September 1992

I may have first heard Q101 (Chicago) on the way back to school. I do know it was sometime sophomore year, either then or during Thanksgiving Break. I began to like alternative even more than I liked the dance music on B96. Eventually, I discovered that Q101 came in at my house when the TV antenna was hooked up to the stereo in the living room.

Tracy was the only other sophomore in the suites. She was there because she, like me, had signed up to a suite (probably a language one) before they pulled the language suites (lack of interest) and said only upperclassmen could live in the suites. Since the school's policy change caused us an inconvenience, we were allowed to stay, though we might have to change rooms or suites. I was moved from the old German suite to an honors suite on the opposite end of the building, which I was able to live in because of my grades.

My suitemates--the ones I remember--were Nicky, Georgina and Mary; for a short time, Maggie, who had the room next to mine; and, eventually, Elizabeth. Georgina and Mary were roommates, and Elizabeth lived with Nicky when she moved into our suite. Maggie moved out because she was very unhappy on campus and wanted to live at home.

Mary got engaged to her boyfriend, so she told us--though she never told her sorority sisters. I don't know what happened there. Georgina used to date Jennifer's brother. He broke up with her, but she could not let go for quite some time. Unlike Peter, he was nice to his ex, allowing her to talk to him and ask him to do things--and she did that a lot. This really got on Mary's nerves.

We moved my stuff in, but there was no food service right away, so my parents (who were staying in S-- overnight anyway) would come and get me for meals. On Sunday the 6th, as I dreaded a long day of having no one to talk to except my parents, we passed the Campus Center. I looked up and saw, parked in its usual spot outside Bossard, Pearl's scooter. "Pearl's here!" I cried. This turned out to be a great day for me, since most of my friends were back early. Pearl was back to lead a freshman orientation group.

new band called Pearl Jam--and it just blew me away. The quality of the production, the interest, the art, the song itself--all were excellent. If you've never seen it, it's a collection of images depicting a young boy, Jeremy, living out his tortured life with parents who don't care and classmates who tease him. In one scene, he kneels in front of a big picture of a wolf with its mouth open. At the end, he goes into his classroom late and shirtless, tosses an apple to the teacher, pulls a gun to his own head and squeezes his eyes shut--then you see his classmates frozen in time, Jeremy's blood splattered all over them as they sit in shock and horror. I didn't know it then, but it was based on a real occurrence, I believe in Indiana. From what I could understand of the lyrics, he was me. (I hadn't yet caught the parts where he would act like a jerk). The music seemed to express the despair and torment of a child who's being teased by everyone else. "Jeremy spoke in class today" was the most eloquent line, since it didn't just refer to him opening up his mouth and answering a question. Also, the lead singer, Eddie Vedder, looked like a wild man with his long, straggly hair and big eyes.

Shawn had a tiny room, a single room because he couldn't stand his jerky roommate the year before. I couldn't believe a room could be so small. It was almost a closet. It was maybe half the size of a double room, which in that dorm was already barely enough for two people. (Rooms in Grossh and Muehlmeier were the smallest.) Besides a bed, he had a small, green easy chair with a rocker, and a little space for his desk and closets--and that was about all the room he had. There were closets and drawers all around and even above his bed. He had a classy-looking, green Inverness coat hanging from one of the knobs of a closet near the window, which filled the wall opposite the door. Above his bed he kept his stereo or jam box (I forget which it was), and usually blasted Christian rock, pop and maybe rap from it.

My room was much like the room I had freshman year, except the windows faced the Wehr Center, parking lot and football field, and the door was on the wall adjacent to the window. My bed was under the window because it was next to the wall heater. At one point we had to have the heater fixed, but it kept the room nice and warm for much of the winter.

The phone was on a dresser. At first it was a box-shaped phone, the standard, but then it stopped working right, so we got some newfangled thing which just had the receiver and no box. You'd put it down on the desk to hang it up, since it had this little hook-thing that would be pushed in. I would often skip putting it on the desk to hang it up, and just hit the hook. I loved this modern convenience. The cord was also really long, so I could talk on the phone while sitting on my bed.

