The Headline Said These Are the Best of Times

A recent Buzzfeed list was 19 Reasons Your College Friends will be your Friends for Life. It was posted on Facebook by a grad school classmate who’s 15 years younger than me; much closer to college and more gullible likely to want to believe this headline. 

Before you call me cynical—which I totally am—I will admit that I have my moments of sentimentality and dedication to certain friends with whom I shared utterly humiliating situations between the ages of 18-24. But I don’t have a core circle of friends that has lasted for two decades as this list infers should have happened. Many of my freshman friendships didn’t last through sophomore year.  Nonetheless, a few of the items in the list hold weight for me 25 years after I began college:

1990, me and Lisa on my 18th birthday

You lived together.

There is something about sharing a 12 x 12 dorm room with a stranger that makes you learn things you never thought you’d learn about another person. Somehow knowing those things binds you together in ways you can’t undo. You learn ways of knowing when they’re lying, when they’re upset, or when they’re hiding something by the most subtle, and sometimes unusual, of ways. Wearing certain shoes means she’s lying about who she’s going out with. Eating squeeze cheese means she’s homesick. And no matter how hard you try to not know, you always know when she needs to poop.

They’re the best people to do absolutely nothing with.

I experienced this just last week when my freshman year roommate, Lisa, and I got together for a girls’ weekend. We live 2 hours apart but haven’t seen each other in 3 years.  So we rented a place on the beach halfway between our homes for 2 days. Midway through day 1 Lisa said she was going out to read on the patio. I took a nap on the couch inside. We were only going to be together for 30 hours or so, and some might think we should have been DOING STUFF and hanging out TOGETHER…but I was happy just having her nearby. I didn’t need her literally at my side nodding at my conversation to know she was still one of my besties. Despite many years apart, we still share brain waves. I say with complete seriousness that we have conversations without speaking. I cannot explain it, but it’s the closest I’ve come to understanding the connection twins have. Our *doing nothing* is never nothing.

Nothing can beat the hours your spent bonding in the dining hall, gaining the freshman 15 together.  

For real. The dining hall at FSU was the best place to people watch, and it’s where Lisa and I came up with endless nicknames for cute boys and sorority girls, watched couples meet and break up, and eavesdropped on other groups who were most likely doing the same thing we were doing.  There was one guy in particular we called Cool Hand Luke. If he only knew the great pleasure we got watching him build his lunch at the salad bar….

You’ve witnessed each other’s terrible decisions.

And pass no judgment. Because whatever dirt I have on her, she has on me. It’s a Mexican standoff. As long as nobody tells, nobody gets hurt. But like a mom who can scold her kid with a side-eye glance, Lisa and I can still remind each other of a long-buried memory of a behavioral indiscretion merely with a raised eyebrow or nonverbal utterance…those well-timed grunts and snorts that convey entire scenarios that would rather be forgotten. 

 But in all honesty, you’re actually thrilled that she still remembers, because it means you mattered, and that you were important in that time in her life. When you are at someone’s side through their best and their worst, over time it ALL becomes the best of times.

 

Summer 2014, me and Lisa 25 years after meeting as college freshman

 

Sweatin' in an Oldie

Every time I watch an episode of Hoarders, at some point I think, "how can he/she possibly be attached to that (piece of fabric/empty box/magazine from 1991)?" I wonder why these people can't see that the object(s) in front of them are clearly garbage that should be tossed out. But the truth is, we all own something whose value is understood only by ourselves.

1987

One thing I can't throw out is a college sweatshirt I bought in 1986. At the time I was 14 years old and visiting my brother at his school during Parents Weekend. In anticipation of this trip I saved my allowance for weeks, knowing exactly what I wanted to buy at the student union store. Once purchased, I couldn't wait to put it on; this sweatshirt was the whitest, coziest, fluffiest sweatshirt I've ever felt. It was like wearing a cloud.

