First day of school this week, and I was late, as usual. Some things don’t change in half a century. 
  “What are you up to?” my sister asked in an e-mail. 
  The answer is, I’m not sure. 
  My father is the only one in his family who earned a college degree. I’m the only one in mine who hasn’t. 
  My father didn’t want to spend his life on a farm, so he struggled through the Depression to support his parents and siblings while he went to school. He took time out to help build atom bombs in World War II, and finally, at age 38, won his doctorate in physics. 
  My mother went back to school for her master’s degree when we kids were almost grown. My brother and sister both did post-graduate work. I, on the other hand, almost flunked out of high school. 
  When I was young and smart, I took a test in Reader’s Digest that compared one’s knowledge to various levels of formal education. I scored higher than the average PhD, so I mused that maybe I could take the magazine to a university and bargain for a master’s degree on the spot.  
  When I enrolled in college after I got out of the service, I soon realized I knew more going in than most of those kids knew coming out, so I quit school and went to work in a grocery store for $1.35 an hour. Shows how smart I was. 
  Then I heard that there might still be a couple of states in which one could become a lawyer without going to school, but that form of apprenticeship had already disappeared. 
  I gave up my lazy search for shortcuts and got from there to here without a sheepskin on the wall, but I sometimes wonder where else I might have gone in life had I had the temperament for formal education when I was younger. 
  Many people go back to school after the kids leave the nest. They don’t do if for career advancement so much as for “personal enrichment.” I don’t care much about personal enrichment, but I’d like to have that degree. 
  Several years ago, I asked a man I fly with what the books he carried around were. 
  “School books,” he said. He’d enrolled in a university that gives credit for such things as work experience and education outside the school system. Most of the gaps could be filled in with correspondence courses and home study. 
  I didn’t follow up, though. I guess it wasn’t my time. 
  My job makes attending regular classes impossible, so conventional college, if I ever got around to it, would have to wait a few more years. 
  I read about Western Governors University in a newspaper. It has a Colorado phone number and it’s on the Internet at www.wgu.edu. 
  The program gives credit for what you already know. I sent them a credit card number to get the ball rolling. WGU assigned me an advisor who set me up for an evaluation at Peninsula College at 10:00 in the morning. 
  I was late several times a week when I lived next door to my grade school. I flunked my 7:30 art class in high school on tardiness demerits. But I was a kid then. 
  I left home in plenty of time for the test, but I had to stop for fuel, and then I thought they might let me use a calculator, so I stopped at a store and bought one and was two minutes late for school. 
  The multiple-choice tests on reading, writing, and even arithmetic were a breeze. Geometry was another matter, even with the calculator. 
  My passing acquaintance with plane geometry was more than 40 years ago. Calculators don’t help much if you have no idea what numbers to punch into them. 
  For the first time, I wished I’d paid more attention to angles and lines in high school. Time ran out before I finished filling in spaces with my #2 pencil. 
  So, what am I up to? I guess I’m going to college at last. 
  Late, as usual.