A lifetime ago

Thirty-eight years ago today I put on a cap and gown and got my bachelor of arts degree from a small college in Ohio. I'd been spending the week between exams and graduation doing so much and sleeping too little that a fever had begun to creep into my compromised body. My parents drove from our Philadelphia suburb, and a friend and classmate who'd transferred to Boston University after our sophomore year had come to watch me graduate and to see other friends she'd had while there for the last time.

As I've probably said in a post or two before, when you never marry and have children, the normal metrics that mark the linear flow of your years can don't get bolstered by anniversaries and birthdays and aren't a part of your daily life. 
Thirty-eight years. Many of the children born the day I graduated are right now feeling sobered by the number, one that tells them their age is between an asset and a liability, experience be damned. They are, maybe for the first time, aware of softening muscles and slowing metabolisms. If they had children, those children are reaching the age at which they see their parents' flaws for the first time and, in the savage way of the young, pointing those flaws out to them. 
I didn't go home with my parents after the ceremony. I feared that doing so would have wedged me into a more conventional life than I, with my big ego, hoped to live. Instead, I packed my 1971 Ford Torino and headed west to Minneapolis, a city I knew little about and where I knew no people. I stayed a day after graduating in my dorm. This was hard to get permission to do, which surprised me. After four years, I'd have thought that there would be a momentum of some sort and one more day in the nest wouldn't be a problem. The building was strewn with consumer goods left behind by graduating seniors who'd tired of them or worn them out. Clothes, records, books, furniture, appliances. In a darkened hall, I ran into a junior who was with a girl he knew, the daughter of an English professor I'd had and liked. The two were scavenging for useful things, digging through piles. It was like a scene in a movie with an apocalyptic theme.
By the time I left the next day, AAA maps on the passenger seat, my fever was in full bloom. Delirium hazed my perception of the two-day drive west. For all I know, Indiana is a state of great beauty and a fascinating place to visit, but all I remembered even a week later was that the highway I drove though it had traffic lights on some sections of it, a new thing to me. 
My diploma (where the hell is it now?) is nearly middle aged.