Twenty Years.

My Dad drove us down the driveway in the white Explorer, the back trunk area stuffed to the gils, for these were the days of massive desktop computers and small televisions with built in VHS players. I watched from the passenger window, noticing how pretty the morning late August light shined through the pines.  Mom, Stephen, and a family friend visiting from Georgia followed behind us in Mom's car.  First I stared at the house as long as I could, then, after we'd turned out of the driveway, I watched the rearview window, staring until my house - my home - and then my street became tiny dots, out of focus.  Dad and I passed the time quietly. I counted out the coins he needed for each toll - EZ-Pass did not exist, and worked on compiling photo albums with real printed pictures, something I'd meant to get to over the summer and never did.

I remember knowing so clearly that morning, August 30, 1997, as my family and I drove me away from New Jersey and north to Boston that things would never be the same again.  It was probably the first thing I had ever been truly certain of in my seventeen years.  No matter how many times I came back to visit, no matter what future unfolded before me, I recognized that my world was changing.  A chapter had closed and another one awaited.  It shocks me now, twenty years down the road, to recall my life then, how small my circle was, how even with the wonderful exposure I'd be granted in my childhood, what a small and little world I inhabited then.

******

As we have been reminded in the news, twenty years ago today (twenty years!) Princess Diana died tragically in Paris.  This anniversary is forever linked with one of my own, on a much more personal note, for exactly twenty years ago tonight, I slept in my 13th floor freshman dorm room for the very first time, my first official night away from home, as a BU college student.

Of course it strikes me as ironic now, in the way that only years of living can, that I am sitting here writing in my beloved apartment in Cambridge, almost directly across the river from where I started my Boston journey twenty years ago tonight.

My parents sometimes tease me that I have the memory of an elephant.  I can usually tell you what outfits I wore when, who said what, what we did where, etc.  Still, it shocks me how certain days and moments can be seared so vividly into your mind that you couldn't possible shake them even if you tried.  In some ways I refuse to believe twenty years have passed in such a blink because I can still smell the sterilized rubber of my dorm mattress, I can feel the afternoon sunlight that streaked through the room as we opened the door, seeing my room for the very first time like it was just yesterday.  My hands get clammy all over again when I recall how anxious I felt, how I'd begged Dad to just drive us straight to the hotel, prolonging the inevitable by suggesting we could set up my room the following morning, and how Mom had, rightfully insisted it made more sense to set the room up in the afternoon when it was less crowded and we had a free laundry cart readily available.  It ended up that we compromised that evening of the 30th.  The room got set-up but I was allowed to stay in their Cambridge hotel one last night.  It was there, all of us crammed into a Hyatt hotel room, where we heard the breaking news about Diana's accident, each of us going to bed thinking she had only sustained minor injuries.

It was the next morning of course, August 31st, that we learned the heartbreaking and shocking news of Diana's death.  My Mom and I sat on the edge of the bed, stunned, watching the news.  Mom began to cry. It felt impossible to turn away from the news and yet it was official move-in day, we had to get back to the dorms.  I moved through the morning in a fog, all the while dreading the inevitable moment when I had to hug my family goodbye, when they would leave me up here in this strange New England city that I knew nothing about, and drive back home - oh, home - without me.

******

August has been mild this year.  Lately it's felt more like late September than the dog days of summer.  Which is, naturally, how it felt that first night in my dorm room as I laid there alone, wondering when my roommate was going to arrive, wondering who I was going to meet, wondering if I'd ever make as good of friends as I had in New Jersey, wondering where my life was going to take me.

Life does not afford us too many moments that we can point to directly and say here - this is the before, this is the after.  Here is then, this is now.  But occasionally we are granted one, a moment that offers a clear divide.  This photo is grainy and I wish the photographer had zoomed in closer on the four of us.  Still, I treasure it, because it's my last shot of the before. Twenty years + one day before. We took this just moments before we left our house in New Jersey that morning of August 30th, just as I was stepping into the after.