So my son, as I believe I’ve mentioned, is going to college in Colorado at the end of the summer. Sometimes people ask, “What is he going to study there?” I finally developed a moderately amusing answer that goes like this: “I don’t know. I hope he’s going to college to find himself. And when he’s done I hope that he will be able to find himself a job. Or at least a good graduate program.”

Like me, my son at 18 has no idea what he’d like to be when he grows up. And when I say “like me,” I mean me at 56 — as well as me at 18. I was not one of those people who grew up burning with passion for a career in medicine, or engineering, or teaching. Or anything. At 18, I had no more concretely formed idea for my future, immediate or otherwise, than to get the hell out of the place where I grew up.

(At 56 . . . well, at 56, it’s a different story. And not one I’m going to tell here.)

But having my firstborn child go off to college has given me an opportunity to reflect on what I learned in college. It turns out that there’s not all that much I remember about my college academics, although I suspect that that’s generally true of people who graduated from college 35 years ago.

I do remember that surprise is an essential element of comedy. I learned that in a class called, shockingly, “On Comedy.” We listened to Bill Cosby recordings, which, then as now, were absolutely hilarious. I remember that I wrote a long paper about modern Southern women writers, in which I criticized one of them — probably Carson McCullers, whose weird, sad characters resonated with me in a way that I still find profound and deeply, deeply disturbing.

I have no memory of my criticism; I probably just wanted to clarify to my rather good-looking professor that I was smart enough to understand McCullers but was not in any possible way weird or disturbing myself. In case he was considering being attracted to me. Which he most definitely was not. At any rate, I remember his comment on that section: “You are very young.”

And so I was.

Which is not to say that I didn’t learn things in college. Mostly I learned them through trial and error, which I guess is really the only way to discern the line between buzzed and wasted. I learned about living with a roommate who was not related to you. I learned about the kind of men who do not make good boyfriends. I learned about whitewater rafting, which is an excellent life skill.

Mostly I learned that the world is not what you think it is from your one little corner of it. I learned that you could go to another place and be someone different than the person you used to be. I learned that there were roads that would take you to places you never imagined.

I think it was in college that I really began to understand that I owned my life. That I was making the choices, not my parents or my teachers or the popular girls. That I was making my own mistakes and learning my own hard-won lessons from them. That I wasn’t the passenger on this trip, that I could drive my little car off any damn cliff I chose — and that I’d better enjoy every heart-pounding heartbeat of the plunge.

I hope that’s what my son learns in Colorado (although as his mother I would prefer not to know about the cliff.)