It was 20 years ago today. And then some.

[captainsblog]

On August 15, 1978, I left Long Island for good.

I'd been away the whole previous academic year, but came home for the summer, because that's what college kids do, right?  In that first collegiate year, I'd turned 18, gotten my license, and experienced freedom, independence and alcohol for the first times in my life. It took about two weeks into that experience to realize that Thomas Wolfe was right about that Can't Go Home Again stuff.

I had no job- these were the days of Carter malaise, and nobody was gonna hire a student who was leaving in two months- and I also had no car, after a nasty wreck of my first one ever barely two weeks after returning "home" (yes, it was one of these, and fortunately, it didn't explode like this one and others did). My father was too much of a cheap bastard to put me on his car insurance policy even before the accident, so my ride for the rest of that summer was a very ratty old bicycle.

Who knows how I managed to keep my sanity under those conditions? We lived nowhere near a train station, so New York City could've been on the other side of the globe. I took some English courses at the local community college just to stay out of the house, and counted the days until I would be getting out of there.

By mid-August, I had a place to go. Cornell at the time had virtually no housing for returning students not lucky enough to have drawn a North Campus room for their freshman year, and my future roomies' lottery numbers and mine added up to something in the high six figures, so we'd found an apartment on the other side of campus from the Collegetown slumlords, but it came with a twelve-month lease, beginning 30 years ago today.

God bless my sister for helping me get out of that situation. She was in an odd state of her own at the time, having temporarily moved back to Long Island for the first time in ten years herself and living with a former and, she thought, future boyfriend. It was his Bigass Caddy that fit all my freshman stuff plus the equal pile of never-coming-back possessions, and got me to the apartment door on that sunny August morning. (A month or so later, she ended that experiment, and was back an hour away from me where she still is.)

I was still carless, but Ithaca is perhaps the most walkable city in the universe. I was on my own for the first week or so, laying in groceries and toilet paper and all the other signs of independent living. As Donna is reminding everyone reading this on her end, I couldn't tell a head of lettuce from a cabbage at that point. To which I reply, "Je t'aime!" (and dodge another explosion).

Roommates arrived toward the end of the month, and the 200 miles from that island seemed awfully longer than they'd seemed the first year. I registered to vote in Ithaca, changed all my college records to reflect my newly established residency, and from that lease forward, home was where I was, not where I came from.

Those apartments are still there- much improved, highly gentrified and I doubt I could afford to rent one for Emily were she to wind up there- and on many of my detours through Ithaca, I cut to campus by way of Triphammer and Highland just to remind myself of where my true adult life began. I went on to move 12 times over 10 years, before my stays in Rochester and our one home here have gained more permanence, but it was always worth it to know that I had a home, however fleeting, that was mine and not somebody else's.

Comments

[symian.livejournal.com]

Life goes quick, does it not?

*sigh*

20 years. Where have they gone!

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

Wonderful memories. Made me think of my first apartment in Elk Park, NC, right after graduation from King College. Thanks. :D