To Hit the Books or to Hit the Road

In the next week or so, as it does every late August, the sound of the Doors’ “Light My Fire” will begin reverberating in my head. It will transport me to my first days on campus in Lincoln, Neb., in 1967, a college freshman 50 miles from home that might as well have been 5,000, considering how isolated and forlorn I felt.

Now, of course, it’s all just memory wrapped in gauze -- this impression I have that “Light My Fire” was blaring from every dorm and Greek Row window. Whether it was every window or just one, the song is encoded and stamped with the end-of-August date.

Not that you asked, but it’s impossible to imagine not having gone to college that fall. Admittedly, had there been an emotional or social entrance exam, I would have been rejected. But there wasn’t.

High school was over, college came next. Like two follows one, it was the natural order of things.

What if, though?

What if I’d been running my own show back then and decided I wasn’t ready for college? What if I’d thought I needed some seasoning or perspective before tackling college? Or, perish the thought, that I just wanted to rest up a bit?

These would be nothing more than idle and fanciful thoughts, except they describe the situation of an 18-year-old friend and her dad, a longtime pal. They live in New Jersey, and Laura has been accepted at Columbia University, her father’s alma mater. That is no small feat, and Dad couldn’t have been more thrilled until she announced that she had no intention of enrolling this fall. Rather, she said, she was going to Brazil to further immerse herself in a culture she has come to enjoy from past cultural programs and because she just wasn’t ready to hit the books again.

Once aghast, her father has signed off, seeing the potential virtue of her move and realizing that, after all, he’s merely a parent and not her parole officer.

It might have heartened him to talk, as I did, to Mike Pelly, the admissions director at Chapman University.

He tells me it’s “not that uncommon” for college-ready kids to want to take a year off. And to do it.

That’s the kind of thinking I didn’t generate until after college.

Exactly, Pelly says. As a general observation, he says today’s 18-year-olds are a few years ahead on the personal development scale than we were 20 or 30 years ago.

I agree. Even if I’d thought of going to Brazil when I was 18, the prospect of informing my parents of that wouldn’t have crossed my mind. I would have been incapable of beginning a sentence, “I’ve given this a lot of thought and instead of going to college, I thought I’d ... “

Not that I’d have had the slightest notion of how to get to Brazil or how to function once I got there. Like I said, Lincoln seemed awfully far from home.

“I’ve had a couple students who I’ve been extremely jealous of, with what they’ve been able to do,” Pelly, who graduated high school in 1982, says good-naturedly.

One of them deferred college and went to South America to pick up Spanish-language skills, then to Australia to become a certified scuba instructor and then to a third locale that escapes Pelly’s memory. But he says it was to do something else “exotic” like getting a pilot’s license or backpacking through the wilds.

“I guess the underlying premise,” Pelly says, “is that they’re saying, ‘This may be the last chance I ever have to do something like this.’ ”

Is there a more universal thought than that?

As August dwindles down, my East Coast buddy has made peace with his daughter’s decision. Her plan is Brazil for a year, then to Columbia next fall. The two of them see how a year abroad could add some fiber to the college experience.

I can only wonder what might have been and how much more fleshed out I would have become if the soundtrack to that first Labor Day out of high school had carried a samba beat.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.