In no way did I expect to feel like this. Driving southbound on route 93, headed to drop off Dehlia at Plymouth State College, followed on all sides by rain and fog and rain, my windshield wipers barely keeping up with any of it, I’m fine. Even The Last Trip To Tulsa, a 10 minute psychedelic, acoustic chestnut that closed out Neil Young’s 1968 self-titled release, fails at dropping me into the blue; it shows up on a playlist looking to have at me, but it doesn’t work. I figure something is definitely up. None of the forecasted melancholy is anywhere to be found.
Summer was running out of what little steam it started with by the time mid-August showed up. My wife had assembled pallets of supplies dedicated to my daughter’s freshman year. Items ranging broadly from facial creams and feminine stuffs to snacks, a monstrous assemblage of push-pins, an 8″ foam mattress pad and a bushel of barely-red Macintosh Apples. ‘It will be good for her to have apples.’ My wife said. ‘It’s always nice to have apples.’ To the apple and face-cream pallet we added things like refrigerators, industrial-fans, a brown box-kayak-sized-presumably filled with gold bars, and a complex shelving system that I brought up three flights of stairs into the elevator-less Blair House on August 18th at barely 9am.
Blair House sits directly across from a spot where Robert Frost lived when he was a teacher at Plymouth State and, closer still, to a severe looking green dumpster with an arrangement of locks protecting it from things like pallets and industrial-fan boxes. Plymouth started as an all-girls college and, as such, the uniform of the day included the wearing of skirts. This 24/7/365 expectation drove the need for, or at the very least an interest in, a subterranean tunnel system connecting all the dorms and classrooms. Legend suggests that 1st year students Blair and Mary Lyon (whose name connects to the abutting dorm) were sister-friends and, breaking curfew one night, were killed inside the tunnel connecting the two dorms. Their spirits apparently still wander the halls scaring kids and making belongings disappear. Given the fruit in Dehlia’s room, it’s possible they pocket several for other ghost-friends with little chance of notice.
Blair has the coziness of an urgent-care center with bleached, colorless walls, cold-tile floors, two beds and two under-sized dressers. Dehlia and my wife make things a touch more cheerful by adding some pictures and color and apples, and it feels somewhat less like a sanatorium by the time we head to the dining hall for fajitas. We are dropping our daughter off two weeks prior to classes starting for soccer work outs and the coaches have mentioned that, by 2p, parents need to be (the fuck) out, and ‘headed home.’ I catch myself staring at D, at times, during lunch. Trying to memorize her face a little, and thinking melodramatic thoughts about dropping her at schools for the past 12 years. I note her expressions. The way her eyes bend and shrink, sometimes, when she smiles and the way she purses her lips together when she laughs with food in her mouth. She’s clearly whatever the opposite of nervous is. Maybe it’s happy and maybe it’s relief or maybe it’s something different still. I’m still expecting to get run over by emotion at some point, it just isn’t now. She seems unstressed and excited and it’s difficult for me to drum up anything close to what I thought I’d be feeling.
We drive to the field-house where the coaching staff has asked for prompt attendance-starting a two week stretch of flexibility testing, concussion benchmarking and a set of fitness expectations that have concerned Dehlia all summer. If she’s nervous about it now, though, she’s either buried it, or turned it into something else by the time we’re hugging her and saying goodbye. There are no tears and no real threat of them from what I can see. We tell her how we know she can do it and to believe in herself and then we’re gone. She’s gone. She waves at us, without looking back, and disappears into the un-ironic, delicately branded All-Well Center with a small group of girls who have no idea about how close they’re about to become.
On the way home, my wife and I talk about how shocked we are about the lack of tears, how strong Dehlia looked and how not-so-awful the fajitas were. We talk about how these events are often emotional let downs and consider the likelihood of coming apart at some point in the future when we have less of an expectation to. At home, I look at some pictures on my phone that I was able to snap. Of Dehlia and Brooke in 330 Blair and of Dehlia and her roommate sitting on 8” foam mattress pads and of Robert Frost and his dumpster. There’s one picture of Dehlia smiling, her eyes shrinking and curling, the way they do when she’s confident, that starts to get into my throat, but it goes away when I flip to a picture of her holding a circus-sized waffle cone with dried chocolate ice cream under her eye. I don’t feel anything resembling sad. Or longing. Or gloom. In an attempt to find something to make me ache a little, I turn on the 3rd game of a 4 game series against the Indians. Giving up 6 runs on 8 hits in 3 and 1/3rd, Red Sox starter Matt Barnes is doing his all to help me out. But he gets out of his jam and the fog stays lifted.
Brooke goes to bed and I sit around watching the Sox deflate, trying to process what did and didn’t happen during the day. I walk through some old photo albums trying one last time to flip an emotional switch. I watch an old soccer video on my phone, read a poem she wrote for Father’s Day when she was 14 and re-read some of my old journal entries from when we dropped her off at Newport City in the first grade. “She looks like an old lady” I said, “someone that has some store of knowledge that she doesn’t yet have access to. When I left her there, I felt something new buckle inside of me. I don’t know what it was necessarily but I both never want to feel it again and want to feel it, again, immediately. Weird.”
Nothing much moves until I see a tweet come through from her right before I head up to bed. ‘Can’t believe how at home you can feel at a place that feels so little like home.’ I think about that. About her recognizing what things aren’t and what they are. About how relieved her relief makes me. And about how connected parent’s feelings are to those that our kids are experiencing. I go to bed happy and content and relieved and that convinces me a bit, that my girl is feeling something close to that as well.