Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

Exquisite creatures of all colors and shapes prance about. Snap your fingers, rainbows appear. Fruits are low-hanging. Constipation has been eradicated. This is a new and wondrous place.

Our professor, who signs emails with her first name, asked us to pull our chair-desks into a circle—so each of us can share opinions, they are all equally important. We’re going to talk and discuss and debate and then interview each other. We’ll read body language as well as textbooks.

All of my earlier schooling happened before everything changed. I have no idea what to expect. This is exciting. This is why I’m here.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

I always knew this would be a humbling experience.

One afternoon a group of us were grinding away at geological map data. I whipped out my Pilot G2 Writing Instrument (6 for $7.29, Target) and solved a long-division percentage calculation by hand, citing the number of feet in a mile off the top of my head—I wasn’t showing off, this was grade school stuff for my generation. I knew I was being watched. “You’re a genius!” a young woman sighed toward me.

Moments of triumph are often fleeting. Within seconds, He-Who-Doesn’t-Give-A-Flying-Expletive announced that my answer was wrong, wrong, wrong—almost instantly he had stumbled upon a childishly, embarrassingly, pathetically simple solution to the problem. To make things worse, He-Who was right.

I always knew this would be a humbling experience.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

It’s impossible to borrow lecture notes from someone who calls you “Sir.”

As a sir, you’ll have trouble rounding up partners for group projects. Sirs don’t sit on hallway floors with the other students, no matter how willing their knees might be. Sirs should avoid making jokes (the kids won’t laugh, or worse, they’ll laugh too hard).

They’ve had a lot of experience with sirs and ma’ams. They know about our penchant for offering advice and insights— especially when not solicited. They give us a wide berth.

But if you can be patient—and if you let it be known you got the lowest score on a recent lab quiz—they’ll reward you with a bit of cred. Eventually a kid named Ian will call you by your first name and you can risk humor again. In small doses.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The “Freshman Fifteen” is shorthand for the pounds kids put on during their first year at college.

They line up in front of all-you-can-eat dormitory buffets, desserts included. Between meals there are chips, pastries, sugar-glazed sugar and fried salt. There’s even an industry that ships snacks to remind students their parents wuv them.

Academic stress plays a role too—adrenaline and cortisol spike. Eat something! The eight-hundred-pound gorilla is alcohol. There are rumors about keggers but somehow I haven’t gotten invited to any. What’s that about?

Freshman gain an average of 8 pounds in their first year—some even more. Most of them work off their Freshman Fifteen before they work off their student loans, which really isn’t saying much.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

— If you float to the top of the river—the gods have judged you to be innocent.

— When you dissect a mallard and its gizzard is out of place in relation to its liver, your spice shipment from Cathay has been lost to pirates.

—Nasty pustules oozing Black Death? Those cranky, cranky gods.

— In the mid 1600s, a Englishman named John Usher calculated that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. His reckonings were so convincing they were printed in the margins of the King James Bible.

There’s an idea that runs through my Science and Humanities textbooks: People often make great progress when they challenge their gods. Ironically change has often been punished as heresy throughout history. (Maybe I should excuse myself now if you don’t mind—they’re piling sticks around that stake over there.)