Canzano: What I learned while my daughter was in college

Four years later...

Dakota graduates on Friday and Saturday.

I have three daughters. The night before we dropped my oldest off at her college dorm is one of my favorite all-time memories.

Dakota’s bags were packed. Her bicycle was loaded in the back of a trailer in the driveway. I was gripping her childhood with both hands late that night, determined to keep it together the next day, when I heard voices coming from her bedroom.

The three daughters were huddled in her room, singing karaoke together. I sat on the hallway carpet outside the room for a while, listening to the three of them crowing on microphones and dancing about the room, giggling.

“They’ll always have each other,” I thought.

The following morning, we’d deliver her to a third-floor dorm room in Callahan Hall at Oregon State, help her move in, hug her goodbye, and drive toward Interstate 5 with glassy eyes. Four years have passed. My daughter graduates on Friday, and this feels like the right time to share what I learned while my kid was in college.

It’s good to look ahead.

That dorm drop-off was a blur. I surveyed the kids moving into the rooms across the way and others who were bouncing down the hall. Would these become her lifelong friends? Just neighbors for a spell? All the kids were excited. Their parents, like me, wore sad and anxious looks on their faces.

It hit me like a bag of bricks as we drove away. My daughter and her dormmates were joyful because they were on the cusp of the unknown, peering into their futures. I was looking back, hanging onto the last bits of her childhood.

I taught my daughter to ride a bike by running alongside when she was 6, holding the seat with one hand until I felt like she had it herself.

“Keep pedaling, kid — you got this,” I cried out.

By the time I hit the freeway, I realized it was time for me to let go of the bicycle seat again. I find it poetic that one of my final parental reminders at that dorm drop was a brush-up how-to lesson on locking up her bike.

Eyes up — there’s magic all around.

I saw a father the other day crossing the street with a young child. He held his son’s hand and offered, “When we come to a street, we look both ways.”

I had my twist on that with my kids. I constantly say: “Eyes up.” It’s a cautionary reminder to keep their heads on a swivel and see what’s happening around them. I do that a lot, but I’m an observer. Maybe it’s a professional hazard. But over the last four years, I’ve watched Dakota have a far more immersive experience with her surroundings.

She’s socially gifted and hardworking. She values relationships and is the kindest person I’ve ever met. The pandemic was ongoing when she was moving into the dorms. Residents were required to take a COVID-19 test before moving in. They lined up in the parking lot of Reser Stadium to be tested. When Dakota took her spot in line, she shook hands and talked with everyone around her.

Her eyes were not only up — her mind was open.

An incoming freshman, Cheyenne, was in line beside her. She was from Hawaii and stood alongside her mother. Dakota and Cheyenne talked and exchanged Instagram handles as they waited. They bonded. A few weeks later, Dakota mentioned they had hung out together on campus. Four years later, they’re good friends who still get together, lean on each other, laugh a lot, and I suspect they’ll always be that way.

Dakota and Cheyenne posed for a photo when they met in 2021.

Another kid she met later in the dorms, Cody, has become one of her biggest allies and best friends. He’s a great student, fiercely loyal, and has the social spirit of a wildcat. I was not surprised that he and Dakota ended up in the bleachers at Goss Stadium with general admission seats for Oregon State’s clinching Super Regional victory last Sunday.

They’ve been friends for a few years. I asked how they met. Turns out, Cody was walking through the dorms one day, and they simply stopped and said hello to each other.

My eyes are up. I see the traffic. I look both ways when I cross the street. But I don’t do this rich, deep, immersive, magical social thing as skillfully as Dakota does. Her approach is far more evolved than mine, and I’ve learned from it.

Bears sometimes happen.

A few days before Dakota’s sophomore year, she moved into a house a few blocks from campus with three friends. I received a frantic phone call one morning about a gate to the backyard that had been smashed up.

“Dad,” my daughter reported, “I think the bear did it.”

I rolled my eyes. She sent pictures of the gate. It was broken to smithereens. It looked to me like some intoxicated person had happened upon the gate and kicked it in. I told her I’d drive down in a few days and help them repair it.

About an hour later, I saw a social media post from Oregon State warning that, indeed, a bear had been spotted roaming campus. Students were warned to keep away from the wandering bear if they encountered it. Dakota later provided video footage from a doorbell camera that showed the bear walking across her front yard. It was a reminder that unexpected and unfortunate things sometimes happen.

You lose a job. Friendships come and go. People get sick. It’s not lost on me that two of the three original roommates are long gone. (Some people get along better at a little distance.) But when your kid insists that a hungry bear may be responsible for smashing the backyard gate, believe her. The wilderness is all around us.

Keep dreaming big — even after you’ve grown up.

Our middle daughter is moving up from the fifth grade to middle school next year. I attended her school’s ceremony on Tuesday. The students sang together on stage and were handed certificates by their teachers. They also put up a slide for each student that included the hopes, dreams, and favorite quotes of the kids.

One child wanted to be a professional football player. Another said she wanted to play professional soccer. A third said she wanted to be a volleyball player. There was one student who simply said: “I want to be rich!!” And another who wants to work for NASA.

My 11-year-old?

She quoted Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

I didn’t know that my child even knew who “the Great One” was before Tuesday. That quote from the Hockey Hall of Fame player is a reminder that you don’t get to big places without taking a shot and betting on yourself.

Keep dreaming, folks.

Keep leaning into inspirational quotes.

Keep running barefoot through the sprinklers.

As I watched the presentation from the fifth grade, I thought about Dakota’s college experience. Her classmates are focused on less dreamy goals. They aren’t aiming to be pro athletes and astronauts as much as they’re geared up to be teachers, marketing executives, engineers, and occupational therapists.

Many of them aren’t sure what they’d like to do, but they’re looking around and parroting each other because not having a plan to announce is cast as a failure.

It’s not. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left college. It took me a year to figure it out. Then, a couple of decades after that, I figured it out again, leaving the newspaper world to launch this independent writing endeavor.

After I made the announcement, Oregon football coach Dan Lanning was one of the first people to call. Mike Leach texted with me about it. Oregon State football coach Jonathan Smith reached out to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind, along with some others. But the first phone call came from Dakota, who was between classes when she heard the news.

“I’m proud of you, Dad,” she said.

That kid graduates this weekend. I can’t wait to tell her how proud I am of her.

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