I always know when graduation looms.

It starts with the spring Santa Anas, and all these weird bugs blown in from the desert are buzzing around my outdoor lights, and pollen covers every surface in fine, snot-yellow snowdrifts, exposing the Achilles heel of my asthma and allergies. For a few breathless and lightheaded days I am convinced my heart and lungs are in failure. Surely I am near death’s door.

This year, after the wet winter, was especially intense. My copious post nasal drip (I spent the sixties and seventies in an allergist’s office getting weekly shots; during the late eighties I was the drug correspondent for Rolling Stone) landed me in the emergency room, a sliver of errant honey dew rind ensnared in phlegm and momentarily lodged disfavorably in my throat, an altogether ironic happenstance that nevertheless inspired a serious head rush and a momentary vision of my own mortality.

Then come the emails from college students.

Some are working on term papers, underclassmen blissfully consumed with the formalities of learning and getting grades.

The rest are seniors. They are about to be hatched. They too have visions of their own mortality. It’s like one kid told me. “I never really thought about actually finishing.”

***

When we are young in America, we are sold the notion that coming of age is a childhood thing-- that all the important growth of body and soul is done during the years between birth and 21, whereupon we are magically granted legal status as adults, handed the keys to ourselves, and sent off into the world.

When I was 21, leaving college for law school, I remember having a vague notion that after the sturm und drang of childhood (terrible twos, pimply adolescence, star-crossed college romance, and the like) things would pretty much run smoothly until middle age, when I’d likely freak out and buy a red sports car or dump my wife for a younger model, or both. I sallied forth, feeling very grown up, ready to tackle adulthood. “I just want to see how far I can go,” I told myself.

As I discovered, things didn’t quite work that way. Your life branches out, things get more and more complicated. It turns you have to face a series of coming-of-age trials. Looking back on my own story, I’ve probably had some kind of life-changing “middle age crisis” every four to six years since I was 21. That’s a lot of lions to kill bare handed, I know. Complicated times. It’s how we roll.

****

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether or not college is worth all the money. It may not be. But if you can afford it, I think it is. Maybe not for the reason you think.

As high school is practice for college, college is practice for real life. A sort of dress rehearsal. College student: an adult with training wheels.

Sure, when you’re there, they make you feel like all the busy work you’re doing—all the projects and theses and chem labs—are really important. They make you feel like they’re training you to become something. And you do learn certain skills, and you learn how to learn, which turns out to be a very importantl—though I’m not sure it takes quite so much rigorous and expensive practice.

Truthfully, the important work of college is done between classes.

College is where you learn to live away from mommy and daddy. It’s where you learn how to wake up on time and get somewhere and and feed yourself. It’s where you learn how to handle the drama of being human—friends, intreques, politics, drama, laundry. Along the way, maybe you pick a career path.

Like it or not, once you leave your beloved university, you’re going to have to start all over. For the next decade or so, your twenties, you’ll be a freshman again. New in the world of adults.

Clueless, enthusiastic, learning your way. Think of yourself your first year of college. Now reinvent. Try to do a little better this time.

Your thirties will be like your sophomore year. Sophomore: from the Greek words sophos, meaning “wise” and moros, meaning fool. As in sophomoric. Sure, you look amazing. So you you think you know.

Really, you don’t. Later you’ll figure this out. We all do.

By your forties you’re a junior. Pleasing your parents doesn’t matter so much anymore. You realize by now that they either get you or they don’t. It doesn’t matter because you’ve chosen your major, you’re beginning to learn who you are. You feel like you’re good at it. You start to understand where you’re going. By the end of your junior year, the seniors are getting ready to graduate.

You friends are now the ones in charge. You’ve got the key to the candy store. Things blossom, hopefully. Sometimes they don’t.

I guess I see myself now, in my early fifties, as a first semester senior. I know what I’m doing. I have history. I understand things about where I’ve been and who I am. I’ve been hanging around the campus of life for some time now. I remember when I was you. People who say they wish they were young again? They don’t really remember what it was like to be so idealistic and full of promise and yet so uncertain…they’re just thinking about nubile sex.

****

What I’m trying to say with this fractured commencement address is this:

Chill out, my fond graduates. You still have a lot of time. All that shit about the AP courses is over now and it didn’t help you a bit. It's time to do what you you can dream. Sally forth. Take a vacation. Teach English in Thailand. Make a concrete plan. Work hard because you love something and because you want to be the best. That is really the only way to succeed.

Just as this column is built one careful word at a time, so does one build a life… one action at time, one day at time. Make each effort pure. Do things for the right reasons. And remember: like this column, life is something they’ll be putting your name on. You want it to be good, right?

Listen to your heart and follow it. Try not to rationalize too much. (Note my own foolish three-week detour to law school, which was somehow supposed to make me a better candidate to be a writer. O-kay.) And this is important: Try to realize that every person out there, no matter what age, feels a little bit like a fraud. Every person out there, no matter what age, hears inside the voice of the little boy or girl who we grew up being. None of us are fooling ourselves. In the end, that’s who we have to be. There is no magical line to cross that makes it different.

And always remember: Sample the honey dew, ever succulent and sweet. But also be sure to trim the rind properly, lest you choke.