How to Drop a Kid Off at College

Brown Lamby the Coed

I just dropped my younger daughter off at college on the east coast.

The day before we were to fly to Boston, we went to a concert in the city. So my daughter stayed up late two nights before her departure, rolling her clothes into impossibly tight little loaves with her friend. In the morning, the bags were ready, all but zipped. And perched right on top sat Brown Lamby.

Brown Lamby didn’t start out brown. Brown Lamby was pink and was one of those baby loveys with an animal head and a hand-towel sized blanket for a body. When someone gifted this to my infant daughter, I promptly took it to our cleaners and asked them to drastically reduce its size so my daughter wouldn’t suffocate under it — the kind of thing that would never happen, but the kind of thing I still worked overtime to manage against.

I picked up a cocktail napkin-sized lovey two days later and my daughter imprinted on that little square. She took it everywhere, slept with it every night and loved the pink right out of it. Once it went missing for many days and our family life came to a halt. My daughter was despondent. I introduced the back-up lamby I’d had made for just such a catastrophe. But back-up lamby was new and fresh and immaculate and therefore a lot less lovable.