Maggie’s room would eventually be made into a guest room, holding the old furniture (including a big, comfy, but ratty old couch) when the new furniture was put into the lounge. I was surprised to find the lounge didn't have a TV. I thought all the suite lounges had TVs. After all, the one in the German suite did not belong to any of us in the suite, but to the college.

I always knew when there was a party or something else big going on in the Zeta or Beta suite, since I could see and hear it through the lounge windows. I could even tell when the Zetas or Betas turned on loud music. At least they played good stuff. That's how I first heard "Would" by Alice in Chains and "Perculator" by Cajmere.

I hadn’t seen the new movie Wayne's World and had never seen the Wayne's World sketches on Saturday Night Live, but I knew many of the one-liners from my friends, who now incorporated them into daily speech. There were little catch phrases such as "Ex-squeeze me?"; "Ree! Ree! Ree!" while making stabbing motions; "We're not worthy!"; and "If you spew, spew in here" (said while holding up a glass cup). We loved the references to "Mill-i-wau-kay," and I loved the references to Chicago, such as the Empire carpet jingle, which I knew from watching Chicago stations for years. I don't think we actually used Wayne and Garth's "Schwing!" After all, none of us were guys.

As for Saturday Night Live catchphrases, we sometimes used a falsetto "Ne-ver mind" and "I'm verklempt". I didn't use "verklempt" since I didn't know what it meant and didn't watch SNL. Pearl used "O-tay" (from Eddie Murphy's Buckwheat). I believe she once embarrassed herself by using it with a much older adult during a serious conversation. Tara's favorite was, "You putchyer weeed in there!"

One catchphrase came from Rachel talking about her uncle and others and repeatedly saying, "He's dead now." The "he" would be drawled. Another one was "Spew! Spew! Spew!" We said this whenever somebody took a drink just as another person said or did something funny. The drink-spewing was meant to come out of the nose.

On Tuesday the 8th, I went out for pizza with Darryl, Steve, two guys named Ned and Marc, and maybe somebody else. Ned got Darryl into a political conversation in the car. Ned was surprised I wanted to vote for Bush. He said, “Is it because you don't want to vote for Clinton?" There really was no good candidate in this race, which would keep happening for the next few elections. I only voted for Bush because, in those days, I thought Pat Robertson was God's prophet--and he said Bush would win.

People didn't jump enough at the school dances. All they seemed to do was sway back and forth and shuffle their feet a bit. Black dances, which sometimes involved people lining up and doing a sort of follow-the-leader, were more interesting than these (which were predominantly made up of white people). I moved my feet more than the other white people, as Peter taught me. Somebody told me that House of Pain recorded "Jump" to get people to jump.

One day, an improv group came to RC and did a performance in Bossard during lunch. If you've ever seen the British or American versions of the show Whose Line is it Anyway, you'll understand what this improv troupe did. Basically, none of the comedy was scripted; they made it all up from moment to moment. They tried to act out situations and play games given to them by the moderator, who tried to give them situations and games that were as funny as possible. They were given points which didn't make a difference. And if things ever got too raunchy, such as a sexual reference, the moderator would hit a buzzer, ending the player's turn. I don't remember the jokes except for "Bananaman." One of the guys ended up with a banana and started going on about "Bananaman." He got buzzed for sexual content. For the rest of the year, you could hear jokes about Bananaman.

