My Parents Embarrassed Me on My First Day of College by Dressing Like They Had Nothing

My father is, on most days, the most deliberate person I know.

He does not do things by accident.

He does not forget things.

He does not act without having thought through the action and what it is supposed to accomplish.

When I was seven, he explained to me why he always put his keys in the same pocket.

Not because someone told him to.

Because he had decided, after losing his keys twice in one year, that the cost of inconsistency was

greater than the inconvenience of habit.

He was not lecturing me about keys.

He was teaching me about systems.

The keys are always in the left front pocket, he said.

Not as a rule.

As a decision.

When you make a decision, you stop wasting time on the question.

I am now eighteen years old and I still hear that sentence at least twice a week.

His name is David Park.

He is fifty-one years old.

He owns three small businesses: a dry cleaning operation with two locations, a car wash, and a commercial cleaning company.

He built all three from nothing, starting with the dry cleaner when he was twenty-nine, working fourteen-hour days for the first five years, and expanding only after each operation was stable.

He wears a suit to work.

Not every day.

But more days than not.

He has opinions about clothes that he does not impose on others but that he lives by personally.

He will not go to Home Depot in his yard-work clothes.

He has his reasons.

My mother is Christine Park.

She is forty-eight.

She has been a hospital administrator for fourteen years at the same institution.

She started as a coordinator and is now the director of patient services, which is the kind of career trajectory that happens when you are both skilled and patient and willing to do the work

that other people find unglamorous.

She cares about her appearance.

Not vainly.

As a form of respect for the people she encounters.

She says: how you present yourself communicates what you think of other people.

I have heard this many times.

I have taken it seriously.

My name is Maya Park.

I am eighteen years old.

I grew up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in a house that was comfortable without being ostentatious, with parents who could afford most things but who chose carefully.

We did not have a pool.

We had a savings account for college.

We traveled once a year, usually to somewhere educational, which sounds like parental

manipulation of vacations but which I have been grateful for in retrospect.

The car in my Instagram photo was not mine.

It was my father’s car, which I had borrowed for a friend’s birthday.

I had not lied about this.

Chloe had simply asked: is that yours?

And I had said: my dad’s.

She had moved to the next question.

I had not thought much about the questions at the time.

In retrospect, I think about them.

What did my parents do.

Where did we live.

Was the car mine.

Had I traveled to Europe.

The questions had a direction.

I simply had not mapped the direction at the time.

My roommate Chloe and I had been matched by the university’s housing algorithm.

We had started talking in June, two months before move-in.

She seemed nice.

She was from a suburb of Cincinnati.

She was studying communications.

She liked interior design.

She had strong opinions about what a dorm room could look like if you put effort into it.

She sent me a spreadsheet of coordinated bedding options.

I appreciated the spreadsheet.

I did not know then what I would learn on move-in day.

Move-in day was the last Saturday of August.

I had been packed for a week.

The boxes were in the hallway of my parents’ house.

My mother had organized them by category: clothing, books, bathroom, kitchen items, miscellaneous.

Each box was labeled.

Each box had a contents list taped to the side.

This is my mother.

She applies hospital administration principles to everything she does.

The night before, my father said: ready for tomorrow?

I said: I think so.

He said: good.

He said: we’ll leave at eight.

I said: I’ll be up at seven.

He said: I know you will.

He said it like it was a fact, because with us, it was.

I woke at six-forty-five.

I made coffee.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with the coffee and the last night at home feeling when my father

came downstairs at seven-fifteen.

He was not wearing what I expected.

The jeans he was wearing were ripped.

Not fashionably ripped.

Old ripped.

The kind of ripped that happens over years of being used for actual work and then wearing out.

The T-shirt had a stain near the left shoulder.

The jacket was one I had not seen since I was approximately twelve years old.

I said: Dad.

He said: morning.

He poured coffee.

I said: what are you wearing?

He said: clothes.

I said: why are you wearing that specific combination of clothes.

He said: it’s move-in day. Things might get heavy.

This explanation was not entirely implausible.

Move-in day involves lifting things.

Lifting things is sometimes done in old clothes.

I accepted it temporarily.

My mother came downstairs.

Her hair was a deliberate disaster.

Not a just-woke-up disaster.

An intentional one.

The kind that requires effort to look like no effort was applied.

The sweatshirt was oversized in a way her sweatshirts were not.

It had a small hole near the right sleeve and a larger one near the left.

There was dirt on her face.

Smeared.

As if she had been doing something and wiped her face without knowing.

It was not dirt from doing something.

It was applied.

I could see the evenness of it, the specific quality of something placed rather than accumulated.

I said: Mom.

She said: good morning.

