frosh flashbacks

oh, moving day. moving day memories.

it was beginning to pour the day i first met fern. mom and i didn't care -- we were just glad we finally found it. we had disagreed on just how to get to orange city after getting off the interstate. mom said 75 was a better road and therefore quicker. i said 60 was a more direct route, and the one i knew better. mom won, except that somehow we made a wrong turn and added a good hour to the trip.

my room was on the third floor, but conveniently directly across from the stairwell. i knew the name of my roommate and some older girl with a tight bun who came in and seemed to be in charge. she looked like she might be mean. what was an RA, anyway? but she told us to meet in the hall at 3:45, and by gosh, if she was in charge, i would do it. i didn't want to get kicked out.

and we met four other girls in the hallway, other freshmen. one looked kind of skanky, two whiny, the other cheerful. i knew there were some other girls down the hall who looked like athletes or preppies and i was not excited to know them. this was some motley crew i was going to be stuck with. it might just be me and amelia for awhile, i thought, until i was brave enough to meet some more people. pam told us we were going to a chapel service. and there we went.

and it was at chapel that i was reminded i was in the right place. the clue was in the acoustics. i was standing, singing a song i knew, surrounded by other people who knew the song. and the sound of all those voices resonating in that huge room... mm.

(it was funny to think back later to those stereotypes i made. those athlete/preps turned out to be my closest friends in about four months.)

***
noon. the freshmen were finally coming in with the boxes and couches and lamps and hanging clothes. they had been in scouting out their doors for a couple of hours now, while the eight of us ran up and down the stairs asking stupid questions and generally being nervous. we had been waiting to meet these freshmen for five long months, praying for them, decorating for them, planning their wing activities. within minutes we'd know the luck of the draw. in hours, we'd get a hint of our place on the wing.

the strike of noon came and my wing was still devoid of girls. i ran to another part of the building to ask another question, came back, and saw the first one. she was slender and soft and blond and looked a little worried. my first homesick freshman! bless her heart. she looked so loveable.

and then her mother said, "how do we get her room changed?"

and over the course of the next half hour i was plunged into the challenges of my new job.

freshmen would move in and i'd go say hi and introduce myself and meet the parents and then let them get back to unpacking.

and they had met me and said hi and moved on with their lives. it took so much time to remember that though my life was currently focused on them, their lives were currently focused on a few dozen things that did not include me. and this was natural and correct.

and the shy, homesick freshmen i'd been imagining?

the social butterflies of the weekend. they knew all each other's names and had a dozen or so friends outside the wings while i was still calling dana tracy and tracy dana.

the same social butterflies who would hear me opening my door at 12:30 in the morning and automatically (temporarily) shut up.

and who would try to buy non-alcoholic beer and throw me a surprise party for my 21st birthday.

who would make their own snow cones with real snow

and pick up 13-year-old boys at the roller skating rink

and take my possessions on SSPs

and sit an hour for a backrub

and play nertz till 2 a.m.

and learn two-word bible verses for a tootsie roll.

i loved how big the world was for them. they could study anything, were beginning to learn what their passions were and weren't. panicked about little things like majors and professions. they were brave enough to think that college might not be for them and naive enough to think they could just leave that place without feeling it. they broke up with high school boyfriends and flirted in heemstra and coly and organized their own bonfires.

but they just never caught on to study break. why was that?