Way more than you want to know about dropping a kid at college

I've had a reasonably interesting life, but I haven't had a whole lot of momentous occasions to deal with. My parents are both still alive. I've stayed married for 24 years. I haven't moved for 18 years or changed jobs for 9 years. So aside from whatever else was going through my head, I also had some curiosity about how I would handle my daughter's actually leaving for college.

Ah, college. For the last year and a half I've heard talk of little else. And now here it is staring me in the face. Here's a detailed description of the dropoff process. Although I'd heard that the process was well organized and worked well, I had some trepidation about hundreds of people converging on a small campus with no streets of its own. I wanted to get there on the early side, and because somehow for the first time in the last 5 years, we hit no traffic on the Jersey Turnpike or the Lincoln Tunnel or any other road that we traveled and so arrived quite early indeed.

The street was an organized mob scene. Dozens of kids standing helplessly on the sidewalk surrounded by mounds of whatever one puts in a dorm room these days. A security guard waves us into a fenced-off section of curb. We start emptying the pile and I can see that the sidewalk is marked in chalk to designate dumping spots. My daughter was relieved to see that she seemed to have about the same amount of stuff as everyone else. We then tell someone at a table which spot we had our stuff in, and a few minutes later a guy with a big rolling bin comes along and we load everything in the bin and head to the room.

I knew from the floor plan that the rooms were pretty small, but even with every inch of the floor covered with our stuff, you could see it was going to fit. The room as slightly shabby (I have an eye for this having worked at Hamilton College for the summer putting a fresh coat of paint on every freshman dorm room) but certainly within reason. The kids actually get a long, detailed form describing what's wrong with the room, and presumably will be held responsible if they make it worse. For example, the air conditioner louvers are "slightly bent but functional." That kind of thing.

I'm good at unpacking, but terrible at putting things away, so I went for a walk with our younger daughter, who was along for the ride. The school is in a neighborhood where I once resided and it's practically unrecognizable. In a good way. All the dive bars are gone, replaced by upscale food markets and restaurants. Lots of places with big plastic bins, trash baskets, some-assembly-required-furniture, lamps and fans piled out on the sidewalk. The college was running a shuttle bus to Bed Bath and Beyond (I'm not kidding).

The rest of the time there was unremarkable, and we were finally kicked out around 3:30. The room looked pretty livable. I felt teary once, about a half hour before we left, but not when we said goodbye. I think it hasn't quite hit me that she's gone. The holidays are next week so she'll be back briefly then. maybe after that it'll seem more real.

P. S. I already sent a package of all the little stuff we forgot.