Twenty-five years later it's threadbare, tinted a yellowish-gray color, and smells musty from hiding in a storage bin for 8 months out of the year. The neck, wrists, and waistband are completely stretched out. I look like a bag lady wearing it. Still, I hold onto it. I've worn that Duke sweatshirt EVERYWHERE: on vacations (all of them), to football games, and on dates. While jogging, while sick, and while studying. Through high school, through college, through graduate school. It has traveled from Maine to Florida to California to Washington. Every boyfriend I've had has held my hand in this sweatshirt.

My life happened in this sweatshirt.

So when I consider putting it to a final rest, a flood of memories always surfaces. I've come to realize over the years that when my life is going well I tend to purge excess items, and when it's less than ideal, I hold on to more.

2012

I have other sweatshirts, mind you; sweatshirts from colleges I actually attended. And I have newer sweatshirts whose whites are whiter and whose brights are brighter. But the Duke sweatshirt...it's part security blanket, part historical artifact, like the teddy bear I received when I was three who still sits on a chair in my bedroom. I know it's way past its prime but I just can't let it go. It's my "Wooby." Every time I've tried to throw it out, sentimentality places it back in the bin. Duke's not going anywhere.

My Love Affair With Neil Perry

As the students crowded around trophy cases full of old black-and-white photographs, the teacher crouched behind them and slowly whispered, “Carpe…carpe diem…seize the day, boys…make your lives extraordinary….”

I never took a Latin class, but I did learn to love that phrase: Carpe diem.

During my senior year of high school, my creative writing teacher introduced us to a soon-to-be-released movie called Dead Poets Society. She had gotten hold of some condensed versions of the movie script, and we read it aloud in class. I remember our Australian exchange student played the part of the inspirational teacher in the reading, and I still hear her accented voice saying those words, carpe diem.

It was a good enough story in its shortened version; I was very much into poetry at the time, and anything that this particular teacher recommended I took as gospel. So when the movie came out the summer after I graduated, I was eager to see it.
The movie told the story of a group of high school boys enrolled at a boarding prep school in New England in the 1950s. Their lives were dramatically changed by the introduction of a radically inspirational new teacher, Mr. Keating, as played by Robin Williams. Through unconventional methods he taught them to question the status quo, to be free thinkers, and to “do more…be more.” It was the message I needed to hear at precisely the time I needed to hear it.

At the time I had just turned 17 and was eager to get away to college and experience everything new. I was soaking up every word my own radically inspirational teacher said. I was yearning to be worldly and wise.

At college, I introduced one of my freshman year roommates to DPS. She fell in love with it just like I did, and this bond was a major pillar of our friendship. Whenever it played at the dollar theater, we caught a ride to see it. If we heard a dorm-mate had rented it, we knocked on her door to watch it. We regularly quoted lines from it in everyday conversation. It was a part of us. And how we loved those boys; she loved Knox, I loved Neil.

But really, we loved them all. They were the boys we wanted to meet, the boys who would write us poetry and reveal secrets about themselves to us. Boys who would find us beautiful but be even more interested in our minds.

We didn’t meet those boys anytime soon, certainly not that year. But the movie gave us hope that they were out there. And it gave us a seed of motivation that, 20 years later, I can see has grown in both of us and influenced choices we’ve made along the way. Both professionally and personally we’ve heard that whisper coming from behind us saying, “seize the day…make your life extraordinary.”

There are so many lines that spoke to me in that movie, I could fill pages just quoting them all. But one of the strongest was, “The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” It is my life’s goal to contribute a verse that is remembered. It is why I write and why I push myself to reach out to relationships I was previously scared to pursue. I’m still working my way up to a barbaric YAWP, as Mr. Keating encouraged the boys to exalt. I try to remember, as he told them, that “poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.”

I still get choked up every single time I watch that movie. The beauty of scenery, the truth of the theme, and the emotion of the tragedy never fail to touch me. But above all, the closing scene where the boys take a final stand to honor their teacher who was forced out of his job shaped the way I view loyalty. I hope that when the opportunity arises I can be as courageous as they were in standing up to defend the honor of someone I truly believe in. And I hope that my contributed verse will be honorable.