Transition

Because it is September, and it is "back to school," and because I will soon be spending a weekend with four of my closest friends from college, all of whom I met in my first few days on campus, I have been thinking about when I left home for college, twenty years ago this fall, when I was eighteen years old. It doesn't seem possible that so much time has passed, that I am sitting in a home of my own, with a husband, two children and two dogs of my own sleeping as I write. So much is still the same: My parents, in their house, my childhood home, so much the same, my late night ways--I sit here well past midnight, sleep a distant point on the horizon, as it always has been, so many of the people I hold dear, the same, the same, the same.

And yet. I remember standing on the deck of the ferry back from Martha's Vineyard by myself, a hardback copy of Little Men in my hand, a library book, not mine, and looking out at the ocean, thinking: The last summer of my childhood. Nothing will ever be the same again. And the drive back to Sudbury with my parents, just my parents, to pack the station wagon full of all my things--new clothes, new sheets, a hot pot (never used)--and the drive, then, to Poughkeepsie, a tense drive, a quiet drive, the three of us lost in our thoughts, although I thought nothing of this at the time, only of my thoughts, me.

And before all this, that drive, so many moments. A chaotic, giddy shopping excursion at CVS for school supplies with my friend Kate, as though we wouldn't be able to buy notebook paper! pens! highlighters (also never used)! at our college bookstores. The somber drive to Bloomingdales for my somber clothes: dark jeans, a navy and black striped T-shirt. I had no inkling that in a few short months I would be waiting in line at the dining hall in pajama pants and a ratty sweatshirt of someone else's, always someone else's, the crisp dark jeans folded in a neat square with the hotpot in the back of my closet, unworn.

But what I am writing up to, what I was thinking about when I started, is a moment I can't really bear to conjure up in full. Still. I will sketch around it, though, because I have to now, and why I am thinking of it now?, but I will do it. Waiting in a long line that snaked around and around a part of the Main building that I can't even remember anymore, with my parents, because everybody else's parents were there, too, to get something, or sign something, and then realizing this was where we were supposed to say it, and somehow being by a big glass window, and having hugged them, and closed my eyes hard tight because crying all out was not really an option, and then looking out the window and saying it, the word, again in my head as I watched their backs walk away, walk away with what seemed like forever in their posture, telling myself to stop being such a baby, so stupid, and then realizing they'd rounded a corner and looking out this big glass window, walking close to it, leaning into it so none of the strangers around me could see me and crying anyway, and whispering the word one more time.

Good-bye.