Football games are underway, and that not only signals autumn but also the start of the fall semester at colleges and universities.

As young adults make their way to the financial aid office to see if and how they can swing a college education, I thought about how difficult it is to choose a career path these days.

There are so many choices, especially for those who love computers and know their way around the Internet. I came of age in the generation where what you chose after high school was what you did your whole life, usually in the same town where you were born.

You worked for a company for 30 years, retired with a gold watch and then sat on the porch, shelling peas, waiting for the grandkids or the Grim Reaper.

Times have changed. Today, government statistics state that millennials will have 15 to 20 jobs over the course of their working life. They can easily go from one career to another and never think about that gold watch.

There are times I wish I could go back to those early days and experiment with different careers. When I left high school, I had all kinds of ideas about what I wanted to be.

I was from a small town, and I wanted to see the world, but I didn’t have any money to finance that dream.

One career offered a chance to earn a salary and see the world – becoming a stewardess. Back in the 1970s, stewardesses – we now call them flight attendants – looked like they had a jet-setting career.

Television commercials featured stewardesses in cute dresses, hats and high heels traveling all over the United States. Some even traveled to exotic, romantic locations like Paris, London and Rome.

Sure they had to serve coffee and deal with travel-weary passengers, but the end result was seeing the wonders of the world for free.

I was living in a working-class blue-collar town, and I wondered what adventures were out there besides an oil-refinery job.

When I told my parents I wanted to work for an airline, they weren’t happy.

“Stewardesses are nothing more than glorified waitresses,” they said.

We know this isn’t true — flight attendants work hard, stand on their feet and might have to deal with a dangerous person. Still, my parents wanted me to go to college instead of right to work, so I went to college and then to work for a reliable company where I could retire with a nice pension.

The choice was safe. The choice was conservative. The choice was what was expected.

I always wondered how life would’ve turned out if I’d been brave enough to travel the world. Who could I have met? What could I have seen? Was Paris really as mysterious and beautiful as it looked in the magazines?

But the “what-if” game is a dangerous one and tricks me from facing my “what-is” reality which is pretty good. I’ve learned to accept how things are and stay in the present. The future is unwritten and the “right-now” is what I make it.

Besides, I wouldn’t change my life for anything. I wouldn’t be a mother to my three wonderful sons. I wouldn’t have the joy of finally having a daughter in the family and I wouldn’t know the deep love of being a grandparent. I wouldn’t have a spouse willing to sit on the porch and shell peas with me while we wait for the grandchildren to visit.

Maybe I can still travel the world. It’s never too late to start down the path toward realizing one’s dreams because plans, and life, change.

And as they do and the older I get, the more I realize I better start down those paths now rather than later.

I wonder if Southwest Airlines is hiring.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.