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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 chance, as she puts it, to again be studious. This semester she’s taking classes in ethics, creative writing (in English and Spanish), and Chaucer. She has gotten snagged by questions of justice and injustice, how she can think about them, and what she can do to make things better — subjects so difficult to keep one’s mind on without classes and experts and, especially, time.
M, my 21-year-old son, is going back too. He took a break from college after a year and a half on the other side of the country. His sense of possibility and excitement as a first-time freshman ran into both a program that didn’t fit him and the brutalist geography of Los Angeles, and he needed time to think. During that 18-month break, he’s been a working musician in New York with all that that entails: playing shows, recording and releasing music, hustling for fans and listeners, working retail jobs, searching for a community, trying to figure stuff out. It was hard, as you might expect, to…
