Dormitory Dreamin'

Monday was one of the great days of my life.  Monday, we ferried my son to his dorm room and, after lugging his various "can't-live-without-its" up to the second floor, in obedience to his none-too-subtle-hints, expeditiously got back in our car and left him to plunge headlong into that eternal bacchanalia some of us fondly remember as College Life.

This wouldn't be a big deal for most parents in January.  But the fact is, due to a glitch in the system, my son's school apparently did not get our housing deposit for the Fall semester.  It was the end of August, and the work-study student handling phone calls from similarly disappointed and disgruntled freshmen who had expected to be living on campus and who now, two weeks before the start of classes, were being handed the news that the reason they hadn't gotten their room assignment was that - tee-hee, surprise! - they didn't have a room, laughed merrily and told us that so many people were in the same boat as we that my son was not even going to be added to the waiting list.

Fortunately, the house we moved into last June has a separate small downstairs apartment built into it. Quaintly known as a "mother-daughter apartment" the smaller apartment has everything except a stove. Apparently, if there's a stove, that kicks the house out of the mother-daughter tax bracket and into the two-family-home tax bracket, and since nobody here is looking to pay higher taxes, we got my son a hot plate and a microwave, told him to come upstairs if he felt inclined to roast a turkey, and called it a day.

It was not an ideal solution by any means, since we now live on the wrong side of the Hudson (i.e., the west side) and my son's SUNY is on the right side of the Hudson.  So every. fricking. day. he had to be driven to the Mall, to catch the bus, to transfer to the campus shuttle, and thereafter all too frequently to tender his apologies to the professor if rush hour traffic had slowed down bridge traffic and he missed the connection for the shuttle, which runs once every hour, and if you miss it you're shit outta luck - all of these jump-through-hoops shenanigans due to the fact that we live in the House That Jack Built.  And every afternoon I had to keep an eye on my cell phone for the text that would announce it was time to jam my feet into my boots and peel off for the Mall because he was on the homeward leg of the journey.  And I would get to the Mall, only to find another text that read, "Oops - take your time - got on the Local by mistake, haven't even hit the bridge yet."

Let me tell you - I am not a fan of malls. Home Depot got a lot more money than they should have, just because I was bored and you can always put up another towel rack if you think hard about where you haven't put a towel rack yet.

My son was a good sport about it, all things considered.  And I did my utmost (no, really - I did - don't listen to my husband!) to be a good sport about suddenly becoming a Suburban School Bus Mommy, which had certainly not been part of anybody's plan. Why didn't my son drive himself to school, you ask? Because we have only two family cars.  We moved from Manhattan, remember? What sane family in Manhattan has a car for each and every member of the same household?  I'll bet not even each of the de Blasio kids has a car - and I'm pretty sure Gracie Mansion has a garage.

So it was a glorious moment when we learned that my son had managed to get on-campus housing.  I had called and I had called and I had called, and I think that I basically tortured so many people in the housing office with my incessant pleas that they "take away my adult child and put him     somewhere," that they put him on the list just to shut me up and stop the phone calls.  The news that he was finally in was greeted with the same sort of jubilant dance-around-the-kitchen-table-hugging-everybody-in-sight-and-inarticulately-shrieking-variations-on-"Whoopee!" that most families reserve for "I just found out I got a full scholarship to Harvard!" or "That Lotto ticket I found on the sidewalk outside my ten-dollar-an-hour job at Gray's Papaya just paid off at twenty-five million tax-free dollars!"

So last Monday we packed everything into the Honda, trundled across the bridge, got to the room, unpacked it all, and found that the double room was so nice and so big (with even a private bathroom, which is good, because my kid is spoiled after years and years of having his own bathroom, and spent most of his years at summer camp bitching, "I don't want to take a shower with all these fucking PEOPLE!") that there was room for things like the XBox and the PS4 and a large bag of video games and a small fridge and the little TV from our Adirondack summer cottage that my son says he is never going back to for the rest of his life because there isn't any subway station nearby and quite a lot of other things that he found he suddenly needed. So of course we all got back in the car, trundled across the bridge in the other direction, unplugged everything in sight, stuffed it in the car, and off we went, poop-poop, only to find that my son's room mate was unloading his stuff, including a second coffee maker, and was contemplating going back to his home for the bass guitar and the amp, since it's such a nice big room and they have so much space and anyway, he had forgotten to bring any blankets.

As my son gave is the hairy eyeball and jerked his head towards the door in the classic "What's that, Lassie? Timmy's fallen in the well?" move that every parent knows means, "Hit the road, please, Mom, and stand not upon the order of your going" my husband and I made eye contact, nodded at one another, and telegraphed, "Let's split before they can dream up any other essential equipment for Life in a Dorm."  We slipped out the door, raced to our car, and fled.

I assume everything is fine, because so far we have not received any calls from my son, or, more importantly, from the authorities.