Look who’s home from her year in the jungles of Central America.
I’m so glad you’re back, Jill. Cheryl just got back from Nepal, too. I get to see her later this week.
‘Tis also the season for parents to welcome home prodigal daughters from college. When prodigal daughters don’t drive, welcoming is an active process entailing several hours of travel time. I arrived in her town a night early so I could go to Monday night Irish dance class nearby. It’s been several years since I’ve done my solo steps in front of P, our beloved and brutally exacting teacher, and I was nervous. But afterwards P made of special point of telling me that I’d danced well. Since she does not dole out praise lightly — I’ve gotten it a handful of times in more than a decade — I’ve been cradling those words in my mind like brittle petals ever since.
I spent the night at Shirley’s and Scott’s. Meet their hounds, Bailey and Buddy.
They had a another overnight guest, a guy from North Carolina who sipped iced whiskey, played a shiny guitar and sang — in what was clearly the voice of experience — original songs about mighty hangovers. He had accompaniment during the choruses.
The following noon, upon my arrival on campus, my prodigal daughter was working frantically on a final essay about something linguistic. Her third-floor dorm room looked disturbingly lived-in, though she did have a stack of six packed boxes. Luckily I’d brought my laptop so I got to finish a two-hour work task (forgetting to unplug and bring home my computer’s power supply: an $85 error, it turned out). Then I wandered around the hallway, sightseeing. I was intrigued by the signs, particularly the one that begged its readers not to throw food in the stairwells, nor to spit on the walls or in the water fountains. There was a notice about a workshop on interracial dating and another poster asking students not to put objects bigger than the trash chute into the trash chute.
How much can one college student have accumulated in a mere nine months, you may ask? Let me answer the best way I can: five hours, a thousand stairs and one parking ticket’s worth. I was barely able to jam the final wee item — a bike — into my huge old station wagon.
We used the last credits on Lulu’s meal ticket to buy fifteen bags of M&Ms, two Pepsis and some Junior Mints. Before heading home we dropped some of her stuff at the house she’ll be sharing next year, only blocks from where we lived in 2000.
15 bags of M&Ms…I approve.