,
was great in letting us know how to do it. There were all kinds of sessions for
parents and visits by different colleges from all around the country and the
world. Since I am an immigrant, originally from Europe, we thought about his
going abroad, maybe to Trinity College, or to American colleges in Paris or
Rome. Some of my son’s friends were thinking of going to Canada. As we travel
overseas each year and spend a substantial time during our summer breaks in
“the old country,” I knew right away that I would not be OK with our son living
overseas on his own for college. There would be too many unknowns. If I needed to get to him, I could not, and
what if he got sick? I just was not prepared for that. He could go for a
semester abroad during his undergraduate years, but even though he had never
been away from us for more than a few days, I knew that he should go anywhere
he wanted to in the US. We are not from New Orleans originally, not even from the
South (my husband is from Pennsylvania), so we’d let him go anywhere he wanted
to…well, sort of. He, on his own, opted not to even look at schools in
California and the West for his undergraduate studies, but would keep that area
in mind possibly for his graduate study.
But,
to get back to how our son made his college choices….Either our son, my husband
or I went to these school college events. We took detailed notes that we shared
with each other and our son when we could, when we were not busy teaching
Creative Writing and English classes at two different universities in New
Orleans. We’re both poets. So it was rather a surprise that, out of the blue,
our son got interested in filmmaking, on his own, in eighth grade at the
private school we sent him to from K-8th grade. He began to make
short stop motion movies with his Legos. He was always creative—not much of a
surprise. But making movies?
Why
not? We suggested that he could try to get into the New Orleans Center for the
Creative Arts. He prepared a film for the audition on his own and got in, but was
on the waiting list, so he had to wait a year. He made another and got in his sophomore
year, then spent three years going to both high schools. He knew what he wanted
to study in college his junior year. He was always interested in History and
Geography, and loved flags…Also both of his grandfathers were diplomats, and
his paternal grandmother is an immigrant like me. So, he decided that he would
double major in Filmmaking and International/Global Affairs. So now that that
was settled, we needed to find colleges that had both of those as majors and/or
minors.
The
World Wide Web is too wide. We weren’t sure where to look. So, in October 2019,
of my son’s junior year I bought a great book on colleges in the US: The Complete Book of Colleges, 2020 Edition: The
Mega-Guide to 1,359 Colleges and Universities (College Admissions Guides) published
by the Princeton Review. It was very useful, but didn’t have the majors
separated….So, I also borrowed a book from the local library which showed
universities by the majors. So you could look at Filmmaking and it showed all
the colleges in the US (and some overseas) that had the major. Not every
university called each major the same thing, so sometimes it was Global
Studies, sometimes something else, like International Affairs, but often it was
the same thing or similar…We picked a bunch of colleges that had both majors,
and that we knew by reputation; after all both my husband and I are college
professors. Then we looked at each one in the other book, the one I had bought,
and we began comparing, and then on their websites. Some of the universities
had come to my son’s school campuses—both of his schools had college visiting
them, so he had talked to people from some of the schools we were looking at
already. The city also had a big college fair and I went to check it out, got a
lot of handouts, lots of information.
Things
were progressing smoothly… When my son and I visited my mother-in-law for
Easter that year in Philadelphia, my son’s first cousin showed him around the
campus of the University of Pennsylvania where she and her two siblings were at
college. We had visited some other schools in the past on our own. So we
decided to visit the colleges in Louisiana first, right at the start of the
school year. There was only one possible school our son would be interested
just two hours away by car from us (he could come home on weekends!), and it
would practically be free tuition as our son would qualify for the in-state
funding for colleges—
Taylor
Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS). But, it was in a
smaller city, and the opportunities for filmmaking and for being exposed to
world views at the school just didn’t seem to be there…So that was another
reason for our son to go elsewhere. Most of his classmates from the private
school days were going to LSU. He had wanted to go there when he was four, but
definitely not anymore. He was never interested in sports…
We
decided during the winter break that our son and I would go to visit my friends
in Indiana at the end of February 2020, so we could look at some colleges in
the Midwest. We booked our flights. But in January, something unexpected
happened. There was a virus called Corona Virus spreading like wild fire all
around the world. A few cases had already been detected in the US. I looked for
facial cloth masks on the internet and found a package of three black ones that
arrived just in time for us to get on the plane for Chicago. Nowhere else could
you find masks for sale. No one except for the two of us had masks on the plane
or at the airport. Everyone looked at us like we were total weirdos.
