Graduating

One of our nieces recently graduated from college here in Iowa City, and has gotten an internship at the university. The lease on the apartment she’s been in for the past four years is up today (to renew it she would have had to have done it last January when she had no idea what she would be doing or where at this time; that’s just the way things are in Iowa City for students and renting), and her new apartment (she fortunately was able to find one) doesn’t open until Monday. So we offered to store as much of her stuff as she needed for the next few days in our house. Her parents drove their van to town and helped her with the move. They made four trips in the van, unloading a mattress and bedspring, couch, chair, coffee table, TV, and sundry other small furniture. They also left town with a van and a car both full of cloths and incidentals. In all, it was pretty impressive. As they were leaving, I told my niece that when I left college, I did so by myself and had packed everything I owned in a 1959 VW Beetle.

I didn’t mean that at all as criticism. It was more a personal reflection, another of those oh-land-oh-goshen-how-things-have-changed-in-40-years moments. I have those more and more these days. In truth, it was probably envy as much as anything else; if only I could have lived my undergraduate days in that relative luxury. But it probably would have been a distraction for me. As if I needed any more distractions as a student. No doubt I was better served by my Spartan survival (at least as I look back on it over the decades), just as my niece has been well-served by her means. We all graduate as we can, as we do, and we all graduate many times over in our lives.