Food Service was an icky job, but at first I didn't mind cleaning people's trays and sending them down the line to the dishwashers. The kitchen and dishwashing areas were called "in the back." There was this big, long, silvery thing with rollers on it which was shaped like a U, and you would slide the trays along it to your coworkers. When people put their trays in the window, I would toss the trash in a big trash can with a red, plastic lid on the top with a hole in it for the trash, then toss the silverware in a pan of water and sort it by type into round containers. The containers would be in a stand that held them upright. I would send down the tray, and the others would stack the dishes and trays in big trays which kept them separated from each other, then push them into a big washing machine. When the dishes were clean, they would come out the other side, which was parallel to and behind the side I worked on, and people would let them dry and cool off, and then put them away. If the dishes weren't properly cleaned, they would be sent back through the dishwasher--yet I still had to check my silverware and dishes for cleanliness at meals. Before a shift, we ate, punched in, and hung up key card necklaces on pegs outside the dishwashing area. We wore plastic aprons and white, rubber gloves, then tossed them into the trash at the end of our shifts. The white powder inside the gloves weakened my fingernails. The Back had a weird, food-like smell which clung to our clothes.

On Thursday nights, when I worked late, I often had to help take out the trash. We went into a service elevator with doors that were pulled shut with a rope. It took us downstairs and opened to the dumpsters. This job introduced me to the Grease Bucket, which would get dumped out by the trash. It was disgusting, all yellowish and smelly. It explained why I sometimes had stomach problems from the food, and would have to blot the food with a napkin (just like my dad would do) until my stomach recovered.

Part of the Campus Center got converted into a pub, which was supposed to be a combination bar, grill, pool hall, and meeting place. Dances were often held there, even though it was too small for that. The voting for the new pub's name was on the 14th and 15th of September. One name suggested was Study, so you could tell your parents "I'm going to Study" without lying. Unfortunately, the name for the new pub was voted to be The Pub. We laughed because lack of creativity won.

That was the golden year of ice cream. We had it all the time, and in various flavors: the new chocolate chip cookie dough, Elephant Tracks, even peanut butter chocolate, which was delicious but rare. I now knew where the ice cream freezer was, and would go there when I had my early dinner. I had my pick of full bins, so my preferred choices would not be empty or ice cream soup before I could get to them.

The fries were always good, but Muskie fries were even better, and wonderfully salty. You could eat either kind without ketchup. These hamburgers had real meat in them, not vile soy, and weren't served on bread but on buns, contrary to high school and junior high burgers. I even learned to love the cheeseburgers. Wisconsin has this way of making even cheese-haters start to like some kinds of cheese.

Remember James? Now for more details. He had very German features and a long nose. I sometimes spotted him working after my shift on Thursday. His job was sweeping. I looked at his time card one day to learn his name. I would pass him on the way to or from Food Service, and we would glance at each other. I never quite got up the courage to say hi, I guess. Oh well, he never said it, either.

Carl and Dirk were freshman roommates who worked in Food Service on a different shift. Nancy pointed at them once and told me that one had a crush on me. I thought she meant Carl--whom I preferred--but she meant Dirk. Dirk was just as much a know-it-all as Shawn, able to talk you into believing anything, and I eventually considered him obnoxious. He wasn't even cute. So it's just as well that Nancy said,

Nancy told me once that Dirk would try to tell the football players how to do their jobs. Now these guys had been in there far longer than freshman Dirk had, yet they seemed to take his commandeering with amused, patient faces. But Nancy said she expected any day now that they would grab him and put him through the washer along with the dishes.

The freshmen in my shift kept complaining about Freshman Studies. They said it had nothing to do with their major, so they shouldn't have to take it. I thought a liberal arts education meant a little of everything, not just what applied to your major. It's for expanding your mind, not just teaching you how to make money.

In a cold room in the basement of Old Main, my Fiction Writing class met with Terry on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My final grade was a satisfying A-, just what a writer could wish for. I wondered why Terry loved Flannery O’Connor so much, since she seemed to write such dark stuff. We moved the desks so they were in a circle, making us much more comfortable talking to each other and reading our work. We kept writing journals.

One assignment was to write an argument between two people. I based mine on stories I dreamed up in junior high, about Shyeskol, a Martian with a high-pitched voice, and Brian, the Earthling she loved--but he thought she was weird. I used much of the Martian culture I had already developed over the years. The class seemed to love it, and Terry especially loved my simple, beautiful-sounding alien names.

