Aug 10, 2018 3 min read

I’m pretty sure it was my grandmother who invented the dormitory shower bucket.

My older sister was headed off to college. As she considered the challenges of walking from the room and down the hall to the shared showers, my sister wondered how she would carry all the things she needed: soap, shampoo, conditioner, razor, toothbrush.

“We’ll get you a little bucket,” my grandmother said, “so you can carry it all with you.”

When it was my turn to start college, I got my own plastic shower bucket – as clever a way to solve a problem as anything you’ll see on “Shark Tank.”

College has changed since I was a student. That 99-cent shower bucket has been replaced by a $12 “shower caddy,” with compartments and holes to drain the water. I know this because I saw a whole display of them at Bed, Bath and Beyond while dorm shopping with my daughter this week.

Soon, we’ll move her into the dorm at her small, liberal arts college. This required some shopping. You could feel the excitement at the store, as moms and daughters pushed overloaded carts through the tight aisles. My daughter had already decided on a color scheme – gray, white and pale pink – so things went pretty quickly. The hardest part was balancing the boxed items atop each other in the cart. She’s pretty frugal about my money, always checking prices and going for the less expensive version. So, I said yes to the totally unnecessary fuzzy gray accent throw.

That shopping trip was about as much fun as I’ve had in a long time. After having spent the summer avoiding all discussion of college, she was finally getting excited about it. As she picked out pillows and a desk lamp, she was beginning to picture herself in her new home. Dorms are no longer rabbit warrens full of students carrying buckets. My daughter will live in a quad, with her own room and sharing a bath with one other student.

I don’t remember much about moving into the dorm when I was a freshman at California University, only that the room was hot and gray and small. When I first walked in, my roommate had her back turned and was looking out the window. It took a while for her to turn around and say hello, but we got along fine.

When I think of college, it’s never much about the dorm. It’s more about the outside parts of campus, the campus newspaper office where I worked, the dining hall, the radio station. As with most things, college is a new and strange experience that expands as you move through it. It ends up being almost nothing like what you expected.

As I helped my daughter buy the things she’ll need for her room, I told her that her life is about to spring open in ways she can’t yet picture. For her, college is mostly that bedroom, the roommate she’s met only by phone, the hilly campus we walked during visits, the drive through the pretty countryside to get there.

All of it is a big, wrapped package that’s waiting to be opened. Soon enough, college will be about the classes, the professors, the friends, the books, the studying. But first, she’s thinking about the place where she will rest her head at night. I told her to buy the really good pillow.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.