Mores and lesses

[captainsblog]

I got home from my Designated Friday a bit past six tonight, to the sight of several packed boxes of All The Things that Emily got to doing today while I was on the road. She'd been resisting the concept of packing before she had her Final Amazing Weekend With Friends And Family, but something got into her consciousness and she's now made significant progress toward Wednesday's goal.

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Meanwhile, I left here today for Rochester appointments at 1-ish and 3, with one on the way back home for a bit after 4. Trouble was, after I'd already hit the road, the earliest needed to be moved until after the middle one, and I only managed to move that up by 15 minutes, so I had an hour-plus to kill by the time I got to Rachacha. After discovering that my favorite Park Avenue lunchery was closed, I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I headed over to RIT to see if any of their pre-orientation sites or programs were running before Wednesday's scheduled arrival.

::crickets::

My, college campuses are dead as doornails in that week or two between Summer Session and the start of fall classes. I stayed in Ithaca for all three summers after my sophomore, junior and senior years, and lived here after my first and final law school years as well, and got to experience that lack-of-phenomenon of on-campus late-August activity on each of those five occasions. I ticked them off today: the shuttered libraries and union facilities; the leftover Remembrances of Activities Past still posted all over, and the few forward-looking banners of Orientation Yet To Come; all accompanied by the general openness and welcomeness of the whole place for people like me who, today, had no official business whatsoever being there. I toured the closed union and campus center; grabbed a City Paper and read it in a comfy orange club chair adjacent to the Interfaith Center (ewwwww, mosque reference!); listened to an unspecified student playing a piano in one of the open studios, then watched as an almost exact Ringo Starr lookalike walked into the Campus Center just as it was time to leave for my spontaneous 2:45 in Chili.

When I next walk those grounds (if I'm lucky to be joining the fam) in just over 72 hours, they will be brimming with n00bs and their parents and senses of Beginning. Yet even in these quietest of moments, I sensed perhaps more of the potential in those facilities for our child as she begins to walk among them herself, well before this time next week.

Comments

[luckycee.livejournal.com]

You painted a very profound picture there, Ray.