Time To Let Go

First day of college.  It’s been twelve years since I drove this ritual for stepson and now its my older daughter’s turn.   I’m thinking of all the many schools we visited.  No.  There was no magic moment.  No tingling that this, among all the campuses we visited, would be the one we returned to.  The driver drops us off at the end of the paved line, where the road forms a circle and soon, we’re lugging her luggage passed Eliot Hall, towards a tent where dozens of other suitcases have been parked.  As is the theme for the day, parents go one way, and my daughter joins a long queue for students. 

She’s the first one to her dorm room and she begins to set up shop on the left side of the room.  My wife can’t help but tell her where to put her things and how to arrange her suitcases in the closet which drives my daughter batty.  The day’s theme repeated then: it ain’t your job no more.  It’s no longer your domain.  Up on the wall, above her bed, she’s pasted a half a dozen polaroids of her and her boyfriend.  Out the window is a rugby field where only seedlings of grass are to be seen.

Lunch is available over in the cafeteria.  Before we dine we hit up the bookstore where she gets some supplies.  I can remember roguishly shopping in the school book store, where I had an undergrad account, for Christmas presents, before the return home for the holidays.  Involuntarily I draw this to her attention.  She grabs a hoodie, opportunistically.  I see a book about the Sinai on the shelf which catches my eye.  Beside it is a biography of sorts of the iconoclastic Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten.  I thumb through it and, not really done yet with my Egyptian afterglow, I decide I’ll read it.

Upstairs in the cafeteria we overhear a table of young Chinese guys talking in Mandarin.  I resist the urge, my daughter’s death stare helps, to go over an ingratiate ourselves.  Later they rise and go over to an adjacent table of fellas, also of the Chinese persuasion and they all begin to scan one another’s we chat QR-codes.  Leaving we pass a wall of flyers that might be up at any school in the country.  A large space is devoted to the Hong Kong protesters.  There is a list of their demands.  I’m not sure I’ve ever considered this list before.  There are photos of defiant kids and menacing storm troopers and there are a number of characterizations of China as a fat, vicious dragon.  I draw my daughter’s attention to it and she comments involuntarily: “that’s not fair.”  I consider all those young men who, I suspect, have just gotten-off-the-boat, who are likely to be upset and confused by this, and of all the inflamed debate on this and a hundred other topics that will happen here on campus in the run up to an election year.  This too, ain’t my job. 

Back in the hall we started the day off in there’s a lecture to the parents.  It’s might have been entitled: “It’s time to let go now.”  They remind us that, even though we’re paying for things, the students are legally adults.  They have rights to their own privacy and data.  It’s all thoughtfully delivered.  But my mind is elsewhere.  I consider Reed’s griffin emblem up above the stage and I think of all my daughter’s struggles to get this far and I am just swelling with pride, and so happy that she is now beginning this journey here.

Monday 8/26/19