I’m calling “Uncle!” on Day 3. Better today than yesterday, I clicked out 1473 new words today. Got the kids set up in the dorm, and they’ve discovered those squeaky clean, fun new roommates are not quite what they thought they’d be, but they have found a way to carve out private time for themselves. In fact, tomorrow, maybe I’ll go back and share some of those roommate adventures with the audience. The kids shouldn’t have to suffer alone, should they?

But those roommates not instrumental to the story. I won’t terror bomb the dormitory–they didn’t do that much in the late 70s anyway. I’ll just let them whither away on the page like the dried up LOVE wallpaper they’re slated to become.

(For those not in the know, likely to be most of you, my dormitory suite in the co-ed version of the Ollendingy(1) Towers at Ohio State University in the Fall of 1978 had a quarter wall of lovely green, blue, and turquoise LOVE wallpaper (think the famous seventies LOVE sculpture, and imagine that repeated from floor to ten-twelve foot ceiling and five- six feet wide) in the study room. The Ollendingy Tower configuration was an outer ring of sleeping rooms, one set of bunk beds on either side of the door; a central study suite with four modular desks and bookshelves; four rooms like this augmented with a common bathroom area for the suite; finished with a central room filled with industrial living room furniture. You had three other roommates, 12 suitemates, and this was repeated around a central elevator, emergency stair hallway for approximately 24 floors. Weekends resulted in interesting concoctions of body fluids in the stairwells. I ran the stairs up and down my twelve flights because it was quicker than the elevators–even with the weekend additions. Our suite had the Resident Assistant room, so we only had three rooms to share the bathroom and common living area. I hit is off with two suitemates in the middle room. I had the room next to the bathroom and had a series of roommates who were rarely there, and the third room was the party room. They’re the ones who poked 100 Little Kings bottles into the living room light latticework. OK. That’s way more than you cared to know–I’m shutting down for the night.)

Oh, and if you’re wondering, this story is not autobiographical. Some of the scenic details are familiar to me, but this is not my story.
(1) Ollendingy was our perversion for Ollentangy. Our dormitory towers where nestled on the banks of the Ollentangy River in Columbus. If you ever get a TV shot looking out the open end of the Ohio State football stadium, that tall tower was my dormitory.