She said it with the particular serenity of someone who is executing a plan.

I said: what is on your face.

She said: long morning.

She said it the same way my father had said clothes.

The answer that answers the question syntactically while providing no actual information.

I looked at both of them.

They looked back at me.

Neither of them looked confused.

That was the thing.

When someone is underdressed by accident, there is a quality of not-quite-settled about them.

My parents were entirely settled.

They looked like themselves, in strange clothes.

The strange clothes had been chosen.

I started to say something else.

Then my father said: we should load the boxes.

We loaded the boxes.

This was when I noticed the bags.

Some of my things had been repacked into black garbage bags.

Not all of them.

The boxes were still there.

But three boxes had been supplemented by two large black garbage bags.

I said: why are those in bags?

My mother said: the boxes were too full.

This was not impossible.

But the boxes had been adequately sized when we packed them.

I was still processing this when we walked to the driveway.

The car in the driveway was not my father’s car.

It was my uncle’s van.

My uncle Tom’s van.

Tom was my father’s younger brother.

Tom was a good person who had made different choices than my father and who lived a different kind of life.

His van reflected this.

It was old.

It was a minivan, the kind that was common in the nineties and that, in the current year, announced

itself as something that had been used continuously for a very long time.

It ran.

It did not look like it should run.

But Tom maintained it, which was the thing about Tom.

He was careless about many things but meticulous about engines.

I said: what happened to your car?

My father said: this one still runs.

This answer was technically true.

It was also not an answer to the question.

I said: where is your car?

He said: Tom needed it for the week.

This was also not impossible.

My uncle occasionally borrowed things.

My father occasionally lent them.

But the timing.

The timing was specific.

I filed everything.

I knew something was happening.

I did not yet know what.

The drive to the university was two hours.

We listened to a podcast my father liked about business history.

My mother asked me questions about how I was feeling.

I said I was nervous and excited.

I was not lying.

I was also suspicious.

We pulled into the parking lot designated for my dormitory at ten-fifteen.

The lot was full of families doing the specific work of college move-in, the boxes and the bags and the carts and the fathers with the particular focus of men who have been given something to

carry.

We got out of the van.

I scanned the lot.

My dormitory assignment had me in a building called Harrington Hall, which was older and had the kind of character that architecture departments call charm and that eighteen-year-olds call inconvenient.

It did not have elevators.

The lot had a mix of vehicles.

Sedans and minivans and SUVs and one truck with a bed full of furniture.

We had been there for approximately seven minutes when a new SUV pulled into the spot three spaces down.

The SUV was shiny.

The kind of shiny that means it is either new or extremely well maintained.

It was black.

It had everything.

The doors opened and Chloe stepped out.

She was how she appeared in her photos.

Put-together.

The kind of put-together that suggests the person has spent time on it and that the time was budgeted into the morning.

Her parents followed.

Her father was in pressed chinos and a polo shirt.

Her mother was in a blazer.

They had a color-coordinated set of bins rather than boxes.

They also had a cart that appeared to be the kind you buy specifically for college move-in, not

the kind you borrow from the dormitory.

Chloe looked across the lot.

She saw me.

She waved.

She started walking toward me.

And then she saw my parents.

The wave became a moment.

Not a hesitation.

A moment of recalibration.

She completed the wave and kept walking but something had happened.

She reached me.

She said: Maya!

She hugged me.

The hug was genuine.

We had been talking for two months.

She was genuinely happy to see me.

But then she looked at my parents again.

She looked at my father’s ripped jeans.

She looked at the garbage bags.

She looked at the van.

She looked at me.

She said: oh.

Just that.

Just oh.

Not an unkind oh.

Not a cruel oh.

But the oh of someone who has just received information that updates a prior model.

Her parents walked up.

Her father looked at my father the way men sometimes look at each other when they are assessing relative status.

My father held out his hand.

He said: David Park. Nice to meet you.

Chloe’s father took the hand.

There was a hesitation before he took it.

The hesitation was brief.

But it was there.

Her mother smiled the smile that people smile when they are trying very hard not to show what they are thinking.

My father appeared not to notice.

He was entirely at ease.

He picked up two garbage bags.

He said: guess we’d better get her stuff upstairs before they tow us.

He said it cheerfully.

The way he said everything when he was being cheerful.

Chloe looked at the van again.

We went inside.

The dormitory was the organized chaos of move-in day.

The RA was directing traffic.

Parents were making multiple trips.

There was the specific noise of many people trying to be helpful simultaneously.

My parents were extremely friendly.

This is true of them in general.

But they were particularly friendly.

My father introduced himself to everyone he encountered in the hallway.

My mother asked Chloe where she was from and what she was studying and what she was most

excited about.

