And she's off!

Two weeks ago we delivered Josie to the University of Rochester, where she plans to study Physics and Astronomy. All the important stuff went really well, though there was plenty of complaining in parent Facebook groups about long move-in lines. What did they expect, I wonder? Probably 1500 students had to arrive the same day. Seemed to me it was handled beautifully. There were plenty of signs and directions, and given our sheer numbers, the queue seemed about right. Once we reached the dorm itself, the football team (yes) emptied our minivan in about 3 minutes flat. In all the muscular enthusiasm for grabbing anything not structurally attached to the car, I stayed in the driver's seat and kept a close eye on my coffee.

Jo has a first floor double on the Freshman Quad. Her randomly assigned roommate, Hayley, had already settled in when we arrived. Her side of the room, decked out in careful proportions of navy, white and gray, looked like one of the "sponsored by Bed Bath & Beyond" model rooms displayed on college tours. Half a dozen overstuffed throw pillows on the bed (where is she going to sleep?). Vase with silk flowers on the windowsill (soon knocked to the floor by a Genesee River breeze). Botanical prints hung in precisely offset formation over the bed, with another framed on the desk, price tag still attached.

My girl eyed this staged perfection only briefly before digging out her Boba Fett poster, her light sabers, her L'Manburg banner (Tommy Innit followers unite), and the bright red and yellow flowered duvet she made herself over the summer, thinking a cinderblock room might need some cheering up. She hauled a giant computer monitor onto her desk and set about unspooling wires and connecting power strips. 

The equivalent space on Hayley's desk holds a giant lighted makeup mirror. 

All you need from a roommate, I told Josie, is not to be mean, and not to be gross. Happily, it seems Hayley is neither. By all reports they're getting along fine, each already busy with different friends and activities. Hayley's hitting the frat parties. Jo convenes late night card games in the dorm lounge and herds her crew onto shuttle busses to explore the area before they're snowed in, which everyone promises will happen any minute. She's scoped out the campus tunnels, identified which dining hall has the best omelets and which the best salads, found her classrooms, explored some riverside trails. She's ready. I'm so proud. 

Also bereft, of which more later.

Lose some, find some

With Josie out of high school, people from my school/parent acquaintiverse are fast becoming used-to-knows. When I see them around (Cape Codders don't leave the house without running into someone we know), the lack of obligatory chitchat is kind of liberating, but takes some getting used to after all those years of being in each other's orbits. Twice this week I've bumped into other moms, smiled and said hi, and realized later that neither of us cared to break stride, let alone stop and catch up.

Yesterday, it was someone who'd served on a parent committee with me some years back. The committee did rewarding good work and mostly enjoyed each other's company, but she and I just never clicked one on one. I found her dull, self-involved and rude (she brought a protein bar to every. single. meeting, unwrapping and chewing it loudly enough to distract speakers. Drove me nuts). As to why she disliked me, it could be anything. I'm not everyone's cup of tea. But seeing a familiar face headed my way down a grocery store aisle, I forgot all that, smiled and said "Lenore, hi, how are you?" and she said "good" and kept right on going. This felt weird ("okay...") until I recognized it as an absolute gift. 

The other lady is someone whose name I wouldn't even remember if it weren't (ugh) the same as mine, and our preference not to chat in line at the farm stand was mutual and clear. My strongest memory of her is us walking into the high school at the same time one day early in Robin's freshman year. "So are you looking at colleges?" she asked. "Not yet," I responded. "It's only her first year, so we're not really there yet." "Oh, you're there," she said, "whether you know it or not is another thing." Thank goodness she was there to sneer that day, otherwise it's hard to figure how Robin got to college at all! What would we do without our superiors. 

Anyway, the up side, and the real point: throughout those school years, there were also parents whose paths never quite crossed mine because our kids weren't on the same teams or in the same classes or friend groups or whatever, but whom I always thought would be fun to get to know if the opportunity arose... and here it is. Now I can ignore people I never liked anyway, and seek out people I did. 

Should I send Lenore a thank-you note? Or maybe a protein bar.

Between Jobs

I have a wee blister on my thumb, which I'm happy about because a) it's from kayaking on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day with a beautiful friend, and b) it's on my left hand so it won't interfere with my pickleball game. 

Job hunting looms, but not today.

in which Things Keep Happening

Right, so, where were we?

My mother died two months ago. This is good news in that her passing was peaceful and lovingly attended, she is finally free of dementia, and perhaps, if you believe in such things, reunited with my dad. It also means moving on, emotionally. Lots to process. 

Robin loves film school at NYU, has a very cool summer internship, moved to an East Village walkup, and the world is basically her oyster. Summer in New York being what it is, it probably smells like an oyster a lot of the time too. I'll say this for Cape Cod: as gross as summer gets here, it's grosser everywhere else. 

Josie wrapped up high school like a boss and will head to the University of Rochester next month to major in Physics and Astronomy. In the meantime she's working in a lab down the hall from Aaron's, so they commute together. 

I'm gleefully tuning out of all things school-related. Remove! Delete! Unsubscribe! Gonna merge the middle and high schools, you say? Go right ahead! Settle right back into that well-worn comfort zone people call "pretty good." Nobody wants our schools to be average, but it sure looks like nobody cares if they're not outstanding, either. So be it.

I just left my job as assistant to an older lady I thought very highly of indeed, because her family were stealing from her and generally treating her so badly I just couldn't be around it any more. The only thing that felt worse than leaving would have been staying. Heartbreaking.

So, lots of chapters ending, new ones waiting to be written. How do you decide what to do with the rest of your life? 

Mother's Day

Thinking about starting this new blog, I spent some time rereading the last one, in which I wrote about caring for my parents before my father died, and moving my mother into memory care assisted living. Any one of those entries is a decent snapshot into how things were; reading them all at once was overwhelming. Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, I didn't notice how awful things were becoming. I just kept dealing with one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, because that's what you do. 

We are doing elder care all wrong, in this country. The "system," to the extent there is one, is just awful.

Anyway. For those playing along at home, Mom is still in memory care. She has declined to the point beyond ever again being able to come visit my house, which we used to do weekly before COVID. She's in hospice, not in a dying-any-minute way like it was with Dad, but just shifting the priorities in her care. There is no cure for Lewy Body Dementia anyway. Whatever else might take her would be a mercy. A doctor friend calls pneumonia "God's off-ramp." We should be so lucky.

On a recent visit with Robin, my mother greeted her as if she were me, then looking over at me, asked "who'd you bring?" On another, with my brother, she greeted me as me, and kept asking him when he was going to propose ("it's not really in the plan"). "I don't know about this new boyfriend," she said as we stood up to leave. "OH! He looks just like Rick!" Exactly like him, in fact. 

Knowing what's knowable about her illness, we thought we were prepared for the inevitable day she would not recognize us as her grown children, and that it wouldn't bother us when it happened. Neither of those things turned out to be true. 

Good grief, she's at it again

It's been six years since I left off Noted and Blogged. Later, I wrote a bit about The Sandwiched Life while caring for my parents. This new blog will fizzle out eventually as well, but for now, it's scratching an itch. 

Nice to see you again.