Please welcome the wonderful Mayberry Mom, with whom I have small-town life in common. I’m thrilled to have her here. If you haven’t been to her place, I recommend you take some time to sight-see there.

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Dear Shaggy and The Poo,

I know being the wife of an academic has been rough for your mom, but there are some advantages to being the children of a guy who hangs out in the ivory tower—especially once he clambers up a few more rungs. I grew up as the child of two professors at a big state university in a town much like Chambana, and looking back? I had it pretty good.

Of course there’s the reduced (sometimes even free) tuition, which doesn’t sound very exciting to you right now but will when you’re 21 and realizing your debt load is many times lighter than it might have been.

Having students at your beck and call can really come in handy. We always had grad students hanging around: babysitting, doing yard work, scraping paint in our ramshackle old house. When I went to my first concert at age 13 (I’m so not telling you who it was, but girls did want to have fun), my parents recruited a grad student to go with me and my friends as a not-babysitter/not-quite-chaperone/“just a friend.”

College towns, while not always in the most inspirational of locations (ahem) usually have a lot of fun stuff to offer. We used to like to hit up the Creamery (the ice cream store run by the ag department), the “rock museum” (collection from the geology department, open to the public), the “bug museum” (same, entomology) and even the student union. In the fall we had football games to listen to from our yard. When I got old enough, babysitting for parents going to games was a lucrative source of income.

The academic life took us further afield, too: A sabbatical in England, where I developed a temporary British accent, plus business trips and conferences in places as mundane as Pittsburgh and as exotic as Hong Kong. And remember those grad students? They came from all over the world, often with incredible gifts in hand.

As their careers advanced one parent’s job got busier and the other one got more flexible. By the time my younger brother and sister were in high school, they teased my professor dad: He worked from home or otherwise on his own schedule so often, was it possible he actually had a paying job?

You two may not be in your-Bana forever, but I hope you’ll look back fondly on the town you do end up calling home. Wherever it is, your mama and dad will be there with you and that’s what matters most. Even though a bug museum IS cool and all.

Mayberry Mom lives, works, and writes in a small Midwestern town … sadly without a university in its backyard.

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