Nearly thirty years ago, I was a freshman in college.
It’s hard to fathom now, but things were a bit different back then.
In order to keep track of who was whom and in particular who was entitled to eat in the freshman dining hall instead of one of the other dining halls, each student was given a sticker to attach to his or her student ID card. The way that the stickers were assigned was simplicity itself: there was a roll of stickers, numbers 1 through 1600 or so; one for every member of the class, and the first time someone went to the dining hall, the checker would look up their name in a big book and discover whether or not they should be there. If so, then the checker would peel off the next sticker on the roll and put it on your ID card, and then she (it was always a woman, as far as I can remember) would write down the number next to your name.
Every subsequent trip to the dining hall, you would flash your card to the checker, and she would read off the number and then check off the corresponding box on an enormous matrix that covered most of the desk in front of her, and make a tick mark in a pad to count how many students had eaten at that meal.
This ritual was repeated every semester. The stickers needed to be replaced every few months. They were color-coded, and so at some point your color would be wrong and it would be time to get a new sticker. The lines at the checker could be quite lengthy during those periods, except when there were two or more checkers working in parallel–some handing out new stickers, and the others checking off students who already had their stickers.
I was a chronic early riser. Early to bed and early to rise was always my way, which means that I missed a lot of interesting things that happened in the small hours of the morning, but I also got the treat of having the campus almost all to myself very morning.
I was one of the few regulars at breakfast every morning. I rarely missed breakfast, and I was rarely even late. In contrast, I think that many of my classmates weren’t even aware that breakfast was served.
When I say that I was usually early at breakfast, I mean this in the most literal way. The first semester I got sticker number 0002. The second semester, sticker 0003. I never discovered who got the lower-numbered stickers, despite trying to sneak peaks at the cards of the other early birds. Initially I figured that whoever got their number before me on the first day of the semester would probably be another early riser, but I never found them. Eventually I formed a different hypothesis: the first number or two on each roll was damaged by being near the edge, and therefore maybe I really did get the first number.
It was strange eating alone in such a cavernous hall–and cavernous is the only want to describe it, with fifty-foot ceilings, dark walnut paneling, lit poorly by chandeliers constructed from the countless antlers of creatures slain by Teddy Roosevelt, according to the local legend. I was never really alone, but I often had a row or two of long tables between myself and the next person. Most of us early birds weren’t terribly social. In fact, some of them seemed positively antisocial, and I left those people alone, but sometimes I would try to join people who made eye contact and gave me the sense that they wanted someone to talk to, unless they were already muttering to themselves.
I didn’t make the cut with a lot of my potential conversation partners. If it was pretty clear that they preferred to eat alone–or at least not with me–then I wouldn’t force myself on them again. Because I’ve always been sort of a gawky, awkward nerd, and never a particularly scintillating conversationalist, this turned out to be a fairly high percentage of the people on whom I inflicted myself.
There was one woman who was somewhat social, and I ended up sitting with her fairly often–maybe once every week or two. She was from a town that I’d never heard of that was only an hour or so away from the town where I grew up, so we almost knew some of the same places, but not quite. The malls I went to were not the malls she went to.
She must have been one of the smallest people in our class–perhaps she was a precocious fourteen-year-old or something like that. I never asked; “Why are you so petite?” seems like one of those questions that is never appropriate. She was pre-med, and I imagined her as a doctor some time in the future, doing rounds in a hospital, barely tall enough to see her patients over the edge of their beds.
She wore puffy sweaters and knit scarves, as were the fashion of the time, and no time before or since. She often wore a skirt, which was not the fashion of the time.
We didn’t develop a close friendship and I don’t think I saw her more than a few times outside of the dining hall.
A few weeks, I got my class report–a large book where my classmates list their accomplishments over the last few decades (a very impressive set of accomplishments), accompanied by photos both from our freshman facebook and recent lives.
I started to leaf through it, looking up old friends. The photos and reminiscences of people I’d forgotten I’d ever known brought back many memories.
I wondered what had happened to the petite pre-med with whom I’d shared so many breakfasts, and tried to look her up, but then I realized that despite my clear memory of how the checkers handed out the stickers for our IDs–a procedure that I only saw twice–I couldn’t remember any part of her name, or even clearly remember what she looked like.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that I went into computer science instead of political science.
