The other day I had a dr’s appointment that I knew I’d spend a lot of time waiting for…you know the drill: show up, check in, sit in the waiting room, wait to be called, sit in the exam room, etc. I’ve learned there’s no guarantee of good magazines, and even if they are good I am scared to touch them. <cough> Swine flu. <ahem>
Anyway, to ward off boredom I took a book: The Little Prince. Quick read, super great story, and I haven’t read it in a long time. Grabbed it from my bookshelf and headed out. Got myself checked in and started waiting. Pulled out said book and had a serious flash back to 1998. Yup. Nineteen Ninety EIGHT. Whoa. Hold on to your hats as you turn your heads, folks, that’s a ways back there!
I had just started my freshman year at BYU. I was living in the dorms and had a sweet desktop computer with a top-of-the-line dot matrix printer. Never mind that it was also out-of-date and my parents gave it to me to justify their upgrade to inkjet. The important thing is I had my own printer and a huge box of dot matrix paper and thus I was so cool. My roommate on the other hand disagreed with the printer coolness. (Hi Meagan!) I would have to print papers early in the morning before I left for class and somehow the line by line ee-aaaccc-zzzz ee-aaacc-zzz sound just ANNOYED her so much! I’m sure that printer is the only thing she ever considered killing me for. However, she exercised extreme control and only ever yelled at me once. But this is all a digression.
Continuing to the true point of this post: stuffed in my copy of The Little Prince was a dot-matrix print out of an email my dad had sent me that freshman year. He and my mom were struggling with this new phase of parenting called “first child to move out freak-out”. They wanted me to be able to call home for free, so they got themselves a 1-800 number. You know, for me to CALL them OFTEN. Even though the root truth of the situation is in the last two lines of my dad’s email: “The challenge is if you can ever use this ‘800′ number. Will there come a time when you think of calling home before your Mother calls you?”
And suddenly in that drab waiting room all the emotions of Freshman Year come flooding over me: the freedom, the excitement, the adventure, the challenge, the homesickness, the classes, the dorms, the friends, the solitude, the food, the friends, the dances, the parties, the EVERYTHING that makes up moving out and far away and starting college. The beginning that marks a major end.
And I realize sitting there looking back that at the time I thought I was breaking free, starting new, and finally getting AWAY from everything that was so obviously imperfect and restrictive and thus BENEATH me. When in actuality, I was rounding a bend in the same road I had always been on. One big bend in what eventually lead me back to those who love me the most. Even when I didn’t use the 1-800 number before they did.
Thank you, Mom and Dad. Thank you for trying so hard to keep in touch. Thank you for letting go and trusting that I would find my way back. I love you.
