Jill is going to Berkeley. For a while, she has been thinking about what to do in order to get ready. But she has never really made time to do any of it.

Finally a month before she was to leave, she announced that she would be setting aside the whole day to start preparing for the trip. I was relieved to find that she would be doing something at last. Anything! Or so I thought. Until I found out that she would be devoting her whole day to fixing her toys. She was assembling all her dolls and stuffed animals to see which of them needed to be repaired or mended. She removed and cleaned faded clothing, glued back Rabbit's missing nose and Poodle's torn- off ears, fixed dolls that needed fixing. Then she spent a lot of time deciding who would be going to California with her. Having accomplished all this, she was quite pleased about how productive the day had been. And for the time being she decided to put aside any other thoughts about what else might have to be done.

Soon it was two weeks before she would be leaving, and only her dolls were ready to go. I was beginning to wonder if they would have to go without her. Then finally Jill went off to Berkeley with her friend Scott to see if they could find a place for her to stay. The day of their flight, Jill carelessly set her alarm for the wrong time. So they woke up in New York at 7:15 in the morning for a flight that was leaving from Newark at 8. How they made their flight remains a mystery. But they did. And at Berkeley, they managed to find a place for Jill, too. Now that things were ready for her in Berkeley, I thought, maybe soon she would be getting things ready here.

But it was not until a week before she was to leave that she finally started packing. She got the boxes and packing material she would need and packed books, pots and pans and various household items. She asked my advice about her wardrobe, then packed her clothes, too. She carefully weighed all the boxes and arranged for shipping. Then she looked over everything she had packed and completely changed her mind. So she packed all over again and rearranged the shipping. The packages were now going to leave the same day she was.

The day before she was to leave, Jill decided she absolutely had to dye the clothing for the dolls she would be bringing. So she spent the day stirring pots of indigo dye and getting Erasmus the Bear and her doll Elspeth freshened up for their new home.

The morning she was leaving, Jill was almost ready. She only had to confer with me about a few things. Like what to take. Still to be decided was how much underwear would be required and also how many pairs of socks and in what colors. The question about the color of the socks was starting to consume an extraordinary amount of time. So much time that I finally had to persuade Jill to choose between the color of socks or making her flight. I am not sure how I persuaded her to choose the flight. But she did.

We got to the airport uneventfully with time to spare. Jill checked her luggage through. But she was very nervous about what might happen at the checkpoint to Tiffany who was in a traveling case. So I offered to accompany them in case there was a problem.

Jill and Tiffany went through security without a problem. I set off the alarm.

"But I don't even have a ticket," I protested as I was being scanned from head to toe with a metal detector. "I'm not even going on the plane," I objected.

"She's my mother," Jill tried to explain as I was being searched.

It was finally determined that my camera had set off the alarm.

"Isn't that sweet!" the security personnel commented as they watched us kiss good-by.

And then before I knew it, Jill really was leaving for Berkeley. She really was gone. With a sigh, I realized how much quieter things were going to be without her. I was missing her already.

January, 1997
BB