“When you come can you bring one of the air mattresses?”
An undulating college commute for the holidays – where we spend a few non-continuous weekends together as a family here and there before a month-long respite takes hold – was underway and negotiations were getting heated.
“I could” … I retorted cheekily. “But why do you want it?”
“We need something to sit on … and something for people to sleep on if they stay over,” she replied, reasonably enough. The months-long season of multi-festivity was coming in fits and starts, but the one thing she has this year that she didn’t have last term was a place to keep her stuff during the interim.
Though she is living in a dorm, I would tell anyone who asks that she and her roommates live in a pretty “epic” apartment.
Wording it that way makes me feel as if my own salad days weren’t so long ago.
Now, I never lived in a fifth-floor corner city apartment with secure access and hardwood floors. I didn’t have a balcony-like window that looked out lovingly over my campus.
But I did have a windowless room in a basement that was all my own, even if it was more than seventeen blocks away.
And I NEVER would have asked my mother to donate the old folding cot in the basement to my cause to find accommodation and party furnishings.
I would have resorted to doing what all the countless Xers of my Generation did – take a walking tour of the better neighborhoods on trash day.
That is, after all, how I procured one AMAZING mid-century modern sectional couch with a Hollywood Regency flair that lasted more than a dozen years – through one party after another, one apartment after another – all the way into the new century.
And I would still have it now if I hadn’t felt the call of nostalgia and released the blonde, jacquard beauty to a new generation of college students one fateful trash day.
But that is not how Gen Z rolls. Afterall, my daughter points out, there are epidemics of bed bugs and other forever-pests to think about now.
“One of the air mattresses will be fine,” she says with a heavy sigh, as if wading through my nostalgia were the physical equivalent of swimming the English Channel.
“Or … it would have been fine if the dog didn’t puncture the thing last time we had guests,” I said, narrating the sudden memory I had miraculously withdrawn from my post-pandemic memory bank and accepted as true without the arduous task of investigating the evidence so as to avoid doing a thorough search of all 11 tote bags in bottom of the front hall closet where the thing is probably jammed.
“How about I get you a bean bag lounger instead … Did you know companies make human size dog beds now? They are so versatile. They can be a lounger, or a couch, or a bed.”
“I know! We live in WILD times.”
“The only thing wilder would be if a drone had delivered the 40-pound, vacuum-packed box to your balcony window within the five- to seven-day shipping window. … As it is, we’re going to need your brother’s help to schlep it up the stoop and into the elevator.”
“I’m sure dragging it out to the sidewalk on move-out day will be much easier.”
Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.
Siobhan Connally’s Ittybits & Pieces: All this for an air mattress
29
0
02.12.2023
“When you come can you bring one of the air mattresses?”
An undulating college commute for the holidays – where we spend a few non-continuous weekends together as a family here and there before a month-long respite takes hold – was underway and negotiations were getting heated.
“I could” … I retorted cheekily. “But why do you want it?”
“We need something to sit on … and something for people to sleep on if they stay over,” she replied, reasonably enough. The months-long season of multi-festivity was coming in fits and starts, but the one thing she has this year that she didn’t have last term was a place to keep her stuff during the interim.
Though she is living in a dorm, I would tell anyone who asks that she and her roommates live in a pretty “epic” apartment.
Wording it that way makes me........
© The Saratogian
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
