When All Your Life Doesn’t Fit Inside Your Life
The rental car is packed with our daughter Q’s stuff to take back to college, but it seems less full than last year. I’m not sure why this thought nags — looking through the rearview mirror I have only a modest rectangle of open window to check what’s behind us, and even that’s through leaves spilling out of a box of plants. I kept going through the list in my head as we took the FDR Drive north, and it wasn’t until we curved onto the Hutchinson Parkway that I understood: When we dropped Q off at college for the first time last year, we packed so as to fortify her against any conceivable need. As a sophomore, Q pretty much knows what she needs to be her kind of student, which turns out not to be everything.
These are the days of going back. The summer has burnt itself out, and the sun has begun to move in the mornings and evenings into its fall slouch. And, of course, school has arrived. I’ve worked in higher education for nearly 30 years, and its rhythms have become circadian for me. The end of August means the beginning of the semester and the sense of possibility and excitement that comes with it, the busyness and messiness of the making of selves.
Q found a home at her liberal arts college in the woods, and though she likes the bagels and Variety Coffee here in New York, she has been looking forward to the smaller town and the…
