My College Roommate

I think about my old college roommate a lot. For the longest time I felt sorry for her for getting me as a roommate. She was like someone from a sweet novel or TV show. She came from a little town in the mountains of Virginia and her mother had attended the same college. She had been a cheerleader and was voted "Best-All-Around" and was probably class president. She had a boyfriend that was a year or two older that was in a Virginia college and they exchanged letters almost every day. She was always buying stamps from me. I can't remember why I had so many stamps. I don't think I ever wrote to anyone. On the other hand, that would explain why I had so many stamps.

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I usually just gave her stamps, but if I was out, she would leave change and a note in my desk. And I always needed change to feed the Pepsi machine. She was the most polite and sweet and neat person. She didn't have a single flaw. She talked in her sleep sometimes and instead of being annoying, I thought it was hilarious. Sometimes she said random things and sometimes she practiced French.

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In the picture above, she is the one on top of my old mail jeep. I'm the one in red. I once brought a La-Z-Boy recliner to school in that jeep and she and I, alone, took that thing up three flights of stairs to our room. That sealed the deal for our room to be the hangout. Everyone wanted to sit in that thing. All the rooms had for sitting were wooden desk chairs and beds. Sometimes someone would wander in after a tough day of classes and ask, "Can I just sit here for a while?" I could also get by with leaving my jeep parked there for a little while because I think campus security thought it was a pizza delivery vehicle.

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For the first several months I pretty much spent all of my free time with my high school boyfriend who lived in the dorm next to ours. I broke up with him just after Thanksgiving and we finally started to get to know each other. Although I felt all grown up, I was not mature enough to realize that I could have anything in common with someone so different from me.

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We were like night and day as far as life experience went. She was a non-drinking virgin that had never even tried drugs. She had early classes and studied all the time or was writing letters. I slept in, went to class and then went to a bar or arcade or was out throwing frisbee or watching "M*A*S*H" in the student lounge. And oddly, although she seemed so classy middle class and I probably seemed sort of white trash, I had lots of money and she was always broke. She was uncomfortable borrowing money from me, so I started borrowing a lot of her clothes and told her that made us even. And I really liked her clothes.

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Once the HS boyfriend was out of the picture I became more of a part of campus life and got to know all the friends she had made. We were a motley group that went to dinner together every night and did some special game/dinner nights in the dorm kitchen. I was the only one with a car and we would all pile into my jeep and go to the mall sometimes. Oddly, two of our group were girls I knew from high school but hadn't really realized were there before. They didn't join us for dinner as often and would donate their meal cards to us for the "special dinners" where you couldn't get seconds.

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Once my roommate and I relaxed around each other, we discovered we shared the same crazy sense of humor. We laughed all the time and a few times I even talked her into joining us at the bar for Wednesday night nickel beer night where we played drinking games. When she lost, instead of drinking, she donated a nickel.

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I felt really bad once our friends started looking at dorms for our sophomore year because I knew I wouldn't be coming back. I doubt she was surprised when I told her. I went back for the Halloween party the next year and she seemed happy with her new roommate. I don't think I ever saw her after that. I hope she's happy.

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Before I started this post, I googled her old high school boyfriend and it looks like they are still married and living in their old hometown. I wrote her number down. I think I'll giver her a call.