School's out - personal reflections of a man's whose youngest child has just graduated from college and his discovery of his joy in living - Column

National Review, August 15, 1994

It never rains in California, as the beach poet says, so I thought to bring along my umbrella. Call it New England conservative meets postmodernist Los Angeles.

My daughter the actress has just graduated from the University of Southern California. Now the word "University" is not one I usually slide in there right next to "Southern California." Where I come from a university is at least two hundred years old, covered with mortar-fed ivy, and dominated by a sociology department from Hell. It's a place of high learning and higher pretension, a place where action is no substitute for words, a place where a boy feels no unseemly pressure to grow to be a man. A proper university, Eastern and effete, is a wondrous thing: dodgers of drafts can become leaders of men, they tell me.

The folks here at USC, in the heart of the country's second largest city, call for different strokes. The graduates, more than seven thousand strong, are led onto the lawn by the Trojan Marching Band, a precision, marching, tune-carrying band. (Those adjectives are meant to convey a sense of awe. Where I come from, the college band appears to be re-enacting Washington's withdrawal from Valley Forge.) And the mascot! While my people settle for a neutered puppy who urinates on the players' shoes, USC boasts the Man of Troy - breastplate shining, tunic fluttering, bareback astride a splendid white steed. Play that Trojan fight song again and I'll take on those sumbitches from UCLA.

But these differences are merely biological, as the young William Buckley once said of the differences between Beame and Lindsay. The real difference is in the academic ceremony. Back home, our custom is to award honorary degrees to shrinks who have unlocked troves of repressed memory, minority writers who have shifted paradigms, and recently retired pols, exhausted from shoveling grants to the politically well represented. Out here, at the epicenter of earthquakes and entertainment factories, they cut right to the chase. The first honorary degree goes to Ella Fitzgerald, the second to George Lucas, the third to Steven Spielberg. And that's it. No Pontiac dealers, no lieutenant governors, no pigeons from Japan. Just world-class artists who have earned our affection and our gratitude. Seems like the way to do it.

My daughter the actress steps forward to receive her degree, and pandemonium strikes Row 27, Section C. Yes our family is out in force, for this is our last child and we are doing it right. Spago for dinner, overnight at Checkers, private tour of the Nixon Library, a spritz of Hollywood hobnobbing. We are celebrating not one, but two great events this day. My daughter is, manifestly, the best and brightest of her sparkling class (but, I suppose it should be noted, only marginally more gorgeous than the 3,419 other blondes on campus).

But there's another rite of passage here as well. My daughter's parents are ratcheting up one demographic notch, from the group marked "bill paying" to those marked "bill paid." We are graduating, too. And the sense of possibility is all around us.

Back a generation, in the Sixties, I sat down with a financial planner. My purpose was to find out what I would need to provide for my growing family. He studied the figures, punched away at his calculator, and said with memorable simplicity: "It's going to take all you're going to have." He was about right. For the next twenty years, those words served as an organizing principle in our lives.

But he was wrong about something else. He predicted with the force of experience that once we were past fifty our thoughts would turn inexorably to leisure activities, slowing down, planning for retirement. Most cliches are overpoweringly true. (I fought for years before yielding to the Big One: when you have lots of small children, you should buy a house in the suburbs and get a station wagon and a dog.) I can report to you on the basis of firsthand survey research that there is no truth whatsoever to this middle-age factoid. What I find is quite the opposite. Most of my coevals are beginning to reconnect, to look for ways to leverage their skills and their assets. They are growing more tolerant of risk, more inclined to build than to earn. They are a dangerous band, these men with their bills paid. School's out.