My birthday, and remembering college

My birthday is coming up. Seems like only yesterday that I was celebrating my 50th birthday by watching the implosion of Three Rivers Stadium in Feb. 2001 from high above the North Side of Pittsburgh, at a friend's house in Fineview. It was such a fun party and breathtaking to watch the old stadium stand motionless for seconds after the charges were set, then collapse into a heap of concrete and rebar moments later. Considering that taxpayers spent a lot of money for its replacement, and that Three Rivers itself wasn't even paid off by the time it was taken down, perhaps it wasn't such a great day for celebration. But it was also my birthday. And any day you get a chance to drink champagne on a Sunday morning in February is a good day.
I've been feeling that I have not had much to say lately, but look, here I already have a whole paragraph and the start of another. College seems like a hundred years ago but one of the things I remember is that it was a time when calling long distance was a big deal (on my rotary dial phone) and that writing letters posted to the U.S. Postal Service was a weekly .. I don't think duty is exactly the right word but that's the one I'm going to use. I wrote weekly to my parents, my sister Elizabeth, friends I had met who had moved on to different schools, my Dad's mother. Quite frequently I looked at the sheet of paper thinking I had nothing to say and before I knew it, pages would be filled.
Looking back, it seems hard to believe that, as a young woman in college, I would have nothing to write about. It was one of the most interesting and exciting and best times of my life. Perhaps the best.
It didn't start out all that well, what with me in Morrill Tower at Ohio State in a pod with 11 other very young women. The two women who were my roomates in our pod (four bunkbeds but only three occupied) didn't make it past, respectively, the first quarter and the first year. Maybe that's part of what throwing a bunch of young strangers together in close quarters is all about. Weeding out the partiers and those who are destined to become pregnant.
Sophomore year I bunked with one new roommate, from Rumson, N.J. and two from freshman year. Our bathroom mirror on North Campus read "Free the Nosker Four." We never did find out what that meant. Nancy, the Rumson girl, and I became good friends but she moved on to art school in Philly after one year at OSU. The other two, Mary Jo and Donna, found an apartment together after our sophomore year. And I quit. For a year or so. Then went back and my last two years, after finally choosing a major and meeting someone who is still a friend today, were tremendous. I got a job, stayed on campus during the summer, had an apartment and desperately did not want to leave after graduation in March 1978 (yikes! 31 years ago).
Things I remember about those last two years. Donna and Mary Jo throw a party at their new apartment, somewhere near Chittenden, I drink too much at their housewarming party and a football player carries me upstairs to a bedroom, where I pass out. Seeing "Star Wars" at the theater on High Street, near Lane Avenue and being totally awed by the opening scene as the starship zooms into view. Sitting on a High Street curb on a summer evening with my friend Heidi, watching people go by, talking about everything and nothing. Reading the Citizen Journal, a failing afternoon Scripps Howard paper (perhaps that should have been my cue to choose a major other than journalism), at my secretarial job in the department of anthropology. Reading papers by professors in said department as I typed them and wondering why they had no grasp of the English language. Sitting by Mirror Lake, reading, and realizing that across the "lake" someone was taking my picture. Juggling at a Renaissance festival outside Ohio Union. Watching soap operas inside Ohio Union (whose cafeteria line, in retrospect, seemed a lot like the one in "Animal House". Working at Quisno's (not the chain) Sub Shop and taking salt pills when it was hot and chopping hot yellow peppers to put on the subs. Seeing an old boyfriend who always made my heart stop come in to same shop and smile at me and me not being able to even acknowledge him. Another boyfriend and I cocooned away in my apartment during a fierce January or February snowstorm (back when we had real winters!)
Look at me. Sentences and paragraphs later. And I remember it all like it was yesterday. Of course. We all do.
Present day. Its been cold and white for what now seems like forever and for what seems likely to continue to be forever. But the cold world is not devoid of beauty. The picture at the start of this entry is of the sunset from my neighborhood from the past weekend.