Adulting in Z formation

“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if the dog didn’t puncture the thing last time we had guests,” I said, narrating the sudden memory I had miraculously withdrawn from my post-pandemic memory bank and accepted as true without the arduous task of investigating the evidence so as to avoid doing a thorough search of all 11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.”