We soon had to sit down and write for an hour, just to see what we came up with. I sat down at the computer at home for much longer than an hour, and came up with "Brian and Shyeskol." It was 25 pages, double-spaced. Terry brought it to my suite to return it to me after he graded it. He stood outside the door with an umbrella, and said, "This took me soooooo long to read, but I really enjoyed it."

I first wrote my now-published story "Bedlam Castle" over the summer. I had dreamed parts of it, only the characters were the cast of Are You Being Served? and Colin's part was played by Spooner. I don't know why it was Spooner; I never had a crush on him or anything. But that's why Colin ended up average-looking. I threw in ghosts to explain things that only made sense in a dream, such as clothes changing color. I typed the story with the name "Bedlam" in maybe a day or two. Now, in Fiction, I needed to submit stories to be workshopped, so this became one of them.

While home for Thanksgiving Break, I typed a revision into my parents' computer. It was about 20 pages, double-spaced, and I believe I had to print up 20 copies for everybody in the class. That took forever, and then I had to separate the pages and remove the edges. (It was a dot matrix printer with continuous feed.) I submitted it to the class, and people joked that it was so long it kept them up half the night. But they loved the story, and had all sorts of praises. Rachel loved the humor. One person, a man who was probably in his thirties or forties, loved that the focus and culmination was a kiss and not sex, unlike so many other stories and movies these days. I took the copies back, along with the comments people had scribbled in the margins, and revised the story in my word processor. It became much stronger. I also changed the title to "Bedlam Castle" to address a concern that "Bedlam" didn't fit.

I worked as quickly as possible, but revising and then printing the story took far longer than I expected. I had to get it ready for finals, which were shortly after Thanksgiving Break, but I also had other classes. The night before the final day of class, I stayed up most of the night working on it. Then on the day of the final, which was to be held in Terry's house on Prof Row, I was still working on it! I forget if I went to lunch. The 1991 Brother word processor printed dreadfully slow, and ink cartridges lasted for maybe 20 pages. The time for the final arrived, and I was still printing out the revised copy for the teacher. I ran out of ink at least once. The final was just the class sitting in the teacher's house and chatting, but we were supposed to turn in our revised stories as well, so this could not wait. One of my classmates called me and said, "Where are you?"

When I finally got to the final and gave the story to Terry, I could sit down and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Terry had been a punk rocker in his youth, and played us a record. I still remember the chorus to one song: "I want to kill for kicks!" His punk persona was different from the Terry we knew, a soft-spoken, even-tempered man.

My friends giggled at the way he would talk slowly in class and that he was actually using a textbook this year. But I liked him, and really missed him the next year when he moved and someone else took his place. One day freshman year, Pearl had been sick and didn't go to class. He came all the way to her room to find out how she was. Ever after that, people joked that he was her "man."

We would listen to tapes of samples of the various types of music which appeared in each period of history. We discovered that music notation wasn't established until sometime in the Middle Ages, so it's difficult to pinpoint just what songs sounded like before then. Love songs were as prevalent then as now. I learned to love plainchant and Baroque. We read about Hildegard of Bingen and the music she wrote. We learned a few other things about culture as they related to music, and that one woman intellectual in the eighteenth century wrote under a male penname so she'd be taken seriously. She was one of those philosopher-types, such as Voltaire, which were around in those days. I don't remember what her penname was. We learned that modern-day S-- and other Wisconsin towns of similar or larger size were like the big and small towns and cities of the nineteenth century, with "its symphony association, organized by merchants, bankers, government officials, lawyers, and other members of the middle class" (page 243, Listen, by Joseph Kerman). We learned that Franz Liszt was like a modern rock star: His concerts drew crowds, women wanted to tear his clothes off, he broke piano strings as he played (much like modern rock stars sometimes smash guitars), and he had a "flamboyant" lifestyle and affairs with noblewomen.

In the class with me were Tara, Pearl and Shawn. I loved having them all in there with me, seeing them three out of the five weekday mornings and then being able to discuss the class with them. Pearl and I loved hearing Chopin's Etude in C Minor, Op. 10, No. 12, because David Meece had written a song, "This Time," with this song incorporated into it. It's also used in an episode of Abbot and Costello's comedy show.

