THE END OF SOMETHING

Some people get all weepy when their children leave home for college, but not me. Children are supposed to grow up and move away. It's no big deal.

So I shed no tears on the final week of summer vacation when I drove my daughter Molly to the University of Pennsylvania, where she and a roommate will live. Their dorm room would fit two Volkswagens and a wheelbarrow. The air inside is suffocating. The decor is Kmart. The carpet is septic. The place reminds you of those hotel rooms in the movies where stubbled gangsters in ribbed undershirts and fedoras hide from the fuzz while a neon sign blinks outside. Molly's walls are a shade of paint that Sherwin-Williams could market as "Dingy Yellow." Or "You'll-Never-Take-Me-Alive Copper."

Molly took one look around and was giddily happy.

So I am happy. That is the way it is supposed to work, and it is working fine, in my case.

Molly's roommate is from Chicago. Within minutes of meeting, the two women were bouncing around campus, their lives already jubilantly intertwined. It seems odd to use this term, women. I know it is the accepted designation for 18-year-old human females, the legally correct word, a word sanctioned by the restroom doors at some of the nation's finest institutions of higher education. But until a few days ago, or so it seems, I was wiping strained prunes off this woman's chin.

I am disoriented, but not dismayed. The whole point of being a parent is to reach this moment. You spend 18 years encouraging your daughter to be independent, even headstrong, and when she strides away confidently on her own you should feel good. And I do.

The University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia, and on the day I arrived the local newspapers reported that a sicko was stalking the streets. He is believed to have raped several women and killed at least one. Molly is unworried; when you choose to live in a big city, she informs me, you must accept certain risks.

Molly chose this city, and worked hard for it, and got it. My daughter usually does what she needs to get what she wants. When she began to drive, she angled for a deal: We would allow her to come and go as she pleased, within reason, so long as she used good judgment, never lied about her whereabouts and maintained high grades. She did all those things, and a deal was a deal. So there was many a night when Molly came home after our bedtime, and that was okay with me. I was comfortable and confident as I lay there downstairs on the couch, inches from the door, beneath an old clock ticking loudly in the stillness, awaiting her step on the stair. I am also comfortable and confident about her safety in Philadelphia.

I have not told Molly to be careful out there, because she already knows it, and besides, no one tells Molly what to do. To use the ladies' room at her dorm, she must walk down a long hall and up a flight of stairs. There is a restroom right across from her room, but it is labeled for use by men only. Instantly, Molly announced that she would regard this designation to be optional.

For the last two years, Molly has volunteered at a firehouse, dressed in a baggy blue uniform, riding the ambulances. She wants to be a doctor, and at the youngest allowable age she became a licensed emergency medical technician. One night she came home from work with blood on her, and a story: A car had hit a bridge abutment at high speed, and people were gravely injured. Molly had been ordered to ride to the hospital with a man whose leg was snapped in two at the thigh; her job was to be a human traction splint, tugging his bones into place as he moaned and whimpered.

She was not yet 17. Her mother and I hugged her and asked if she was okay.

"Okay?" she said. "This was the greatest day of my life."