You don’t know how fast twenty five years goes by until they’re staring back at you, unblinking.

I had this experience on Tuesday when I took my son, Darling Laughing Son, a senior in high school, to the University of Oregon. U of O is my alma mater. I graduated about 25 years ago.

I walked into U of O, at eighteen, a gawky, insecure, somewhat brainless girl. I had had a lovely, sheltered childhood, in the same town I live in today, and was completely unprepared for real life. Now, one can argue that college is not “real life,” and I will go trotting with you down that lane and agree in many, but not all, areas.

Either way, if you could find a more immature girl on the planet, I would be surprised. When I toured the campus with Darling Laughing Son, so many memories hit. Some good, some hilarious, some bad, a few very poor ones.

I remember that I was unprepared for how lonely I was going to be. I missed my parents, the dogs, and various siblings. I had come from a loud Catholic family. We were bored to death in church once a week, said grace before every meal, and had three rules that were NEVER to be broken, “God first, family second, hard work and academics third.”

Everything else was a very distant fourth.

Well, the God first/hard work part didn’t really work while I was drinking screwdrivers and tequila, nor going to parties all night. Dancing ‘til three was probably not in there, either. The hard work mantra was broken, too, when I decided that hanging out with boys was, of course, going to take precedence over studying, and my 8:00 class was optional.

I loved the U of O. I loved how liberal it was, how opinionated, and how everything I thought and believed was turned upside and sideways and I had to think again. I had to learn how to think. I didn’t know how to think critically. I didn’t know how to see all sides, I didn’t know how to analyze, listen, and I certainly didn’t have my emotions in control enough to make reasonable, rational decisions, which was on glorious display now and then.

U of O was a lightning – quick, multi – cultural, speech making, protest happy, bastion of a whole bunch of intellectuals, and a few not so intellectual, people, all thrown together. It was like being shaken in a padded science beaker and when you rolled out of the beaker you were a whole new person that you liked a lot more because you’d had to find yourself and figure out who you wanted to be.

Darling Laughing Son and I walked by the place I used to work raising money for U of O….past the steps I sat on when a young, smart, interesting man and I had a sad conversation. He wanted a relationship, I was too immature, see “brainless” above…I remember one of the girls in my dorm, which we actually toured, having an abortion. She dropped acid before it, and was a total wreck…we walked by a building where I got a C in geology and the teacher scared me death….and by the library where I studied and realized I was nowhere near as smart as I thought I was and all this school work was very, very hard for the daydreamer in me…and past buildings where I had met so many fun friends, from ages twenty to fifty, and we’d laughed and talked, and I’d learned something from each of them…

I’m biased. I know that I want Darling Laughing Son to go to U of O. I don’t know if he will. Wherever he goes, I will happily attend Parents Weekend and smile and laugh and be grateful to be with him, as I am with our daughters, too.

But U of O, like most people’s colleges and universities, will always have a rockin’, special place in my heart. Towering trees, old brick buildings, new ones built to look old, brain boggling academics and the arts…and the memories of hundreds of thousands of alumni, strung together through the swaying branches, waiting to be remembered when they come back with their kids and stroll through the campus and wonder how twenty five years could possibly go by so…very….very… quickly.

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