On Wednesday and Friday mornings, my Sophomore Honors class met with Bill. I read all the books, except for one. Some I liked more than others; I loved the memoirs of a former slave, the diaries of women pioneers, and The Crucible. I thought Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold was terribly boring. It's funny to occasionally find praises of it in newspapers and books. I thought Gretel Ehrlich was obsessed with sex, since she saw phallic symbols everywhere in the Wyoming landscape.

Once, probably around October 16, Bill brought in two black students. They spoke to us about the black experience, since nobody in the class was black. They said something that oftentimes a young black man would go to a white girlfriend and ask her for money all the time, knowing full well that he couldn't do this with a black girlfriend because she would act like he was nuts for asking. From what they said, black women sounded far more confident than many white women, and I envied that. I also mentioned that I saw The Hood in the Muskie, and sat there with tears in my eyes, blown away by what I had seen. I had no clue that such things happened in this country. Our guests nodded and smiled, confirming that yes, this movie was showing things the way they really were.

I was especially entranced by the sad story of Abelard and Héloise. I wished the book had gone into more detail on it, or even reprinted some of their famed letters. I mentioned the story to Pearl, and that I had been told Héloise was twelve. Pearl said she'd been told she was sixteen. In 1999, I heard she was seventeen. So how old was she, anyway?

I asked Marc and/or Julie to help me get my remaining stuff back from Peter. Julie brought me to the Pub, and had me sit next to Marc, a Zeta. I said that I hoped Peter would be civil to me this time. Peter came over from the Zeta suite, and sat on Marc's other side. Marc started mediating between us so I could find out what happened to my stuff. These weren't gifts to Peter, but things that had been forgotten or left. Then, on his own volition, Peter got up, and came over to talk to me himself. I was surprised, and a little anxious: how would he speak? He began with a "hi," then proceeded with some explanations about where my stuff was. He was so nice to me! He smiled, even, at certain things. I felt so much more at ease then, like I didn't have to put on an act in front of him anymore. I wondered if he'd even be willing to consider coming to church again, though I didn't say anything about it. (I was most concerned about his spiritual well-being.)

September 22 at 8pm, an ESP entertainer performed at Roanoke. The two-hour season premiere of Quantum Leap--the one in which Sam leaps into Lee Harvey Oswald--was on at the same time, so I had to tape it. It seemed like everybody on campus watched that episode. Maybe that's why the Bradley Building was only half-full.

The ESP guy stood on the stage, blindfolded. Once, we had to write answers to personal questions on a piece of paper given to us earlier. The questions were: funniest moment, number with special meaning for you, question for the ESP guy, nickname used at some time, and name. I put down, "10 people stuffed in a car, 17, should I minor in German, NJ, Nyssa J."

Later, Pearl, who wanted to go to England that winter, found that, according to this guy, she would go to England. Tara found that she would get married in about a year, year and a half. (He was almost right: she would meet her man senior year, and then marry him in 1997 or 1998.) At first, the guy just seemed to be going down our row and in our little group of friends, which was really strange.

No, I didn't minor in German. I mentioned before that Ruth and I didn't get along. I don't know why; teachers usually liked me. That semester's German class was still To Be Announced in September. Every other class I've ever had that was TBA, we all just waited until we got further instructions from the Registrar's Office. So that's what I did this time. But Ruth told me off for it, saying I should have called and asked her what was going on. What the heck? She also ripped on me for other things she didn't like about me. I guess she just didn't like shy people who were not go-getters. She loved another girl in the class who was in all sorts of things, outgoing and ambitious, majoring probably in Business or Marketing. (I was a writer from an easygoing middle-class family. Many of my relatives were farmers, and my brothers ended up in the working class. My big ambition was to write well enough to be published.) I remembered her getting snippy at least once when I asked why pronunciation for a word (German or French) differed from what I'd previously been taught. I remembered her getting mad at me for choosing not to do an optional activity because I didn't want to. So I decided I could not keep taking German with this woman, and wished I didn't have to take Humanities with her as well. At least I got an A.

