Happy old friends

My first year of college, I was lucky enough to have a fantastic roommate, Brooke. She is one of those people whom everyone loves--a genuinely cool, interesting, nice person with a magnetic personality. I don't know if we ever would have become friends if we hadn't shared a room, but we got along great. She turned me on to Sex and the City and coppery lipstick. We rearranged the furniture fairly regularly. We had parties where we tried to turn our beds into couches. One weekend I came back to our room at around two a.m. to find a raging game of drunken strip poker taking place. Some guy I had never met before was sitting butt naked on my desk chair. It turned out that she had never met him before either.


I had another great friend my first year of college, Toby. Toby lived one floor above Brooke and me, and I don't remember how we became friends, but I do remember that I was her first friend at college--not because she had trouble making friends but because we went to college in her hometown and so she spent most of her time with her high school friends. Toby is an amazing actor and director and writer. Once when we were walking back from a play she had been in, she was happy and excited and it was snowing and the middle of the night and she just leapt off a porch in a graceful swan dive right into a bank of snow. Brooke and I followed, slightly less gracefully. The three of us were great friends.


The three of us didn't do everything together, but they fill my memories. Before Brooke transferred, the three of us all came back to school after winter break several weeks before classes started again. We spent most of January wandering around in the snow, going to movies, helping Brooke pack, drinking wine and apple cider and amaretto sours, sleeping, going to coffee shops, and generally being depressed at the fact that Brooke was leaving.


Our sophomore year, I got a single room and Brooke and Toby were roommates, two floors up. But Brooke transferred to a new school halfway through the year. As a going-away present, we gave her a framed photo of the three of us, a great photo that unfortunately I do not have scanned. We stayed in touch, but it faded. At this point Brooke and I talk maybe twice a year. Toby and I stayed friends, but we each became more wrapped up in other friends as college proceeded. I think of Brooke and Toby as freshman- and sophomore-year friends. But also, lifetime friends.