This weekend I’m off to Charleston, SC, for a much-anticipated reunion with my college housemates. In our senior year of college, the six of us lived in a squalid centuries-old house in Amherst that has since been torn down and replaced with a bank. The house was a nightmare: Fat mice in the closets, feral cats in the garage, and absolutely no counter space in the kitchen. We had a landlady named Marjorie Babb, a shrewy lady in her 70s who watched us with Mr. Furley-like moral scrutiny. “Babb’s Babies,” we were. (I just coined that term, but this weekend, I will campaign to make it stick.)
Despite now being scattered across the country, we convene semi-regularly. If it’s only a partial gathering, we’ll call an absent person and concoct a ruse to fool the person into believing something ridiculous. This has long stopped working effectively. “I don’t believe you,” one roommate told me last year when we called from Disney Land, saying that I had been chosen to star in that evening’s light parade. “Because whenever we get together, we call each other on the phone, and we lie!”
Yes, it’s true. I’m not sure why we do this, because we’re all such nice people. Except for me, of course, which is how I earned my nickname – “Old Salty.” I really can’t recall how earned this nickname. I think it has something to do with pirates and beer.
Lately, all of our reunions have been for our weddings. Everyone has been married except for me. Rather than sit around and wait for that to happen, we’re converging from all over the country to engage in ritualistic embarrassment by telling stories from our days of boozy debauchment. I’ll be back next week, and I promise to share the best one on this site.
