Thirty-Five Years Away From Home

Back in 1980, my family went on a Spring Break trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was not a radically new idea. My family took a great many trips to the desert southwest. This one was different, because it was done for the expressed purpose of getting me a visit to the campus of the College of Santa Fe. I would love to tell you that I was paying strict attention to what was happening in front of me. I was not. What might have been a victory lap of sorts, having been awarded a five hundred dollar academic scholarship from that small but august institution, was a foggy blur of familiar places and blank indifference on my part to engage in the institution that had made this generous offer.
I was not ready to go off to college. That's why I have no specific memory of any campus tour or even stopping by the bookstore for a souvenir T-shirt. It is also the reason that I made certain that my son was up front when it came time to join the group for his campus tour this past week. If I asked him once, I must have asked him a hundred times how he was feeling as his mother and I walked across the campus of his choice. I guess the whole picture would show that this was one of the choices he made, but this was the place that had chosen him. All he really had to do was say, "Yes."
That's what he did. And he paid attention while we walked from this set of classrooms to that. He looked interested as we wandered through freshman dorms. He seemed confident when we asked if he was feeling good about where he was and what was about to happen to him. He was picking his new home away from home.
I'm pretty sure my parents stood over my shoulder and asked a lot of the same questions. They were every bit as committed to me finding an institution of higher learning where I could feel at home. It seemed like such a no-brainer: Why not go to school in the place where we had spent so many family vacations? Why not, indeed. I wasn't ready. I don't know if it would have mattered where I stood or what I asked or didn't ask on that campus tour way back then, but I know that it felt different when my son made that same trek thirty-five years later. Will it feel the same in five months? I sure hope so. This felt different. It felt good. It felt like home.