Last Friday we headed south to fetch our freshman. We averaged about 75 mph on Interstate 5, cars passing us all along the way, and in five hours reached northern Los Angeles, where traffic precipitously halted. Although the day of mourning for Ronald Reagan was a semi-holiday, cars were bumper-to-bumper; it took us three hours to wend our way through LA to southern Orange County. The frequent braking and over-90 degree heat made us thankful once more that, many years ago, we had taken the road north.
We pulled into the parking lot at UC-San Diego around 7 p.m., and my hopes for a return trip the next morning were dashed when confronted with the state of disarray in the freshman’s room. The freshman’s mother took charge, shooing me and the pre-teen out of the room. She sorted and folded until 11 p.m., while I made myself useful by checking in at the nearby Marriott and hauling the luggage upstairs. That strenuous task completed, I rewarded myself with age-appropriate liquid refreshment.
On Saturday morning I bought bungee cords and duct tape to secure the containers we were storing at UCSD. Despite leaving behind several cubic feet of material, we nevertheless filled the van with suitcases of clothes, boxes of CDs, DVDs, and electronics equipment, a rarely played viola, a five-foot implement used in one of the more obscure martial arts, dilapidated shoes that Goodwill would not accept, and a rectangular watercolor whose value could only have been sentimental.
UCSD threatened to impose a fine on rooms left in a substandard condition, so the mothers of the freshman and his roommate spent hours cleaning and vacuuming and picking up until the room gleamed like a diamond amidst the squalor of the all-male suite.
After an unbelievable transformation, the room is ready for inspection
The mothers then turned their attention to the common area furniture and scrubbed off organic substances of indeterminate origin. By 3 o’clock they were done.
We drove to Seaport Village, San Diego’s counterpart to our Fisherman’s Wharf, and celebrated the completion of the freshman year by dining at the San Diego Pier Café.
We were paying for the view, but the fish was fresh and perfectly grilled, and after decades of frugality I find it easier to rationalize loosing the purse-strings. © 2004 Stephen Yuen
After dinner we strolled to the USS San Diego memorial
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