<p>The night before I started college, my Dad and I stayed with his parents, and my grandmother pulled out some college letters home of his that she had saved. Some of the early ones practically made me cry. He was so disoriented and depressed. Everything he knew was wrong. He had spent much of the money he had saved from part-time jobs on a college wardrobe, and he hadn’t purchased a single thing he could wear without attracting scorn. One letter had a long list of things that his brother (a year younger) should and should not buy. (Handpainted ties - bad. Khakis and suede bucks - good.) Fraternity rush was an exercise in being snubbed, something he had never experienced before. Even the Jewish fraternity didn’t want to touch him. Each letter was pretty much a load of misery.</p>
<p>But he learned to identify with his captors, so to speak, and to imitate them. Three years later, only his nose and his last name distinguished him from anyone else there. He was president of a fraternity whose national charter still forbade him to join, a member of a secret society that was (and remains) the pinnacle of that college’s prestige system, and on his way to Harvard Law School. </p>
<p>The truth was, he didn’t love his parents much – they weren’t the nicest people in the world, to put it mildly – or his community, either, and college gave him something he COULD love.</p>