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The Age of Unfairness
Our daughter Q led us across the road from her dorm, then down an opening in the trees where the concrete underfoot had long been split by oak roots, which curved gently down into a wooded path that followed the Mill River. It was late November and most of the leaves had fallen, but the tall trees still looked dignified as trees do. We walked for a few miles, talking about next semester’s classes, when and where she might study abroad, what she has enjoyed eating lately and with whom, how she likes to check out a Mary Oliver book from the campus library and read poems on the log we just passed.
This is exactly why we were visiting Q — to get out of the noise and compression of New York, to walk in the quiet woods, to be on either side of our daughter and talk a little about everything but mostly about nothing. She goes to Smith, an all-women’s college in Massachusetts that has generated uncountably many firsts for women and one that attracts students concerned about the inescapable problem of being a person in the world, particularly a marginalized one. She chose Smith because of its special intersection of place and purpose, and though she is only starting her second year, she has found a home for herself that didn’t seem possible in New York, a city rich in place but also in people and the noise they make.
Northampton, MA barely seems real. It’s a beautiful small town with a brick, double-wide main street where cars must stop (frequently) for pedestrians in a rainbow crosswalk. Apart from a standard-issue CVS and an Urban Outfitters retrofitted grandly into a former bank, there are no chain stores, just a series of small, locally owned shops and restaurants, many of which fly pride flags. The prominent church in this quaint downtown is Unitarian that advertises “room for families and people of all ages; for seekers, doers, those who want to work for justice, and those who need respite from the pressures of their daily lives.” People everywhere wear a wide range of functional but attractive woolens.
Throughout the weekend, we noticed that the stores and restaurants and sidewalks seemed more crowded than usual, more parents walking next to their children than one might expect without some scheduled large college event. The more we thought about it, the more my wife and I came to believe that many people were in town for the same…
