Remembering 30 Years Ago, When I Was a College Freshman

Having just finished the first session for outlining a new episode of The Connor Wars, and about to continue proofreading my novel, a musing flashed in my mind. It was 30 years ago that I was beginning the home stretch of my first semester at the University of Maryland.

The campus still had that mildewy smell as a result of having endured Hurricane David a couple of months before (that was interesting…being that at the time the University staunchly refused to cancel classes for weather). I was well into German class, had dropped my physics class — though for some peculiar reason I kept the lab, I was skipping Calculus because it was just going over the same stuff I learned in high school, though I attended the labs where there actual work and quizzes were being had, and in History 101, I had a T.A. that praised my writing–which gave me the confidence (though not yet the skill) to believe I could write, that I was literate.

I think about how none of the current crop of basketball players were born. Shoot, they weren’t even born by the time I’d graduated. As it is, Maryland Women’s Head Basketball Coach, Brenda Frese, was only in 3rd grade. (If the player thing didn’t make me feel old, that certainly does.)

Emotionally, I was trying to correct the callow weaknesses that mid-terms had pointed out. Also, I was trying to find my way socially on campus–which isn’t such an easy thing when you live 45-minutes away. I hadn’t yet become a fixture in the temporary commuters lounge (actually the Colony Ballroom Lounge on the second floor of the Student Union…which was then still officially named the Student Union). My peeps were the members of the Maryland Star Trek Association (MSTA). Think Revenge of the Nerds meets The Big Bang Theory meets The Guild meets (what with it being the late 70s) Californication, and you sort of get the idea. DnD, SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and more were elements of the MSTA group. (Since I’m a writer, people are surprised that I wasn’t into the DnD and similar role-playing games. I dunno. I just missed it. I’ve never played.)

I told DLT#2, Tess[[daggerto]]–who is now having her own college experience, that it’s a time that I treasure. I am so happy that I had it…and I’m equally happy that I don’t have to do it again. It was a rich time that either poured or reinforced the foundations of everything I’ve done afterwards, but it was also a time where youth got bonked on the head by the skillet of adulthood.

Naïve little me didn’t know it then in the fall of 1979, but life was going to get interesting.