It is done. My daughter will be going to college next year — and not just any college. She’ll be attending the very same institution of higher education I attended oh, so many, years ago.
Thinking of her wandering the same halls, barging into the same classrooms late for a lecture, hanging out with friends in the same cemetery on crisp autumn nights or sledding down the same hill in winter snows, I easily imagine her sharing the experiences I had in my college days.
Friends say I must be so excited my girl’s heading to my alma mater and I am, but not because I want her to have identical adventures as the ones that filled my time. In fact, she can’t.
Obviously, technology has changed the world since I first set foot on campus.
Thirty-some years ago, no one had a computer, laptop, and iPad in their room, you couldn’t watch movies except in a theater, there was one television in each dorm, and most kids called their parents on pay phones.
Her classmates have changed as well. Students today are better measured, tested and already higher achieving than the motley group of friends I met in college.
My daughter and her peers have already gone through an intense competitive process just to get into any college.
There is even a blossoming industry to help teenagers gain an edge through testing tutors, essay editors, application advisors.
I know that I will understand the geography of the place when she throws around the names of certain buildings, but there are so many new ones that didn’t exist in my day, and others that have been wiped off the map. Even the town is the same, yet different from the one I remember, with street names I will recognize but stores and restaurants I’ve never heard of.
The real reason I don’t want her to have my university escapades is that she should have her own.
I have no burning, nostalgic need for her to live in the same dorms or belong to the same clubs I did.
In fact, it’s not my school at all anymore.
I have close friends from that time and place and a wealth of memories, maybe even a little knowledge still banging around in my gray matter.
The institution it is today is not really the one I knew back in the day.
My daughter told me, during the application process, her one concern about applying to my old school was that I wasn’t all “rah rah” with enthusiasm every time she mentioned its name.
I explained that I didn’t want her to think going there would be like the anecdotes I could tell, that her time would be anything like mine, nor that it should be.
She would have to find her own way and come home with her own stories.
Now she’ll have that chance, at her school.
Read The Dad every other Thursday on BrooklynPaper.com.
