I felt for the kid — this freshman who walked up to me on the Flagler campus and asked where a building was. Midway through the question his voice cracked — the most God-awful squeak. It could have broken glass.
Man, when you’re young, why does your voice always let you down at just the wrong moment? No doubt it was from the jitters that come with the first days of college — this big, new, unfamiliar, intimidating, alien place. So different from the comfy world you just left.
I felt for the kid and pointed across campus to the towering 5-story building. “It’s that big one,” I said, thankful the building he was looking for wasn’t the one we were standing in. That would have really been embarrassing.
He trudged off and I watched him, remembering back almost two decades to when I was in his shoes trying to get the lay of the land at this very same school — unsure, nervous and overwhelmed, but at the same time excited, eager and too clueless to know better.
When you work on a college campus, the first week always takes you back to your own college days. All the sights, the emotions, the people you first met. One was a sophomore who poked his head into my dorm room as I unloaded clothes from my duffle bags.
“Man, I had some good times in this room,” he said. “That’s where I glued my blanket to the ceiling.”
I stared at the blue mark and didn’t know what to make of it. To this day I still don’t. I know strange things go on at college. Gin stills in the shower. Farm animals running wild. Sure, but for the live of me I have never been able to conjure up a reason why — even in an altered state — gluing a blanket to the ceiling would constitute a “good time.”
What would possess you to do such a thing? Where does an idea like that even come from? I always had this image of him shivering through winter and thinking, “Why didn’t I just steal a car bumper like everyone else?”
I remember all sorts of things, like heating cans of ravioli on a hot plate in my room or how my idea of dressing up was a T-shirt that didn’t have a mustard stain on it and socks.
I remember the cheap beer that could have doubled as turpentine and that aftertaste it left in your mouth for days, no matter how much or how little you drank. I remember how toast was a major food group, and that if you ever woke up before 11 a.m. on a Saturday, it was a sign you were mortally ill. I remember Frisbee as a full-contact sport and how you could produce a 20-page term paper in one night with nothing more than a few scribbles in a notebook, a bag of nachos, four liters of Coke, and some guy blasting country music down the hall that left blisters in your ears.
How did I live like that? How did I LIKE living like that? And more to the point, how did I survive living like that?
The bathroom alone should have done me in. By mid-semester, the Centers for Disease Control had quarantined it. They wanted to study whether a high concentration of mildew could devour a college freshman.
They were the best times. The most memorable. I don’t remember a care in the world, which is funny considering how many demands on my time there were — the books, the classes, the papers, the tests.
I learned — I really did! — but there was always a good time to be had, and plenty of fun to go around. Man, I would love to be that nervous freshman again. In fact, I wish I could track him down. I’d tell him it might seem big and scary now, but not to worry: In no time he’d be gluing his blanket to the ceiling.