Moving Thomas back to Flint, part 1

After tomorrow Thomas will have finished all his classes and just has finals next week to get through. He started expressing anxiety about getting all his things home a few weeks ago. Simon's car was stuffed to the gills when we moved Thomas out to Chicago in August and, when I think back on all his trips to visit us during holidays he certainly did seem to carry piles and piles of stuff back with him, so after mulling it over, I decided to move him in two stages: I came out today in my car, and said we could load it up and then next week, after finals are done, he and Simon can deal with the rest. I told him to get ready and have things packed so we wouldn't have to stress over it, and after we had dinner together we both headed up to his room. I have a very clear memory of what his room looked like when he moved in at the start of the school year, including its relative emptiness. Either the room shrunk 75% during the year or his things have quintupled in quantity in that time. I can't put my finger on what all the new things are but there was a HELLUVA lot more stuff in there today. I did see a small cabinet I have never seen before but mainly there just seemed to be piles and PILES of: computer games and gaming systems (yeah, I saw those go back with him during one of his visits), the bassoon (yep, I know that well), plants and more plants (those must be from Chicago), lots of xylophones (all hand crafted by Thomas, he claimed, in his physics class--one of which is made with copper pipes and is a diatonic scale)...But even accounting for those things, the room just seemed absolutely vacuum packed with stuff. We made one trip to my car (which is, of course, parked on the absolute top floor of an old parking structure and the only access to my car was a super skinny unlit cement stairwell with steep narrow cement steps) and Thomas was done in. (True, he was hampered by the several pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream in his gut that he forces himself to eat ever few hours (because he has $300 in "flex dollars"--cafeteria money that he has to use or lose before he moves out next week--and the only thing they sell for take away that he likes is ice cream). Thomas had a play date with one of his high school friends, playing some computer game that I don't understand, I am sure. (For those who are interested, I suggest checking out Thomas's YouTube channel, where he posts videos of their games. Sigh.) There is Thomas's dorm (as seen from my hotel room window) and behind one of those lit up windows is Thomas, steadfastly shoveling ice cream (Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia?) into his mouth while playing a computer game: And somewhere in that parking structure is my car, resting after a long and tedious drive from Flint today. After we finish loading up the car tomorrow morning (including, of course, the cabinet) I will be heading back to Flint. Good luck to Simon who gets to deal with the rest of the stuff next weekend, including the many, many xylophones.