We
had been to Europe in summer of 2019, first to the “home country” and then to
the South of France and then to Paris following the steps of the Impressionist
painters. After we returned, our son got
very sick. He had a very high fever for nine days that would not go away and he
also a rash on his body. The epidemiologist at the Children’s Hospital looking
at his lung X-ray told us he had dots on his lungs. Our son was being attacked
by some unidentifiable bacteria. It was a scary time. Everywhere we had gone to
in France, there were mostly Asians wearing masks over their faces and gloves
on their hands. Did they know something we did not? Once our son recovered and
the dots disappeared from his lungs, I wasn’t going to chance anything, so we
put on those new, black masks, just in case. When our friends picked us up from
the airport, they were shocked to see us wearing the masks, not realizing that
mask-wearing would soon become part of our everyday lives. We toured the
universities and were the only ones wearing masks at each school. We visited
ten universities there.
Those
were the last ones we would visit due to COVID restrictions, but we did not
know that at the time. We had to do virtual tours from then on as COVID spread
drastically. One could not travel anywhere…But we managed and made up our minds
eventually. We never visited the school our son would eventually attend before
he made up his mind to go there. In fact, we had not flown anywhere (not to
Europe, that’s for sure), until he and I got a plane to New York City in August
2021 for him to begin his college on Long Island in person, now vaccinated, but
still wearing a mask. We took AMTRAC in June to NYC for his orientation, and to
leave seven bags with an old friend from the American school I went to in
Greece who lived close by. What are friends for during difficult times then to
help each other…Even though I had not seen him in twenty years, he picked us up
with his truck, loaded the bags, kept them for two months, and when we came in
August helped us move my son into his dorm. Amazing!
All
was well…except that Hurricane Ida had other ideas. She appearing suddenly
while my son and I were busy moving him in. My husband stayed home. Ida hit New Orleans on August 29th,
2021, sixteen years to the day of Katrina which had destroyed the first floor
of our house and everything in it (including all of our two-year old son’s baby
toys), so that we could not live there for a year. I didn’t know what to do. I
was in a hotel room by myself when PTSD hit me. Would we lose our house again?
Would we lose our jobs? How will we pay for our son’s college then? I was
stranded. I could not go back to New Orleans. The airport was closed The power
was out.…Who knows how long it would take before I could go back. I immediately
called my Indiana friends, and they said to come stay with them. I rebooked my
flight and flew to Chicago. I found out from my husband that our house was OK,
except for a few living-room leaks, and shingles off the roof, the bent fence. He
saved our furniture, rugs, floors, by being there…But the city was not OK and
would take a while for things to be OK again. But the levees held this time. We
did not get flooded this time.
I
suddenly realized we had made the right decision for our son. He was safe (even
though two days later Ida flooded basements of three friends in New York and
New Jersey, who had kindly offered for me to stay with them, including the
friend who had kept my son’s bags). My husband endured 90 degrees heat for a
week. I was in Indiana for eight days before I could fly home to the piles of debris
in front of our house...
In the meantime, at Midway airport, my friends greeted me wearing masks. Ah, what irony!
On a train in Chicago on the way to visit Northwestern, February 2020, wearing ,masks |
My son’s suitcases for college piled up on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to his dorm. |
Safe with my friends in Indiana walking by Lake Michigan. |
Dr. Biljana D. Obradović, a Serbian-American poet, translator, critic, Professor of English, who was recently Head of the English Department at Xavier University of Louisiana, who has a Ph.D. In English from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from VCU in Richmond, VA, has published four collections of poems, most recently Incognito (Cincinnati: WordTech Press, January 2017), two translations of collections of poems—into English from Serbian (Bratislav Milanović; Zvonko Karanović, Sleepwalkers on a Picnic, Dialogos Press, 2020), five into Serbian from English (John Gery, Stanley Kunitz, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Bruce Weigl, and Niyi Osundare), and two anthologies of poems, the most recent co-edited with Dubravka Djurić, Cat Painter: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry (New Orleans: Dialogos Press, Oct. 2016). She has also edited a collection of essays by Philip Dacey, Heavenly Muse: Essays on Poetry (Lavender Ink, 2020). An issue of Atlanta Review, Summer 2021 was devoted to Serbian poetry that she co-edited with Dubravka Djurić and mostly translated herself. She is currently working on a new collection of her own poems and a new translation of selected poems by Dubravka Djurić.