I went to a high school (Northfield Mount Hermon) that is nestled in the Connecticut River valley. In order to get from my dorm to the cafeteria I had to walk a path up a hill so steep that in the winter people would ski down it. And when I reached the top it was only to get to a small plateau leading to another hill that was even steeper (but shorter) to reach West Hall, provided I had not died from hunger before that time. And the drop-off behind the dorm-- which led to the river-- was so precipitous and vast that on some mornings what appeared to us as ground fog was actually a low-lying cloud that had drifted off of the river.

I mention this because daughter Becky is now attending a college whose chapel was "built on the highest point in St. Paul." But if they hadn't told me it was on the top of a hill, I might not have noticed.

St. Paul, it turns out, is rather flat.

The campus was lovely, but surprisingly small. And there were albino squirrels, which was just downright confusing. ("In Minnesota, even the squirrels are white" was my comment at the time, which would have been funnier if we were in Utah, but I had to work with what I had.) Most of the buildings-- or at least the ones I was privy to-- were clustered on the "top" of the "hill", which should be a tremendous boon on the days it's -30 degrees outside and one has to walk from one's dorm to a classroom.

The only reason we were able to transport my daughter, plus all of our luggage, plus son Tim, wife Deb and my mother in two cars without U-Haul being involved was Becky's roommate, Abby. She happened to live in St. Paul about ten minutes from the school, so about 3/4 of Becky's room was sent by Federal Express ahead of us. You may wonder how a college Freshman could already have a roommate she knows well enough to ship things to, and the answer is this may be the first time, "don't worry, Daddy, I met my new friend on the internet," is actually a good thing to hear. Anyway, it was very helpful because as we discovered after driving to Abby's family home to pick up all of that stuff, there was no way we could have gotten it all there otherwise. Tim nearly had to walk to the school due to lack of space.

--St. Catherine University is the largest all-girls' college in the country, and by that I have to think they mean student body size, not campus size.

--Everyone on campus knew my daughter before she even got there. I'm not sure how she pulled that off.

--A very large portion of the student body is Minnesota residents. We live in the largest concentration of colleges in the country and are used to seeing the population of our town double at this time of month, so the idea that a majority of St. Catherine University students are locals is just weird to me. And to Becky.

--The student center is an enormous building called Coeur de Catherine, which is French for Catherine's coeur. Behind Coeur de Catherine is a statue called Zerogee which depicted a naked man and a naked woman floating in zero gravity, attempting to catch a naked baby floating above them. I found this entirely too fascinating, for reasons I'm not clear on.

--The chapel is magnificent, and I enjoyed seeing it very much. I could have lived without the hour-long not-quite-an-actual-Mass music performance that took place in it however. The music was lovely, but it came after a three hour orientation meeting.

--The orientation was actually rather well done. I felt about it much the way I do the film The English Patient: it was really good, but I could have lived without about 45 minutes of it. The high point was when the students went outside for team-building exercises of some kind, leaving parents and family to watch a performance by a standup comic pretending to be a professor. Or a professor pretending to be a standup comic. The line was somewhat blurry.

--Until this day I did not fully understand what people meant when they described my daughter as "mature". Then I saw the scared looks on the faces of some of her new classmates. Really, some of them looked terrified. And most of them only had to drive up the street, for goodness sake.

(To Be Continued)