The kids are back.

Spring quarter classes started today at Santa Clara, and in contrast with the idyllic quiet of Holy Week the campus is now teeming with undergraduates. Even though I'm barely three years older than most of the students in the senior class, in some ways I feel like an old codger compared to the Class of 2005. This feeling is hardly new: I sensed that I'd passed a maturational milestone last spring with the graduation of Georgetown's Class of 2004. When Hoyas who were freshmen when I was a senior received their diplomas and (mostly) dispersed from the Hilltop, I knew that my own undergraduate experience was irrevocably a thing of the past. In other words, I'd received a potent reminder that I wasn't a kid anymore. One year later, I'm beginning to feel a kind of generational distance between me and today's college students. The undergrads I see walking hither and thither on campus no longer register in my consciousness as my contemporaries, but as "the kids."

Oddly enough, I probably wouldn't have been able to articulate the sentiments expressed above had it not been for an odd little experience I had last night. As I do on most weeknights, I was out for a mid-evening stroll. Walking by a residence hall on the Santa Clara campus, I passed two students in the midst of . . . well, let's say they were making use of a controlled substance that often enters into the stream of commerce on college campuses. As I walked by, one of the students shouted at me or at no one in particular, "Hey, you want a hit of this weed?" I said nothing and kept walking. Interestingly, the first thought that leapt into my head was: That wouldn't have happened in my day. In my day, I thought, college kids were a lot more discreet. If they were into that kind of thing (I certainly wasn't), they generally did it behind closed doors rather than in brightly-lit public places with a lot of strangers milling about - and they certainly didn't invite random passersby they didn't know to share in the revelry. In my day . . . gosh, in my day! Am I so old that I'm starting to think about "my day" as a time in the past?

Now, the incident I've just related didn't really make me feel like an old codger, but it did make me wonder whether the cultural milieu that I sprung from and the cultural milieu that formed today's college students are different in some respects. Beyond the question of plausible generational differences, I wonder whether the nexus between culture and geography is relevant here. Maybe Californians are simply less inhibited than Easterners, particularly in their attitudes toward controlled substances. One might even look at disparities in statutory penalties for possession of illegal drugs from state to state as evidence of cultural differences. Musing on this possibility led me to recall these lines from NOFX's "The Decline":

Jerry spent some time in Michigan
Twenty year vacation, after all he had a dime
A dime is worth a lot more in Detroit
A dime in California, a twenty dollar fine

Critics may object that I'm talking apples and oranges here, and in deference to their objections I shall desist from further analysis of an ultimately inconsequential event. At the very least, I hope my readers get a chuckle out of this rather atypical post - you might consider it an early observance of April Fool's Day (which saves me from having to say something clever on the date itself). These scribblings should prove that I'm not an old codger - at least not yet, anyway. AMDG.