Hard-Learned Words of Wisdom for College Freshman

I got a card last week from the daughter of longtime Nebraska friends. I was best man at her parents’ wedding and first saw her as an infant just home from the hospital. Now she’s 19 and a sophomore at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Time flies, but maybe you’ve heard that story.

What struck me was hearing from her. She and I had never corresponded until she sent me a Christmas card last year. Over the years, I’d always visit her family and catch up on her activities, but it’s not as though I had any special place in her life.

For that reason, her card touched me, because I assumed the driving force behind it was that being 600 miles from home at college had left her a tad homesick. Maybe I reminded her of some bygone part of her life that linked her to family and hometown. Maybe writing to me made everything seem not as far away.

Perhaps I doth think too much, but her card brought back personal memories of being a college kid away from home--something that thousands of teens are experiencing this month.

As with most of life’s major passages, I handled the transition to college rather poorly.

Still a month shy of 18, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska with all the confidence of the Cowardly Lion without Dorothy. Although only 60 miles from home, I was immediately homesick, a condition worsened by my best friend’s decision to pledge a fraternity instead of to room with me, as we had planned all summer.

When it comes to emotional pain, I don’t bend, I break. That was never truer than for the first few Sunday nights as a college freshman, when, after a weekend at home, my parents would drive me back to Lincoln and deposit me at the dormitory elevator. Invariably, I would get misty-eyed at our imminent parting, mumbling teary goodbys as if I were heading off to war the next morning instead of just Anthro 101.

It was my first time away from the shelter of home, and I didn’t adapt to life in Harper Hall. I was timid and fearful and loathed the lumbering bozos with the booming stereos and the inability to handle sloe gin fizzes on Friday nights. There was no relief in classes, either; not in 100-student lecture halls with faceless profs and a freshman English teacher so into existentialist authors that my outlook became as dreary as the approaching winter.

My strongest memory of those September days is one of floundering.

My parents, on the other hand, must have been wiser. Unknown to me, they apparently were getting a big kick out of my agony, because they saved a letter I wrote them in the fall of 1967. For years, I didn’t know they’d kept it. When they finally dug it out of the cedar chest and showed it to me, it was clear they had only kept it for comic value.

So, in the spirit of bonding with The Lost and Fearful Frosh of ‘94, here’s what one of your ancestors sounded like in September of 1967:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I was sitting and thinking last night how we all used to walk in Port Arthur (Texas) to get ice cream cones and stuff, and wondering if this is what it was all for--for me to be sitting here in college reading books, taking tests and listening to lectures. It must have been for something else, but I don’t know what.

I can’t think of anybody who is really happy at what they’re doing, or who they are, and, for that matter, there’s no reason to. It makes me wonder what people are here for. They do something, spend a life, and die, and the next batch follows them on. The person hasn’t done anything to cause any great changes, and is soon forgotten. Chances are he was unhappy most of the time, so what’s been accomplished?

It’s every man for himself anymore. Most people eventually prove to be phonies anyway, if you give them time. Nobody takes time to figure out what is best or what is purposeful. It’s all for right now, and for appearances. I think I was born in the wrong century, but the only problem is I don’t know whether I belong in the 19th or the 21st.”

It goes on, but you get the idea and, really, what’s the point, anyway?

For whatever reason, my parents didn’t put me under 24-hour suicide watch after getting the letter.

I laughed gamely when, after all those years, they showed me the letter. I didn’t remember writing it, although I had the handwriting analyzed and it was mine.

What occurred to me was that I should have gone either to more mixers or fewer English classes.

That’s ancient history. These days, I’m a perfectly well-adjusted, constantly chirpy scamp of a guy with a zest for life that just keeps growing each and every day I’m on this glorious planet.

So, to you college freshies during these sometimes-trying September days: Fear not, you can’t possibly be any more hapless than I was, lo those many years ago.

P.S. But if you ever contemplate writing a letter like that to your parents, maybe an occasional sloe gin fizz isn’t such a bad idea.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.