It's college move-in season everywhere, and anyone who's spent any time in academia is probably thinking of this time of the year, not January, as the real new year. The freshmen arrived last week at Swarthmore, and over the last few days we ushered all of them through the library in slightly dazed groups. My Bloglines feeds are full of posts about the return of the students. I've been thinking about a bit of personal history.
My dad spent the latter half of his life teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, across the Schuylkill River from where I now live. Some of my early memories are of visiting him after my parents split up and my mother and I moved to Baltimore, running around the campus and sliding down Claes Oldenburg's Split Button sculpture. On one of these visits, right around this time of year, I noticed large numbers of students trundling their stuff toward the dorms in what looked, to my eyes, like giant laundry carts. I said something about "the invasion of the laundry-cart people," and, for years after that, the Invasion of the Laundry-Cart People was a standing joke between my dad and me. I'd ask if the laundry-cart people had arrived yet; he'd report that he'd spotted the first wave of the invasion on Locust Walk. And so on.
I'd almost forgotten about the Invasion of the Laundry-Cart People until a few weeks ago, when my walk through Center City took me by the Moore College of Art. I heard voices behind me and saw a couple of students and their families, with that returning-to-campus look about them, pushing — you guessed it — giant laundry carts full of dorm-room furnishings. I don't think I'd even seen those carts for at least twenty years. I think they may be a local phenomenon; maybe the schools around here rent them from the same supplier.
It was a lovely moment: it wasn't exactly like getting the past back, more like a small reminder from the universe that everyone's life is made up of echoes and continuities, linkages that go forward as well as backward. I wonder if, decades from now, I'll still be watching students with their carts on their annual end-of-August run.
Happy new year, everyone.
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