Loneliness and Cheeseburgers

When I left for college, I was warned. It was a dire message repeated endlessly: you will be so unbearably homesick. So when I got here, I felt a little guilty not being homesick. I mean, I can call my parents whenever I want to talk to them, I can write them, e-mail them at almost anytime of the day - more than I could have in high school; and I don't miss my room - it's a nice room, but I've brought bits of it here, and that is enough for me. Most of my friends have lived so far from me for such a long time, that I'm used to the distance there.

There is one thing I miss, though. I miss meals at home. It's not the cooking, though nothing the cafeterias can come up with can beat my mom's cooking; it's the family time. At home, I would wake up at 6am to eat breakfast with my parents. I showered at nights so that I wouldn't miss it. After breakfast, I'd go back to sleep until 7, and then get ready for school. At night, schedules were rearranged to be sitting at the table together. This last year, I was working, so it got a little hectic. I'd tutor until 5 or 5:15, come home, eat dinner, and on Monday/Wednesday, leave for lifeguarding at 5:30. But I was at the table with my family. If I couldn't make it, which happened on occasion, especially when we had paste-up for newspaper until 8pm - well, those nights, there would be a rapping at the door at the end of the building we were in - my dad standing there, and sometimes my mom, too, with a plate of food fixed up by mom, still hot, with aluminum foil covering it, and a set of silverware and a napkin. There were less than a dozen times in my 12 years of public school when my mom didn't fix my lunch.

When I was little, after the church fruit sales, we would have half of our garage filled with towers of orange and grapefruit boxes. It smelled wonderful in there! It was my job in the mornings to fetch enough grapefruit for breakfast, so I would tiptoe out barefoot across the slippery ice-cold floor around the car to the fortress maze of citrus and pile as many grapefruit as I could into my arms. Then we'd all sit there, half asleep still, digging into our grapefruit half. I miss that. I miss groggy non-coherent dining together. I miss scheduling things around dinner time, not dinner time around things. It made it important.

P.S. 3.3 down, 21.7 to go.