NEWTON'S LAW: PACK YOUR ACADEMIC HOLDINGS AND DON'T LET LIFE SURPRISE YOU

I was trying to explain to one of my sons the other day about the difference between a college degree and a college diploma.

The college degree, if attained in a forthright and committed fashion of education, is a good thing to have, extremely useful in later life. The diploma, as an ornament, is negligible.

By this I mean that on a daily basis I draw from my experience as a student, think of something I read or apply something told to me by a professor.

My diploma, on the other hand, could not be produced for examination without an hour's notice. I'm quite sure I haven't disposed of it; still, like my high school ring, I'm not quite sure where I have it stored.

This occurs to me at a time when people in this city, seniors until becoming recent graduates, are, at this moment, packing themselves up and heading out to make their marks. Their finals are behind them and their degrees are all but certified.

It's "real world" time.

Thirteen years and numerous mortgage payments have removed me from this, so it's difficult now to remember what that felt like, having trained myself to go into the world a learned man and then pausing on the brink to realize ... gosh, now I've really gotten myself into it.

There are moments along the way that should have prepared you for this inevitability.

Your peers had spent their senior year creating, polishing and printing resumes, sliding them to you proudly across third-hand apartment tables where you had shared many carefree meals and festive evenings.

The facts may have been fudged a bit ("I didn't know you were secretary of the Biology Club." "Sure, I read the minutes at one meeting.") but these were misdemeanors, not felonies; the heart was in the right place.

You had spent so much time on spring evening front porches and the Playdium's back tables discussing the future that it never occurred to anyone that some day it would be here.

Now you toss the remnants of your college experience alternately into packing boxes and trash containers. Saved are the small triumphs of expression ("Elements of Time in `The Sound and The Fury,'" a term paper I still own) and discarded are random and irrelevant notes, deprived of the chance to collect dust as memorabilia.

Paperback books that looked scholarly on the makeshift shelves of a college apartment harbor themselves in less prominent space when house payments commence. You dig them out from time to time and hesitate at an underlined passage, a note in the margins.

You see off friends, their paperbacks and academic holdings stuffed into a car, vowing to keep in touch, just as you had in the plentiful spare moments of collegiate existence. The spare moments, you discover, are less abundant as you age and keeping in touch becomes a haphazard and disintegrating project.

The decisions you will make the grand ones, the ones you took pains to plan for won't develop as you think ... and that's not a bad thing. I find myself putting more thought now into renting a video than I remember putting into making career decisions.

Your life will take its own turns and you will do what you can to negotiate them. Important things will become evident to you, though you might not recognize them all the time.

No matter what you do, you will reflect on it ten years from now and be surprised by what's happened and how fast it all went.