Against the Grain: Going away to college is really going to a whole new world

My eldest son, Casey, and I were standing outside the entrance to Tiffany’s at the Fashion Valley mall in San Diego. He was taking a picture because “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is his girlfriend’s favorite movie.

“I’ve never seen a Tiffany’s before,” he said.

“Let’s go in,” I suggested, but he was horrified at the idea, as though, once inside, we might be accosted by income police who would discern immediately that we could not afford to purchase so much as a silver paper clip, and then we would be arrested and thrown in a jail reserved for imposters.

I tried to persuade him, anyway. “It’s a public store,” I told him. “We’re allowed to go in. They probably get people all of the time who are just looking.”

“No,” he said, yet again, and I had to give up.

The truth is that I shared his trepidation. We were clearly not the kind of shoppers accustomed to stores such as the ones we encountered that afternoon. I was in $15 flip-flops, jeans from New York & Co. and a baggy T-shirt I bought at Target. My son wore his Pac Sun shorts and Sperry loafers with his UC San Diego T-shirt, but even his association with a local university could not obscure the truth that we did not belong at Tiffany’s in Fashion Valley mall on Friars Road in San Diego.

In fact, I had not felt so much like a poor country hick in a long time. We had just finished looking through Bloomingdale’s for something to buy, but instead of shopping we simply pointed out prices to each other. Eventually we separated so that I could lust after $700 handbags while Casey looked for shorts he might be able to afford.

After about 20 minutes, he found me and said, “Mom, you won’t believe how much shorts cost. Guess.”

I did, throwing out a number I thought must be so high that it would make the actual cost seem small by comparison. “No,” he said. “Higher.”

And so we left Bloomingdale’s and ambled along the open-air mall, a shopping mecca so vast that one could spend an entire day perusing its contents and still not make it into every store. It was exhausting to think about the variety of consumer delights available.

We passed by a Hermés, Kate Spade, Steve Madden, Halston, Michael Kors, Coach, Burberry.

“Oh my God,” I said, “there’s a Prada. And look, Casey – Jimmy Choo!”

He was not quite sure what kind of store Jimmy Choo might be, and so I explained, but by then he was overwhelmed, and he wasn’t all that impressed by the notion that there are people in this world, not just movie stars but ordinary – well, sort of ordinary – people who can and do shell out $2,000 for a pair of shoes.

We were not in San Diego for shopping, in any case. We were in San Diego for my son’s orientation to Revelle College, one of six colleges at UC San Diego. It had been a two-day orientation, and it was the evening of the second day, and we were looking for gifts for the family – something for Casey’s dad and brother, who had stayed home.

The orientation had been for parents and students, and after an initial welcoming parents were taken to a different location on campus, where we were given lectures on policies and procedures. The second day of orientation, though, was all about psychology.

After our kids had spent the night in Revelle dormitories, parents arrived back on campus from our various hotels to receive a lecture titled “Holding on While Letting Go.” I had already come to terms with letting my son grow up and away from me. I had done so by not really thinking about it, or by drinking wine when I could not avoid thinking about it. I knew I would be OK. He would be even better.

Over the past few months, I have on various occasions told my son that when he attends university in San Diego in the fall, he will be entering an entirely new world. I meant this primarily in terms of the ideas to which he will be exposed, though I also meant it in regard to the location itself. But until we strolled that mall I myself had not been aware of how different San Diego will be for him, a boy who grew up in a place where the closest thing to a department store is J.C. Penney’s. I told him that La Jolla, where his campus is located, is one of the richest neighborhoods in the United States, but it is one thing to know this intellectually and another to see it firsthand.

San Diego itself might just as well be a foreign country for a kid like Casey. According to City-Data.com, which shows statistics for 2012, the average home value in San Diego is $430,000 (in La Jolla it is about $2 million) and the median household income is $62,395. People older than 25 who possess a bachelor’s degree constitute 42 percent of San Diego’s population, and 17 percent of the people in San Diego have a graduate degree. The unemployment rate in San Diego is between 6 and 7 percent.

Merced’s statistics look so dismal by comparison that is almost masochistic to ponder them: an average home value of $141,600; an adult population where only 15.4 percent possess a bachelor’s degree and 5.7 percent have earned a graduate degree; an average household income of $36,027; and an unemployment rate between 16 and 17 percent.

And then there are the crime statistics: In San Diego, there were 3.5 murders for every 100,000 people in 2012; in Merced, 11.1 people in every 100,000 were murdered. San Diego saw 113.3 robberies for every 100,000 residents; the recorded statistic for Merced is 265 robberies per 100,000.

It is almost as though I am sending my son off to Xanadu for college, and I cannot fathom that he will want to return to live in his hometown once he has lived for a while in a place as full of promise and balmy year-round temperatures as San Diego.

But the conventional wisdom among parents is that this is what we raise our kids to do – to be better, smarter, more adventurous than we are. To do the things we did not have the courage or opportunity to do ourselves. To live in the places we might have chosen if things had been, somehow, different. And yet, during our parent orientation, when a team of psychologists encouraged us to share our fears about sending our children away to college, I could not admit that my truest, deepest fear was that my son was passing me up, that he was entering a world I will never be able to share with him, that he will not only be more educated than I am but also more sophisticated, the kind of man who can walk into Tiffany’s and buy a ring without considering how far away from home he has traveled.

We spent four days in San Diego, where I drove the terrifying freeways clutching the wheel with such anxious rigidity that my fingers ached at the end of every day. On Wednesday, as we headed home, Casey fell asleep on the Grapevine, and then awoke somewhere north of Bakersfield.

“We’re back in the Valley,” he said, glancing out the window as the oil derricks and almond and pistachio orchards ticked by.

“Yeah,” I said. “Home.”

“I think I’ll want to raise my kids in a place like Merced,” he said.

I looked at him. His head was framed by the landscape outside: now a housing development, now a dry field left to turn fallow, now an alfalfa crop, now an abandoned shack set amid weeds and a dying oak tree. “Why?” I asked.

“Big cities are really nice, and I want to live in one, but when it’s time to have kids I think Merced, or a town like it, is better,” he said. “I think kids can feel more at home in a smaller place.”

A few hours later we were taking the new Atwater-Merced Expressway exit. We saw our insurance agent drive by and we waved. In the smothering Valley heat, everything had slowed down. I was happy to be home, as I always am when I return after a few days away, and I thought then about how we choose to love places, and that our choices are a result of memories and familiarity, the blurry, unreliable foundations of belonging.

This story was originally published July 9, 2015 at 2:50 PM with the headline "Against the Grain: Going away to college is really going to a whole new world."