METCALF: The education of a boy

School was always a standby. Since I was five and learned how to color from Mrs. Cartwright, I’ve always considered myself a student. It defined me. I was a sponge, as my fifth-grade teacher Mr. Meil told me, ready to “soak up” the information of the world. By seventh grade I had learned algebra, and how to toss my sharpened pencil to ensure it stuck in the ceiling.

Those skills and hundreds of thousands of dollars later have now evolved into a Boston University journalism degree. When I receive the holder for the piece of paper that I will receive later, it will be the end of my formal education. It will inevitably happen on May 16, the same day Michael Jordan was awarded NBA Rookie of the Year and “Top Gun” premiered. Boom. That’s going to be it, end of college. Drink your beers, smoke your cigs, toast your last Andre, it’s on to the real world.

It was fast. It was fun. Now, where to next?

Travel the world. Get a job. Buy a car. Start a business. Move out of Allston. I really have no idea what I want to do. Right now, I can only write about how I got here and what I’ve learned.

My path to graduation began a long time ago…

One incident sticks out more than any other in those adventurous pre-high school years. I was 12 and my friend Dave and I, exploring the woods, spotted a cottonmouth snake that was sunbathing in an inlet off the Blackstone River in Rhode Island. It was on a rock in the middle of a shallow, slow-moving pool. At the bottom of the pool was a snapping turtle that we had nicknamed Godzilla. We dreamed of catching Godzilla, but we were always too afraid to try. However, we had never seen a cottonmouth before and we reasoned that the slim snake would fit perfectly into Dave’s empty aquarium. It was only empty because the frog we had caught the day before had fried in the sunlight, unable to escape the see-through death trap, while Dave was at school.

Dave and I had brought two inflatable tubes from my pool and paddled out to the snake. Dave was on one side with the net and I on the other. I approached carefully while Dave watched Godzilla and waited for me to scare the snake his way. When I was about two feet away the snake slithered off the rock, using its seamless motion to propel itself through the water, right into Dave’s net. Luckily we kept the thing in the net. When we got back to Dave’s house we were quickly informed it was really poisonous. We released it the next day.

I have no idea what we were thinking. We had that childhood invincibility and adventurousness pumping through us. I just wanted to catch the snake. I didn’t know it could take me out. In a recent sports psychology class my professor went over how the three keys to youth sports are having fun, being with friends and learning something, but I would argue that’s what childhood is all about. Children are so ignorant of the world that each day is a new lesson.

High school represented the end of that ignorance. Kids in high school know it all. Like how Brand New makes the greatest music and Abercrombie the best clothes. They know what the shocker is and they’ll show you. It’s the time when boys harass substitute teachers and fall for girls. In my case, I fell for the wrong one &-&- a snake of a woman that would cause two fights and then leave me for Dave. Sketchy stuff like that was regular in high school.

But on the other hand it had its rewards.

What made high school fun for me was its unpredictability. High school was filled with firsts: First kiss, first cell phone, first car, first car crash and first job.

High school is also a great time to test decision-making skills.

When my sister was 16 she thought it would be a good idea to jump from a second-floor window onto a trampoline. She bounced once on the trampoline, flew high into the air and then landed nose-first on the ground. She looked like Marsha after getting hit with the football. Two months of healing for five seconds of fun.

When I think back to that point in my life it always appears to me sitting in the passenger seat of my friend’s ’92 Mercury Grand Marquis, floating down dark suburban streets, rarely stressed, with Brand New’s “Soco Amaretto Lime” playing in the background &- “I’m gonna stay 18 forever, so we can stay likes this forever. . .” &-&- picking out the scenes of my childhood and wondering what the world would throw at me next.

Yet at the same time, it wasn’t the most liberating period in my life. I squirmed under my parents’ rules. There was an intense school schedule with sports practice after. The work was tough, sometimes, but it was necessary. High school gave me the knowledge that would ensure my entrance into BU.

Like college, high school seemed to end as fast as it started. But unlike college, I was excited to leave. The small-town existence was stifling my possibilities and a big city was just what I needed.

The reason I wanted to come to Boston was its history. Growing up in New England, I attended yearly events where family friends or relatives would visit and we’d go up to Boston to walk the Freedom Trail. The tight alleys and old buildings of the North End made me feel like a colonist. The sloping gracefulness of the Boston Common looked idyllic. The slow pace of the Charles River stood in stark contrast with the white-water-like channels of the streets. Boston was a bustling city with an old-time feel. I thought it would be a good transition from town life to city life.

As a freshman I lived in Towers and Warren. I switched mid-way through the year. In Towers I was a step away from the Charles, but in Warren I was 17 floors above the city. I could see Fenway Park and the Prudential Center.

I joined a fraternity my first semester. I can’t possibly explain to you what that was like. I thought it helped to make me a man. The guys I pledged with are still my best friends. I’ve since left the fraternity, because it’s not the same one I joined. The pledge program has been dismantled, like many fraternities across the country, by societal pressures from outsiders. Fraternities have been stigmatized in American culture. But ask anyone who has been a part of a good one and they’ll tell you how valuable of an experience it was.

College definitely honed my perspective on the world. I attribute that more to great professors than anything else. Thank you, Diana Wylie, for showing a man the nuances of Jane Austen. Thank you, David Roochnik, for employing the Socratic method so effectively my classmates started a Facebook group called “Professor Roochnik, not your average Greek.” Thank you, Elizabeth Mehren, for defeating the inverted pyramid in your literature of journalism class. And thank you, Gerald Powers, for teaching me how to write seven-word, 15-syllable sentences. Try it, it will improve your writing.

What I’ll miss about college is the freedom. The ability to skip class just because. To arrange my classes on Tuesday and Thursday. The downtime to read a novel a week. The fullness of the weekends. The closeness of friends.

The prospect of leaving all this behind is nauseating. People always say these years are the best of your life. They’ve been the best of mine. Sure, they’re tough, unpredictable and occasionally mentally taxing. But it’s just the process of life. It never stops.

I’ve come a long way since unknowingly catching cottonmouths in the river. I’ve learned how to identify the most dangerous snakes in the world. The highs and lows of high school have disappeared. They’ve been replaced with the steady perspective of a soon-to-be college graduate. But I can’t help but want to go back to my pledge days, taking the heat with my friends at my side. Or rolling out of bed and racing to class. Or exploring the details of Tocqueville and reading Hemingway. I don’t want to leave college. I want to stay 21 forever, so we can stay like this forever. But change is inevitable, and May 16 isn’t getting any farther away.