On a hot day in late August, 1991, I kissed my parents goodbye and boarded an airplane at Logan Airport. My destination was the University of Kentucky. Everything I needed for my first year of college was stuffed in a backpack and a duffel bag.
The backpack had a bottle of water, a notebook, a pen, my class schedule and an autobiography of the legendary basketball player Larry Bird. The duffel bag had everything else, including seven pair of underwear, T-shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, a pair of khaki pants, jeans, sweatshirts, a jacket, a football. And a razor, seldom used.
I could have used a cell phone, but we didn't have those back then. Instead, I had a long-distance phone card in my wallet. Though my dad wanted to hear from me, he wasn't excited about the cost: 25 cents a minute. As a result, our conversations were brief.
"I'm good," I'd say.
"We're good," they'd say.
"Talk next week, bye."
College has been on my mind a lot recently. We've started looking at colleges for our 17-year-old son, Cade, who'll be packing up his duffel bag next August. He'll be the first of our three boys to leave home. That college-admission essay has been on this to-do list all summer.
Also, I've been seeing a lot of parents and their college-bound students shopping in our stores these days. Clearly, kids need a lot more these days than what can be stuffed in a duffel bag. Some are decorating a sterile dorm room, hoping to make it more comfortable for the next nine months. Others are moving off campus into apartments.
At Furniture Consignment Gallery, we've got a lot of what your student needs for that dorm room or that first apartment. No, we don't have ramen noodles or Cliffs Notes. But we do have affordable mattresses, desks, lamps, colorful prints, side tables, night stands, filing cabinets and a host of other items.
Going to college is one of life's big milestones. We've been there, we understand the journey. At FCG, we can help make your new home, well, a lot more like home.
