Some observations as my daughter watched her friends head to college in the past week and then moved in herself:
- One friend of my daughter reports that her roommate at a public university brought a flat-screen television along with a microwave and mini-fridge. At first, my daughter thought that this was stereotypical university overindulgence. No, responded the friend: it's the roommate's parents who are that indulgent.
- When my daughter and I arrived on her campus yesterday morning, we went our separate ways for an hour: she to do all the bureaucratic stuff, me to get a bite to eat and relax on the campus cafe's patio. The student who followed her out of the parking lot towards the first station? Accompanied by two parents and two or three siblings (I forget).
- I saw several trailer-containers with more than a few cubic feet of space, and parked in the (only) driveway in and out of one parking lot was a Ryder truck (not a trailer or a van). I can only hope that the truck had stuff for several returning students.
- The administrator who greeted me at a morning reception seemed a bit surprised that I had dropped my daughter off with a few suitcases and odds and ends and didn't know what she was doing at the moment. Then he praised me.
Yes, my daughter's college had a reception for parents and an explicit time at which they had scheduled "parents say good-bye and go away." As a result, I think I better stop making fun of today's parent-handling routines. I'm sure that some of my classmates also had helicopter parents, but I got to my college in the evening of move-in day after traveling cross-country with a suitcase and trunk, and by the time I had dragged everything to my room, I was exhausted, and it was dark. If anyone brought a vanful, I wasn't going to know.
By the time of the afternoon hug-and-go deadline yesterday, I was on my flight back to Tampa–I teach T-Th 8 am classes this semester. I would have loved to stay in the area to visit some friends and enjoy sub-90 F. weather (oh, the cafe patio and the outside part of the reception was wonderful–temperatures in the mid-70s), but I think the only practical thing I could have done was shuttle my daughter to get (or get on her orders) odds and ends that don't make sense to pack for a plane trip. That's what care packages are for (this week's: a coffee grinder, filter, and other accoutrements).
Ha! I knew students who needed a truck to haul their stuff (including an entire pre-fabricated loft that would be erected inside their dorm room in addition to a sofa and stereo equipment) more than a few decades ago. But they did it, with their own money, not their parents.