2014-04-01 – While my wife Kit was signing us up for Obamacare (which she calls ACA), I was on a tour through the bucolic campus of Grinnell College in the middle of Iowa.

We do things backwards in my family. My younger son Cal is already a second-year student at Grinnell, now my older son is applying. He took a few years to become a chef and work in a couple of the top restaurants in Chicago. Now he is applying to enter as a transfer student (based on his work at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts).

So we listened to the pitch and took a tour. I’ve been through it before, but being with a different kid made it, well . . . the same old thing with a different kid.

Okay, I know what you are thinking: stop being so cynical. Yeah, I know it sounds that way. But I don’t really mean it that way.

Because it was the same old thing when I went to college and it will be the same old thing when their kids go off and do their first things on their own.

They laid it all out. There is so much that will be new for them. There are so many opportunities to do cool things. A guy like me here’s this and feels like I did when these guys were born—part of something that is both new and age old.