Those of us without roommates had to meet together in Krueger Lounge on the evening of the 24th. There, RA's told us we had to get roommates or pay the extra price for a single room. Rachel asked me if I wanted to move over to Krueger, but I looked at her as if she were nuts. It was too cushy to live in the suites: no quiet hours, no visiting hours, no freshmen jumping up and down on the third floor all night long. As the others divided up, somebody suggested I room with Clarissa. She moved into my room.

Clarissa liked playing with my new TV's remote. She'd flip here and there just long enough to hear a word or two on each station, and hear what sorts of weird and funny sentences she could put together. We would both laugh at some of the things she came up with. She'd grown up on a dairy farm. We both liked to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and wish the writers would put Riker and Troi back together. We watched Monty Python and the Black Adder series every week on PBS. We loved to watch Mystery Science Theater: 3000. One night, Joel made a lemur hand puppet dance as the robots sang about Joey the Lemur. I grabbed my Santa dog, which Shawn named Woof Woof, and began shaking him up and down like he was the lemur hand puppet. I began singing, "Lemur the Lemur, da-da-da-da-da!" This became a common joke between us. We had many such jokes. We also shared faith (she was conservative UCC). Other people had expected us, two quiet people, to sit like bumps on a log.

One day in September, she told me she went to the RC-CAB office with some guy to get something. (RC-CAB was the Campus Activities Board, which they were both part of.) I later told her about Peter, and pointed out his picture in the 1992 yearbook. She cried, "I went to the RC-CAB office with that guy!" Small world--er, campus. (This sort of thing happens a lot in Wisconsin, too. For example, I met a guy in S-- years later who had no connection to Roanoke, but knew Peter.)

I often watched MTV, which still played videos in those days. They had Rock Blocks, Alternative Nation and 120 Minutes. I had already heard some alternative, but this opened up the floodgates. Not only did I discover alternative, but I also discovered industrial and modern metal: Nine Inch Nails, Alice In Chains, Danzig. I still listened to WIXX, the Green Bay Top-40 station, but techno and alternative were my favorites.

On FOX, one of the new batch of shows was The Heights, a show about a group of twentysomethings with a band. There were a bunch of shows in the 1992-1993 season that were copying the newest trend; I believe this one was youth shows or 90210 or Melrose Place (which in those days was about twentysomethings, not psychos). Heights didn’t appeal to me, but the theme song, one of an album of songs which were made for the show, became omnipresent on the radio for a while: "How Do You Talk to an Angel." All the songs on the album were written and performed by the actors/band members, at least according to the premise. I don't know if the actors and actresses did their own playing, or if a back-up band did. The show's theme song did a lot better than the show itself did: it was canceled by the end of the season. But everybody loved the song--except me. I thought it was slow. It got played so much that I couldn't stand it anymore.

Probably early sophomore year, Darryl said Wisconsin PBS stations would stop showing Dr. Who because the BBC had stopped making it. (Though, as we know now, it was only on hiatus, to return in 2004 or 2005.) Life without my weekly fix of Dr. Who? What a silly reason to drop it! As if PBS never showed old programs. Wisconsin PBS stations were weird: If one showed something, they all did, and if one stopped showing something, they all stopped. They all seemed to be linked together. They would even show hockey games! A PBS station (typically highbrow) showing hockey??????

Catherine loved to yell greetings to Pearl and me and anyone else who was with us, no matter if it was across campus or across the cafeteria or even just a couple feet away. She never cared how many people turned to look at us. She would say: "HI PEAR-L! HI NYSSA!" We were supposed to yell back to her, but only Pearl yelled "HI CATH-E-RINE!" I just said, "Hi Catherine," which was louder than usual for me but nowhere near a yell.