See more on the next page

My father is, on most days, the most deliberate person I know.

He does not do things by accident.

He does not forget things.

He does not act without having thought through the action and what it is supposed to accomplish.

When I was seven, he explained to me why he always put his keys in the same pocket.

Not because someone told him to.

Because he had decided, after losing his keys twice in one year, that the cost of inconsistency was

greater than the inconvenience of habit.

He was not lecturing me about keys.

He was teaching me about systems.

The keys are always in the left front pocket, he said.

Not as a rule.

As a decision.

When you make a decision, you stop wasting time on the question.

I am now eighteen years old and I still hear that sentence at least twice a week.

His name is David Park.

He is fifty-one years old.

He owns three small businesses: a dry cleaning operation with two locations, a car wash, and a commercial cleaning company.

He built all three from nothing, starting with the dry cleaner when he was twenty-nine, working fourteen-hour days for the first five years, and expanding only after each operation was stable.

He wears a suit to work.

Not every day.

But more days than not.

He has opinions about clothes that he does not impose on others but that he lives by personally.

He will not go to Home Depot in his yard-work clothes.

He has his reasons.

My mother is Christine Park.

She is forty-eight.

She has been a hospital administrator for fourteen years at the same institution.

She started as a coordinator and is now the director of patient services, which is the kind of career trajectory that happens when you are both skilled and patient and willing to do the work

that other people find unglamorous.

She cares about her appearance.

Not vainly.

As a form of respect for the people she encounters.

She says: how you present yourself communicates what you think of other people.

I have heard this many times.

I have taken it seriously.

My name is Maya Park.

I am eighteen years old.

I grew up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in a house that was comfortable without being ostentatious, with parents who could afford most things but who chose carefully.

We did not have a pool.

We had a savings account for college.

We traveled once a year, usually to somewhere educational, which sounds like parental

manipulation of vacations but which I have been grateful for in retrospect.

The car in my Instagram photo was not mine.

It was my father’s car, which I had borrowed for a friend’s birthday.

I had not lied about this.

Chloe had simply asked: is that yours?

And I had said: my dad’s.

She had moved to the next question.

I had not thought much about the questions at the time.

In retrospect, I think about them.

What did my parents do.

Where did we live.

Was the car mine.

Had I traveled to Europe.

The questions had a direction.

I simply had not mapped the direction at the time.

My roommate Chloe and I had been matched by the university’s housing algorithm.

We had started talking in June, two months before move-in.

She seemed nice.

She was from a suburb of Cincinnati.

She was studying communications.

She liked interior design.

She had strong opinions about what a dorm room could look like if you put effort into it.

She sent me a spreadsheet of coordinated bedding options.

I appreciated the spreadsheet.

I did not know then what I would learn on move-in day.

Move-in day was the last Saturday of August.

I had been packed for a week.

The boxes were in the hallway of my parents’ house.

My mother had organized them by category: clothing, books, bathroom, kitchen items, miscellaneous.

Each box was labeled.

Each box had a contents list taped to the side.

This is my mother.

She applies hospital administration principles to everything she does.

The night before, my father said: ready for tomorrow?

I said: I think so.

He said: good.

He said: we’ll leave at eight.

I said: I’ll be up at seven.

He said: I know you will.

He said it like it was a fact, because with us, it was.

I woke at six-forty-five.

I made coffee.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with the coffee and the last night at home feeling when my father

came downstairs at seven-fifteen.

He was not wearing what I expected.

The jeans he was wearing were ripped.

Not fashionably ripped.

Old ripped.

The kind of ripped that happens over years of being used for actual work and then wearing out.

The T-shirt had a stain near the left shoulder.

The jacket was one I had not seen since I was approximately twelve years old.

I said: Dad.

He said: morning.

He poured coffee.

I said: what are you wearing?

He said: clothes.

I said: why are you wearing that specific combination of clothes.

He said: it’s move-in day. Things might get heavy.

This explanation was not entirely implausible.

Move-in day involves lifting things.

Lifting things is sometimes done in old clothes.

I accepted it temporarily.

My mother came downstairs.

Her hair was a deliberate disaster.

Not a just-woke-up disaster.

An intentional one.

The kind that requires effort to look like no effort was applied.

The sweatshirt was oversized in a way her sweatshirts were not.

It had a small hole near the right sleeve and a larger one near the left.

There was dirt on her face.

Smeared.

As if she had been doing something and wiped her face without knowing.

It was not dirt from doing something.

It was applied.

I could see the evenness of it, the specific quality of something placed rather than accumulated.

I said: Mom.

She said: good morning.

She said it with the particular serenity of someone who is executing a plan.

