A New College Freshman, a New World

Today, in honor of the first freshman class of the millennium--and their 3.2 million parents--let us turn the news a bit closer to home. How close? So close that the moans of an incoming underclassman can be heard now, echoing from her Southern California driveway. “Could we please turn off that camcorder for the love of God and get on the road sometime before, oh, Christmas?” she is pleading. “If that wouldn’t be asking too much?”

Poor kid. Of course it is asking too much. The rented truck sits, half-packed, in the smoggy sunshine. Great mounds of belongings surround it. This is last week. The freshman reminded the household months ago that she must be campus-bound at sunup. This was before the road trip somehow became a family extravaganza.

Now she sits, head in hands, in the back seat with two kid sisters, two bags of groceries, a cooler, a queen-size comforter, an Etch-A-Sketch, a wet lollipop, two purses, somebody’s fishing pole and the snout of her dad’s video camera, zooming in on each detail of this, the off-to-college experience.

Here is a close-up of the packed suitcases and stripped bedroom. Here are the heaps of bedding, makeup, appliances. (This last heap requires a long tracking shot that is a tour de force, lasting many minutes. “More electronic devices than in the Pentagon!” her father proudly intones.)

The sun climbs. The kid sisters riff relentlessly on such scholarly topics as belching and wedgies. Half of the things she needs are still in the house, forgotten. “Hell-o? It’s not getting any earlier, people,” the freshman mutters. And so the trip begins, too soon.

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The first waves of the 1.6 million students who start college this year began hitting America’s college campuses this month. It’s a big wave and a big season for taking stock of big changes. California’s system of public universities, for example, was a national treasure when the freshman’s father graduated from it. Now, as she heads off to his alma mater, the UC headlines are all about damage control.

But some things don’t change. On the road, the freshman sleeps in the back with her sisters. She has always fallen asleep on car trips, her mouth parted in the shape of a Cheerio. Her face, in sleep, hasn’t changed since she was little. This prompts a thought: Soon she’ll sleep on a dorm bed that, for all anyone knows, could date to the Free Speech Movement. Did we pack a mattress pad? A blanket? An extra blanket? Boiling water and rubber gloves and Ajax?

Maybe she’s too young for this. Don’t kids today have a longer adolescence? This prompts another thought: Does this mean middle age doesn’t have to start until retirement? Where’s a mirror? Did somebody say “baseline face lift?” “Mama!” the youngest child calls loudly. “How come you’re pulling your cheeks back like that?”

Uh, time for some music. On the radio, Neil Young sings as he sang when we were freshmen. Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain/With the barkers and the colored balloons . . .

We are quiet as the road flies beneath us. You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain/Though you’re thinking that you’re leavin’ there too soon/You’re leavin’ there/Too soon.

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The campus still smells the way campuses have smelled forever, of cut grass and old ivy and last night’s keg. Outside a fraternity house, two sleepy-eyed pledges hose something off the front steps. At the dormitory, the traditional Soviet-bread-line-style wait for registration is, likewise, unchanged.

The new room is done in an attractive, cinder-block-and-outdoor-carpeting motif. There’s a decorative, fist-sized hole in the communal shower stall. But the roommates are a cross-section of California girlhood: a ponytailed athlete from San Diego, an only child in bib overalls from San Francisco, a perfectly coiffed girl from Pacifica in capri pants who yelps, “Omygod, this looks like a prison bathroom.” Quickly, the four stock their place with educational resources: two phones, three TVs, CD tower, refrigerator, answering machine, microwave, boombox.

UC tuition was free a generation ago; now it, ahem, isn’t. The check for this year’s schooling would have bought a subcompact. Then again, so--almost--would the check for the cart full of things the freshman “needs” from the student bookstore. (Another CD player?) Her father wonders, protectively, if this store stocks handy, purse-size pepper spray; her kid sisters keep tossing in snacks.

There is the last night in the hotel, then the last breakfast, then the last goodbye and then it is time to leave her to her new room. We tell her again how proud we are, how that’s never changed, but she’s backing away already, waving the same way she waved when she was little, so little. And now she is gone and we’re all changed, too soon.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.