We now had a new soft serve ice cream machine in the cafeteria. Chocolate went fast, which was a shame for a chocoholic like me. So that I could get what I wanted, I would get my cone with the rest of my meal, then set it in a plastic bowl. It would melt a little before I could eat it, and I had to push it back into the cone with my spoon, but at least I had chocolate.

Top-40 songs have always been stuck on one theme: love. That's one reason why I loved Christian music, which was far more creative with themes. I now discovered that alternative music was, as well. Alternative in those days seemed to be obsessed with death. For example, Ween's "Push th' Little Daisies," Belly's "Feed the Tree," and Julian Cope's "Vegetation": "Well I didn't really want to kill myself, But there just was no other way. Now I wait for you, darling, in my graveyard bed, And each day brings you closer to me and my vegetation."

There was often Bingo in the cafeteria during dinner, with various prizes, such as microwave popcorn. You'd find plastic bowls of Cheerios at every table; they were the chips. They were also a popular missile. A student would pull numbers out of a big tub, and call them over a mike. One popular number was, of course, O-69.

Steve, the guy with the Jesus hair, was a Zeta. He was part of a cool group of Zetas, who included Darryl and Marc. He was a chocoholic like me, and proud of it. He said he was "a first-year senior, which means I'll be here forever." (He graduated after my junior year.) He wanted to go to Hollywood after graduation and try his hand at filmmaking; he ended up going back to Chicago instead, where he was from. I had no idea at the time that he and Catherine were part of a local group that belonged to the medieval re-creation group called the SCA, or that my future husband knew him. A few years later, Pearl almost passed him on the street, and he was seneschal (chairman) of the Chicago SCA group. Later on, he went to Japan.

I called Steve the Head of the Psychos. I often said that weird people seemed to congregate in Roanoke--a good thing, by the way. I don't remember now what all he did, but I do remember these things: He would scuttle along in his chair in the cafeteria instead of getting up and walking around. In the cafeteria one day, after the lunch crowd left, he sent a paper football and a paper frog flying through and over various formations of salt shaker pyramids, stacks, and goal posts.

We all had fun with Pearl's new crutches. We called them "crunches," which a child had called them. We used them as rifles, weapons, something to lean on, or whatever. Pearl would just laugh. We also played with her scooter. We longed to have our own scooters, and would drive Pearl's whenever possible. Catherine, who was short and light, would often get up and stand on a little ledge on the back of the scooter while Pearl drove.

Like the rest of us, Pearl had brought stuffed animals to college: One was Pingo, her favorite teddy bear from babyhood, now all beaten up. Another was Mona, a yellow dinosaur with a big body and long neck. Pearl called her Mona because, when squeezed, she let out a moan that was supposed to be a growl or roar. One of Mona's pals was a stegosaurus named Spike. Mona sometimes called people on the phone and roared at them. Spike had a girlfriend, Sara's dinosaur Peg.

Since I usually found people in Pearl's room, I called it Party Central. When her friends weren't over, roommate Cindy's were. Cindy's friends were a mix of Band people and high school friends (she lived in S--). So these friends were often from other colleges. One was Ralph Z., who loved to make "manly grunts" like Tim on the sitcom Home Improvement.

Darryl, Marc, Steve, Julie, and their friends soon noticed that I didn't cuss. I never said anything about it, but they saw it bothered me. So in place of cuss words, they said "bunnies." This was a lot funnier than cuss words, so they often ended up laughing instead of feeling bad. Just imagine hearing a manly guy like Marc say, "What the bunnies are they doing?" or "It really made me feel like bunnies." Pearl said it showed they respected me.

This group soon became secretly known in our group as the Octagon. Somebody noticed all the little love affairs and crushes going on in the group, and made a diagram showing who liked whom. It ended up having eight lines, so it was called the Octagon. I call them that here because it's far more convenient than saying, "Darryl, Julie, Marc, Steve, etc." all the time.

Carlon was a good friend of Anna's. They were both black Pentecostals, and both very vocal about their faith. They were also both greatly respected, even by non-Christians, perhaps because of their integrity and sincerity. I loved to listen to the two of them, sitting together at lunch on Sundays after church, talking about faith-related things. They'd give each other advice, or talk about what they'd learned.

