Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The good professor had ingenious ways to kept us alive during two-and-a-half hour science lectures.

When he had things to hand out, for example, he’d ask a student from each lab bench to come up to get them.

“Will the student with the most Kanye West downloads come up?” “Whoever has the cleanest sneakers, please come up!” We’d exchange looks around our table then one of us would self-consciously walk up to get the handouts.

I’d enjoyed a free ride, having perfected a don’t-pick-on the-old-guy scam. One afternoon the professor asked for “The person with the best hair.” My bench partners pointed to me. I was front and center, with the least best hair in the room.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The clocks are firmly in control. They’re tenured and all but untouchable.

A clock in A204 decided there wasn’t time enough for the oceans—Atlantic, Pacific, etc., we blew off a million square miles of open water. The clock in C125 nixed kinships in favor of functionalism. A clock in the math lab aborted a slope-intercept demonstration, bad news for us remedial pukes.

They control the length of classes too. Periods scheduled to go an hour and a quarter last anywhere from ten minutes to several hours. Hands speed up when a lecture is inspiring but slow to a crawl when it’s a dud.

The chronometers (we call them that when they’re within hearing distance) command a position high on the back wall. Professors can see every time a student glances back to check the time—it’s like being heckled by a drunk. Something has to be done.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

My dad (the kid in bib overalls) and I shared junk food in his kitchen one afternoon in the seventies. Dad had experienced the best and the worst his century had to offer.

I asked him about the biggest changes in his lifetime. The progress of women, he said without hesitating, and the spread of electricity.

As a young woman, my mom clerked in a department store. She once sold a brassiere to a world-famous aviator named Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. When I entered high school Mom went back to work, ringing up groceries, and got her own Social Security card. She showed it to me.

My parents spent their earliest years with little or no electricity. Old habits die hard, they never got used to calling our refrigerator by that name. It took them forever to get air conditioning. They didn’t approve of batteries.

More than a century after Dad was born, he has a boy in college who happens to be studying women’s roles and the need for clean electricity. If he were here, he’d celebrate by getting us another round of Eskimo Pies out of the icebox.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

We used the formal sign-in sheet but he decided to call attendance anyway. After each name he asked, “Are you happy?”

It was completely adlibbed—he skipped a few students then came back to include us all. “Ms. Name, are you happy? How about you, Mr. Name, are you a happy man?”

The first students were caught by surprise and answered yes (admitting sadness in this classroom would seem like admitting a STD). But as the professor continued down the roster, things took a turn toward Oprah. Several students weren’t quite sure about their happiness and a few confided that they weren’t at all that happy.

One young woman was “Ecstatic!” I plan to sit next to her the rest of the semester.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

“My husband and I are nothing here, we are nobody.”

She’s a middle-aged nursing student. She wanted our group to see an e-mailed photo of her former workplace. She had been a surgical somebody in Bucharest for 28 years. (Notice the bone structure of the patient.)

People leave vital parts of themselves behind. Language, wit and social savvy don’t always travel well. People have to unlearn things. “I shouldn’t bribe cops?” Many have to settle on a lower rung on life’s organization chart, at least for a time.

She never believed the streets of America were paved with gold (nobody does anymore she said) but there were persistent rumors about opportunities. That was enough to catch her attention.