I confess I was not looking forward to taking my son to college. It’s not that I wasn’t excited for him, but he was anxious about the change and I was worried about saying goodbye to my firstborn. I knew we would be projecting our anxiety on each other, amplifying our neuroses in new, unpleasant ways.
My wife and daughters were unable to join us on the trip to UMass-Amherst, so it was just the two of us, making a day of it.
We had a good talk on the drive there. He talked about his worries. I did my best to share fatherly wisdom and validate his feelings, even as I tried to quell my own worrywart tendencies.
We arrived far too early for our move-in time, so we stopped and took a walk in the woods at a small conservation area outside Amherst. Walking through the trees calmed us both, and with so many trees in that part of Massachusetts, it was reassuring to know that a calming walk is always an option for him.
Moving him into his dorm room gave me flashbacks to my own freshman move-in day. The dismay at the cell-like nature of the room. The awkwardness of meeting the roommate, imagining what it would be like to live with this stranger for the next year.
Because I was clearly getting in my son’s way while he set up, I explored the 65-year-old dorm, wondering how frequently he would check the ancient-looking mailboxes, or how he would do with his first load of laundry.
We spent the afternoon and early evening exploring the campus, eating in one of the famously excellent UMass dining halls, and delaying the inevitable goodbye as long as we could. He was nervous about orientation because forced socializing with strangers is not really his thing—yet another trait he and I have in common.
Then, as we sat at a picnic table outside his dorm, a student wearing a familiar Foundation for Belmont Education 5K shirt sat nearby. He and my son said “Hey” to each other, and though they weren’t friends at Belmont High, the fact that my son had seen a familiar face was comfort enough that I felt better about giving him one more hug and saying goodbye.
During my long walk back to the car, I lasted nearly 12 whole minutes before I burst into tears. It was a quick, cathartic cry. I felt the tension of the last 10 hours drain out of me, and then I was fine. I reminded myself that he really wasn’t that far away. We could and would visit frequently.
As I drove the hour and forty-five minutes home, wondering how many times I would make this trip over the next four years, I listened to a playlist I made years ago that consists of songs about change. It seemed apt. I sang along to “Wild World” by Cat Stevens and “Changes” by David Bowie. It’s a long playlist, and the final song was just wrapping up as I drove into Waverly Square and home. The final plaintive-but-still-somehow-joyful words of Lucy Dacus’s song, “Map On A Wall” always hit hard when I hear them, but they were especially poignant that day: “If you want to see the world, you have to say goodbye/’Cause a map does no good hangin’ on a wall.”