Shawn's older brother and younger sister both had cystic fibrosis (CF), so they were both expected to die early deaths. This was a heavy weight on Shawn's heart. His brother had already had a bad turn, while his sister was still healthy. His brother looked Latino, and his sister was blonde. Shawn joked that somebody once saw them together and said, "You guys all look nothing alike!"

Lunch was usually a bit more hectic, with people coming and going all the time because of classes. But some of the Group would go to dinner around 4:30, the rest around 5 or later, and we would all sit there until long past 6. We often stayed longer than anyone else. Thanks to frequent outbursts of loud, raucous laughter and the Cup Game, we called ourselves the Loudest Table. We were obnoxious, yes, but it was fun. Once when I wasn't there, a hall director came over and asked the Group to please not play their Cup Game because it was too loud. But that didn't stop us from playing it at other times, probably usually late into dinner or weekend lunch when we were practically alone.

Pearl learned the Cup Game from a high school friend and passed it on to us. This is how she described it to me: "The cup game had a clapping/slapping-the-table rhythm you had to follow [in time to Rich Mullins' song "Screen Door on a Submarine"], and you had to turn the cup over and pass it (to the right?) at the right time. It was loud, and confusing if you didn't concentrate."

One night, as Rachel, Pearl, Carol and I left the cafeteria, the moon was full and beautiful, with a star beside it. Rachel looked at it and said, "Oh, wow, look at the moon!" Somehow, this became a recitation, each of us with a part. I don't remember my part; maybe I made a weird noise from my childhood repertoire. It went like this:

College dorm doors usually had dry-erase message boards, along with various decorations. Some had muscle-men pin-ups; some had feminine decorations; some had paper animals; some had sayings such as "Drink till he's cute"; one had a picture of a glowering Calvin (from "Calvin and Hobbes") peeing. My friends liked to write witty sayings and draw symbol-signatures (an amoeba for Rachel, a beetle for me) on each others' boards.

The Group, the Octagon, and Shawn liked to spill salt onto the table and draw pictures in it with our fingers. We also used an ID card like a razorblade to cut lines out of the salt as if it were cocaine. (None of us ever did cocaine, by the way.) We also liked to stack salt and pepper shakers into pyramids or other formations. I played Dalek wars with Darryl, using salt shakers. After all, they looked just like Daleks.

Clarissa took "Church, Sect and Cult" during fall semester. One section of the textbook mentioned Nazarenes. (I discovered through this book that there were actually two denominations calling themselves Nazarenes. Mine was officially the Church of the Nazarene. The other one I've never encountered; I believe it was simply, Nazarene. Their views were very different from ours, not mainstream.) One day, the teacher lectured on my denomination. He said he knew a Nazarene, and that they weren't supposed to wear makeup, shorts, pants or short hair on women, etc. etc.--making us sound more like the Pentecostals I'd known in high school. Clarissa said her roommate was Nazarene and not at all like that. When she told me, I was glad. In fact, the only Nazarenes like this I had ever heard of, lived in Southern Indiana and the South. West Coast Nazarene preachers preached in their shirt sleeves, while East Coast preachers were more conservative--but only the Southern ones had

In the warmer months of the year, I sometimes sat in a certain tree by the lagoon to get away from everything. I had to do more leaning than sitting in the little nook where the branches started, and hold myself in place with my feet, since it wasn't much of a seat. But it was a good place to read, a private place out of sight of nearby Muehlmeier. No geese hissed at me there because they preferred to stay near the water. I privately called it My Tree. Sometimes I read Lit class assignments there, and sometimes I read novels, such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian.

Kids used to tease me for being weird. Now, I realized that "normal" could be boring. I did not want to be like anyone else in personality or in style. I didn't even like jeans or sweatshirts, which most people consider comfortable. I liked weird people, such as Steve and Rachel, so why should I try to be normal?