A thick manila envelope arrives with the mail. It's all multi-colored ink and smiley faces and hearts and shiny metallic stickers. Postmark is from Northfield, Minnesota, and the handwriting is so very familiar.
Sophomore Year: Ken, Tor, Adam and I are living in this quad on the corner of third Musser. It's an awful dormitory, tiny rooms, barren walls, all battered and weathered with time. But we are living together by choice instead of some random freshman room draw. We're the All I-90 room, starting with me on the far left, picking up Adam in Pullman, Tor in Missoula, then continuing south and west until we get to Ken in Rapid City.
Interesting thing about Musser, other than the fact that it's this lousy box-like reject dorm from the sixties with a twin -- Meyers -- halfway across campus is that in order to cram more rooms into the box, there are five single rooms per floor, two on each end, and an extra for the RA. One of the few dorms on campus where you could find a single. Linda Gates lived in the no-bigger-than-a-walk-in-closet immediately across the hall from us.
(that's one of the ooh, so shocking things for some parents when they show up at Carleton for the first time, that crazy mixed-sex floor thing, girls and boys living together, a world gone crazy)
I can so easily get sidetracked here, so easily remember how good it was for the four of us to have Linda so close, how good it was for her, too, going through some difficult times that we wouldn't know about until later. Aaron lived down the hall from us, too, who I'd room with again for both of my senior years, who would eventually become the best man at my wedding. A lot of good came from that year on Musser.
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