Packing Up a Freshman on College Avenue

SAN DIEGO — As a father, I’m accustomed to being surrounded by contrarians and people of dubious opinions, half-thoughts and spontaneous outbursts. Kids, most of them. Many of them my own.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?” my daughter says as she answers her cell phone.

“This is your father,” I say on the other end.

“Who?”

“Your dad,” I say.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?” she asks.

Fresh from her freshman year, she speaks into her cell phone like someone booking Vegas lounge acts or arranging a bail bond, in clipped rat-a-tat-tat sentences full of semicolons and exclamation points. At 18, she speaks in punctuation that hasn’t yet been invented.

“I’ve come to take you home,” I tell her.

“Like, when? she asks.

“Soon,” I say.

“Let me check ... maybe, sure ... who’s this again?”

“Your dad,” I say.

Down on College Avenue, they are loading up for summer. Some of America’s most promising children, bellies soft as Krispy Kremes, carry their dorm gear down to their parents’ cars, some of them sweating for perhaps the very first time--the kids, that is, not the parents.

“I’ll carry that,” a mother says.

“No, I’ll get that,” responds a whiskered dad.

“Let me get that,” says a kid.

The quad in front of the dorm is littered with college debris. It’s what Earth would look like if it were hit by an asteroid sponsored by Bed, Bath & Beyond--full of pillows, blankets and stuffed animals.

There are beanbag chairs. Comforters. Dell computers torn apart as if for an autopsy.

“This is so heavy,” my daughter says.

“On the way home, everything’s heavier,” I tell her.

She is carrying her pet frog, in a small plastic pet-frog container. The frog appears hung over.

I am carrying a small TV. A computer keyboard. A pillow that smells like mouthwash. A lamp. A mouse pad. Two cans of Dr. Pepper. A jar of pennies. A suitcase with a broken strap. A ceramic baseball. And half a stapler.

“Nice packing job, honey,” I say.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she says proudly.

On the way to the car, we pass young lovers saying goodbye for the summer. Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. A guy who looks like Flounder from “Animal House.” That blond from “American Pie.”

They are all the couples, past and present, who have had to say goodbye for a summer back home with Mom and Dad. I sense a bitterness about them. A resentment they cannot hide.

“Get a room, will ya?” I mutter.

“Dad,” scolds my daughter.

The young lovers act as if they are invisible, when in fact they are the most visible people of all.

They stand on the quad hugging and crying, then try to crawl inside each other’s clothes. Remember when you were in love like this? Me neither. Kills your brain cells, this much love. Emotional whisky.

“Maybe we should get a luggage cart,” my daughter says after my left ventricle collapses.

“Luggage cart?” I say.

So we wait in the dorm lobby for a cart. Apparently, the parents’ club sprang for luggage carts, to help moms and dads lug stuff from the dorms to the cars. Might be two or three of them.

“How much longer?” I ask.

“Probably half an hour,” the kid at the front desk says.

“Could you, like, call my room when one is ready?” my daughter pleads.

“No, you have to wait here,” the kid says a little too gruffly.

“No, I think you could probably call us,” I say, forgetting for a moment that I’m not in L.A.

“Dad, we’ll just wait,” my daughter says, tugging me by the elbow.

I feel like a character in an Updike novel, a middle-aged guy off to retrieve a daughter at college, while flashing back to my youth, a thousand years ago.

Even a thousand years ago, college was much like this. You spent the year collecting mishaps. You wore jeans that didn’t fit, and a smile too big for your face.

You slept till noon and ate your big meal of the day at 1 in the morning, in unscrubbed places named Pancho’s or Harry’s, which served several kinds of ethnic food, none of them related: tacos, egg rolls, fried shrimp.

You never drank milk.

On Saturday night, anything could happen and usually didn’t. On Sundays, you studied and called your mom because you missed her cooking and clean clothes that smelled like snow.

That was college then. That is college now.

“What time did you go to bed?” my daughter asks a friend.

“Three,” her friend says. “You?”

“Four,” my daughter says.

Four? Vampires get to bed before 4, even teenage ones. But I guess that’s freshmen for you. At night is when they come alive.

“There’s a plastic wading pool in your bathroom,” I tell my daughter when we return to her dorm room.

“I know,” she says.

“Let me put it this way,” I say. “Why is there a plastic wading pool in your bathroom?”

“One girl, she can’t shave her legs in the shower,” my daughter explains.

“That makes sense,” I say.

“It does?” she asks.

And down on College Avenue, freshman year packs up for home.

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is [email protected].