Educating Ronan

Well that was fun while it lasted.

When last we met, the Leafs had just clinched their spot in the playoffs. Last night, after six wildly exciting games, in which our expectations were met, exceeded and then ultimately dashed, the players started their (well deserved) summer vacations. Not so Ronan, who had to go back to school in England for 10 more days.

Let me tell you a little about how this all came to be. I have his permission, which I now apparently have to get before I start blogging about him. My children don’t understand that the only reason I had them in the first place was to provide material for my career. It was fine when they were little, when I could talk about the often hilarious things they said and did, but then they got older, and words like “privacy” and “respect” and “basic human rights” started being bandied about. Big eye roll.

Anyhoozles, Ronan, who is now 18, is some kind of freaking intellectual. No, he really is. Both the boys are smart as paint, as my father used to say (like paint is smart?), but Ronan is scholarly. He loves words, and thoughts, and big ideas. He is bookish, like my father was. He is making his way through the literary classics, with a penchant for Penguin hardcovers. He is, as his girlfriend lovingly calls him, a total nerd, although total nerds rarely have beautiful girlfriends who call them that. As such, his heart’s desire was to major in English – at an English university.

I blame myself. I took him on a tour of the U.K. the year before he graduated high school. We visited University College London, Edinburgh, St. Andrew’s, Bristol and East Anglia. He applied to them all. He was accepted at them all. He also applied, at our insistence, to one Canadian institution: the University of Toronto, Trinity College, where he was accepted WITH A FULL SCHOLARSHIP. But no. He HAD to go abroad, he explained. The beautiful girlfriend was herself going to school in the States, and he himself had to explore new worlds. So despite our better judgment, and the fact that we could barely afford to do so, and also the fact that he was just 17, we packed him off to the University of Bristol, his first choice, because they offer a banging double major program in English and Film.

I’m not going to say it was a big mistake. I am going to say that it was a learning experience in ways no one expected. There were the contact hours: only six hours of class a week, and no opportunity to take extra courses. Not enough for a kid with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. There was the weather: damp, dismal, dreary and dark. There was the food: awful, and not enough of it. He was homesick, heartsick and ultimately physically sick for much of his first term. Hardest of all, I think, was the fact that he had to admit to himself, as well as to us, that he didn’t belong there. Sure, he made friends, and did well in class, and got involved in events and plays and clubs, but, like so many of us learn when we travel, there really is no place like home. Especially when home is Toronto, Canada.

So he re-applied to U of T as a transfer student, and anxiously checked his inbox every hour for weeks until he was, of course, accepted. Not at Trinity, and no scholarship, because HA HA TRANSFER BOY! THAT SHIP HAS SAILED! WHERE’S YOUR GOD NOW? He is finishing out the year at Bristol, with one more week of classes. He will come home for 3 weeks, then fly back to write ONE exam. ONE stupid exam that they refused to move or let him write remotely, because they remain bloody minded to the bitter end.

Next year will be better. Next year Ronan will avail himself of all the amazing resources this city and school have to offer, and he will appreciate the heck out of them. Next year, we won’t have to consider remortgaging the house to pay his tuition. And next year, dare I say it? The Leafs just might win the Stanley Cup.

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