Flying Along with Desmond and Molly

The other day I was working on a quilt--for hours--and listening to the White Album, the Beatles album that came out my freshman year of college.  That music was everywhere then.  We used to jump on our dorm beds to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."

I began to wonder what in hell happened to the girls I met that year, who lived in the same dorm hall:  Betsy,  Rockie, Barbara, Nancy.  I'm in touch with my roommate of that year every Christmas, but these other people had become phantoms.

I got out the 1969 UCSB yearbook and looked at our group picture:



My then-friends, all in the front row:  Nancy (third from left), Rockie, Betsy, and  Barbara on the far right.  I'm in the back row, third from right, wearing a scratchy wool Villager dress

Why is everyone wearing plaid? Why are we all wearing skirts, for that matter?  But then that was was a dorm with door-less "date rooms," where at least one person had to have his/her feet on the floor at all times.  We also had a housemother and a curfew and lock-out.

I got so wound up on the White Album, flying on caffeine from a bar of TJ's chocolate,  that I turned on the computer and looked for one of these girls on Facebook, the only one whose married name I knew:  Betsy.  She responded:

"OMG Liz Randal!  Where have you been?"  Like I just stepped out for a minute and forgot to come back.

Her former roommate, Rockie, saw that on FB, and jumped into the conversation.

So!  They're still funny, irreverent, and Democrats.  Rockie even quilts.  Barbara's a portfolio manager in LA,  Rockie's living in New Mexico, Betsy in San Jose, and Nancy is lost somewhere. 

UCSB in 1969

That White-Album winter, we endured forty days and forty nights of rain.  Our bicycles rusted sitting out under eucalyptus trees. We were cooped up in rooms with highly polished linoleum floors and heavy doors that slammed at all hours.  Every bathroom had a can of solvent to get beach tar off our feet.  I transferred to Berkeley my junior year and lost touch.

It's been comforting to find out that these friends went on to become Regular People.  Part of me has always felt that I was less accomplished, surely, than that group of girls with diamond-sharp minds and big dreams.  Not so.   None is Shakespeare or a Princeton professor or a Bill Gates. Most married and had children.  Some were employed.  Some got graduate degrees.  Most seem to be enjoying their lives.

And anyway, who cares?  At 63, it's good enough just to be alive and finding some fun (okay, joy occasionally) in each day.  You have to live to be a certain age to appreciate that.  And this life is so much more restful.

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