Dear Mary,

I read in your column in the Life and Times section, a few pages on, that you will be graduating in a couple of weeks and moving back home to think about how you intend to gain fame and fortune when you finally head off to Paris.

That’s a lot for a father to digest at one sitting.

Like others who have been responsible for the care and feeding of this year’s graduating class for the last 20 years or more, your mother and I are experiencing a tangle of emotions – especially because you are the youngest of our five.

As we’ve anticipated watching you stride across that stage in cap and gown, we have relived the morning you walked into a kindergarten classroom clutching our hands.

And it hasn’t taken much of a stretch of the mind’s eye to see you standing in your crib for the first time, wobbly but proud, your diaper draping the latitude of the hip-huggers you wear today.

You were still not much more than a child, or so it seemed, the day we moved you into the dorm for your freshman year, then, just as we wake one spring morning startled to find the azaleas have burst into full flower, one day you came in the door and you were a young woman.

When we paused to wonder at how that happened we realized how much you have changed over these last four years.

You have learned a great deal, in classrooms, in the library and even at places like Madigan’s.

You’ve matured emotionally and intellectually in ways you perhaps don’t recognize.

You’ve developed into one terrific writer. And as we consider all that you have become, we are proud of you beyond measure, as we are of your four siblings.

Sure, I know you have had a few sleepless nights lately weighing a career in bartending or crossword-puzzle solving against going for a graduate degree at Moler Barber College.

And when, with diploma cover in hand, you maneuver those narrow stairs leading down from the stage next Saturday you may see only desert stretching out ahead of you.

It may be cold comfort, but the person in front is likely stepping into that same void, and so is the person in back of you.

I remember breaking under a dinner table interrogation in my senior year and confessing that I didn’t know what I was going to do. My mother burst into tears and said, “If only you had taken some education courses, you could at least teach.”

Somehow I made it through, and so did my classmates – in part by luck, in part by purpose, even with a few side trips along the way. (And, as it turned out, Mom, I could at least teach.) You and your classmates have the wherewithal to do the same.

Now there’s that matter of your living at home for a while. You wrote that you will have “another few years before my parents kick me out,” but that was a typo, wasn’t it? You meant “months,” didn’t you? “Weeks?”

Whichever, you may be “totally and utterly okay” with it. But remember, as Ecclesiastes might have written, there’s a time to nest and a time to fly.

We do want to make you feel at home, though, for the short time you are with us.

You will find fresh linens on your bed. And we’ll lay in a stock of the coffee you’ve become addicted to in your college years and extra munchies to get you through reruns of “Friends.”

At least for the first week.

We’ll even deliver the want ads section of The Times-Picayune to your bedroom door every morning.

Love,Dad

P.S. About that curfew. Since you’ll be a college graduate, we’ve decided to extend it to 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

~ Larry Lorenz is an A. Louis Reed Distinguished Professor of Communications

“Don´t be fooled by the rocks that I´ve got”