I said: what is on your face.

She said: long morning.

She said it the same way my father had said clothes.

The answer that answers the question syntactically while providing no actual information.

I looked at both of them.

They looked back at me.

Neither of them looked confused.

That was the thing.

When someone is underdressed by accident, there is a quality of not-quite-settled about them.

My parents were entirely settled.

They looked like themselves, in strange clothes.

The strange clothes had been chosen.

I started to say something else.

Then my father said: we should load the boxes.

We loaded the boxes.

This was when I noticed the bags.

Some of my things had been repacked into black garbage bags.

Not all of them.

The boxes were still there.

But three boxes had been supplemented by two large black garbage bags.

I said: why are those in bags?

My mother said: the boxes were too full.

This was not impossible.

But the boxes had been adequately sized when we packed them.

I was still processing this when we walked to the driveway.

The car in the driveway was not my father’s car.

It was my uncle’s van.

My uncle Tom’s van.

Tom was my father’s younger brother.

Tom was a good person who had made different choices than my father and who lived a different kind of life.

His van reflected this.

It was old.

It was a minivan, the kind that was common in the nineties and that, in the current year, announced

itself as something that had been used continuously for a very long time.

It ran.

It did not look like it should run.

But Tom maintained it, which was the thing about Tom.

He was careless about many things but meticulous about engines.

I said: what happened to your car?

My father said: this one still runs.

This answer was technically true.

It was also not an answer to the question.

I said: where is your car?

He said: Tom needed it for the week.

This was also not impossible.

My uncle occasionally borrowed things.

My father occasionally lent them.

But the timing.

The timing was specific.

I filed everything.

I knew something was happening.

I did not yet know what.

The drive to the university was two hours.

We listened to a podcast my father liked about business history.

My mother asked me questions about how I was feeling.

I said I was nervous and excited.

I was not lying.

I was also suspicious.

We pulled into the parking lot designated for my dormitory at ten-fifteen.

The lot was full of families doing the specific work of college move-in, the boxes and the bags and the carts and the fathers with the particular focus of men who have been given something to

carry.

We got out of the van.

I scanned the lot.

My dormitory assignment had me in a building called Harrington Hall, which was older and had the kind of character that architecture departments call charm and that eighteen-year-olds call inconvenient.

It did not have elevators.

The lot had a mix of vehicles.

Sedans and minivans and SUVs and one truck with a bed full of furniture.

We had been there for approximately seven minutes when a new SUV pulled into the spot three spaces down.

The SUV was shiny.

The kind of shiny that means it is either new or extremely well maintained.

It was black.

It had everything.

The doors opened and Chloe stepped out.

She was how she appeared in her photos.

Put-together.

The kind of put-together that suggests the person has spent time on it and that the time was budgeted into the morning.

Her parents followed.

Her father was in pressed chinos and a polo shirt.

Her mother was in a blazer.

They had a color-coordinated set of bins rather than boxes.

They also had a cart that appeared to be the kind you buy specifically for college move-in, not

the kind you borrow from the dormitory.

Chloe looked across the lot.

She saw me.

She waved.

She started walking toward me.

And then she saw my parents.

The wave became a moment.

Not a hesitation.

A moment of recalibration.

She completed the wave and kept walking but something had happened.

She reached me.

She said: Maya!

She hugged me.

The hug was genuine.

We had been talking for two months.

She was genuinely happy to see me.

But then she looked at my parents again.

She looked at my father’s ripped jeans.

She looked at the garbage bags.

She looked at the van.

She looked at me.

She said: oh.

Just that.

Just oh.

Not an unkind oh.

Not a cruel oh.

But the oh of someone who has just received information that updates a prior model.

Her parents walked up.

Her father looked at my father the way men sometimes look at each other when they are assessing relative status.

My father held out his hand.

He said: David Park. Nice to meet you.

Chloe’s father took the hand.

There was a hesitation before he took it.

The hesitation was brief.

But it was there.

Her mother smiled the smile that people smile when they are trying very hard not to show what they are thinking.

My father appeared not to notice.

He was entirely at ease.

He picked up two garbage bags.

He said: guess we’d better get her stuff upstairs before they tow us.

He said it cheerfully.

The way he said everything when he was being cheerful.

Chloe looked at the van again.

We went inside.

The dormitory was the organized chaos of move-in day.

The RA was directing traffic.

Parents were making multiple trips.

There was the specific noise of many people trying to be helpful simultaneously.

My parents were extremely friendly.

This is true of them in general.

But they were particularly friendly.

My father introduced himself to everyone he encountered in the hallway.

My mother asked Chloe where she was from and what she was studying and what she was most

excited about.

See more on the next page

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