How do you convey the deepest, sweetest batch of parental emotion to your child when you’ve just returned from a sweaty, last-minute odyssey all around Lewiston and Auburn to find a replacement for the carefully selected mattress pad you — or maybe they — forgot on the way out the door from New Jersey or California or Texas? 

Most times, you don’t.

The day you drop your student off at college is intensely practical in focus, exhausting, and, for parents, often filled with the momentous feeling that you’ve graduated from something. Except there is no degree awaiting you, and the person you love so much would kind of like you to leave right now. It’s not that they don’t love you too, but they want to get on with the life they’ve been waiting for and working toward for as long as they can remember. 

Inspired by something Wake Forest University did last year,  our photo/video team decided to give family members a place to convey some of those big feelings. Multimedia producer Theophil Syslo dug an old-school phone from deep in the Bates archives — garnet in hue —  and set up microphones around it. With three cameras rolling in front of Hathorn, the very first building on the Bates campus, we started flagging families down to ask, were there things they hadn’t said during move-in? Congratulations, entreaties to call, advice on the year ahead and how to live well in their new home? Say them now.

On the wisdom hotline: As families wrapped up the moving-in process, we asked them to send messages to their students. Click cc to enable captions. (Theophil Syslo/Bates College)

The feelings expressed in this video are universal, whether it’s Associate Dean of Students James Reese, who has worked at Bates since 1977, and his wife Sonali Arseculeratne Reese ’93 saying “goodbye” to their son Ishan ’29 or the parents from China, Yan Xu and Wesley Wang, who left a message for their daughter, WangSu Xu ’29, in Chinese. No matter the language, the pride and joy and tender hope came through loud and clear.

Congratulations to the members of the Bates Class of 2029 and everyone who helped get them here. 

—Mary Pols