MY FIRST YEAR at the University of Chicago was made even more challenging by being in what had to be the worst dorm on campus.  But that spring, I managed somehow to get #7 on the housing lottery for the next fall.  Perhaps the only redeeming feature of my first year dorm was the fact that there was a dining hall on the main floor.  Aside from that, the dreary 60s architectural style, tiny shared rooms and group showers didn’t appeal to me.

In 1980, the dorms at U of C were spread out across campus and in the neighboring Hyde Park neighborhood and with #7 on the housing lottery, the dorm world was pretty much my oyster.  By far the most desirable (which the university has since sold) was the Shoreland – a former luxury 12-story hotel, built in the 1920s, with views of Lake Michigan from most of the rooms.  Many were actually suites and were quite spacious with private bathrooms and a full kitchen on each floor. The drawback (there had to be a drawback) was that it was a brisk 25-minute walk to campus, which could be quite brutal in the Chicago winter.  The university ran shuttle busses as well, but they never really seemed to be at the right time.

So I opted for a suite in the eleventh floor Bradbury House (each floor was house) with a high altitude view of Lake Michigan.  I had two roommates and we decided to put all the beds in the bedroom, leaving us a more spacious and civilized living room – complete with fireplace and three windows facing east. It had wall-to-wall carpeting and a couch and easy chairs.  It was really nice by U of C standards, which at the time were dreadfully low.

Within a few days we met our next-door neighbors, Vicky and Ellinor, who were the same year as me.  Although the number of students in the college wasn’t that big, I hadn’t met either of them in my first year so it was nice to make new friends.  Vicky was interested in Asian studies and Ellinor was interested in biology.  I was about to switch my major from Biology to English (having fought a losing battle with organic chemistry) but we still had a lot in common.  I was also interested in ecology and birdwatching, passions that Ellinor also shared. To the extent in fact that she had a pet bird, a cockatiel named Miss Sophie, who was supposed to be a secret in the pet-free dorm, despite the bird’s penchant for high-pitched whistles and shrieks.

We spent a lot of time that year hanging out, tromping through the wooded isle in Jackson Park – a favorite birdwatching spot – and living the life of typical second-year students. Our personalities fit well together and we could just as easily talk about everyday topics, or in typical U of C fashion segue into intellectual discussions that would take us late into the night. By the end of the year, I had started to make the transition to English major and had gotten an apartment off campus with some friends, so we parted ways and promised to stay in touch and I had no reason to believe that we wouldn’t.

That summer however, I got a call from my father telling me he had multiple myeloma, a particularly difficult to treat blood cancer, and within a few months he was dead. His death triggered a series of events, including litigation, a suicide (his second wife’s) and a legal juggernaut which involved me, my mother, my father’s estate, and his second wife’s sister.  It was very complicated, and my mother was in no shape to handle it, so that fell to me.  Eventually, lack of money and general anxiety led me to the decision to withdraw from the college, and move back to New York to attend to my mother’s legal and health battles.

What it meant of course was that my year in Bradbury House with Ellinor was my last “normal” year at college with classes, dorms, concerts and all the other activities of a typical student.  The next year was filled with threatening notes from the bursar, nasty letters and phone calls from lawyers in New York, and rambling, often savage, telephone calls with my mother.  So I do look back on that last U of C year through the fond and forgiving lens of nostalgia.

Ellinor and I lost touch, and it wasn’t until a few years later that I got a call (remember this was pre-internet) from her saying she’d be in New York for a night and could we get together.  We had one of those wonderful pick-up-where-we-left-off reunions and as I recall went to dinner and walked around the upper west side together until it was time for us both to go home. It was great to catch up and I learned that since she graduated she had gone on to get a doctorate in evolutionary biology.  Her particular area of focus was a group of species of snail found only in Africa’s oldest, deepest lake.

As somebody whose dreams and ambitions had been derailed by fate, it was nice to meet somebody who had stayed on course and was doing what she wanted to.  It was also nice – this being the mid-1980s – to meet somebody who wasn’t in investment banking or finance, which is what it seemed a lot of my friends at the time were doing, or at least aspiring to.

We parted, and promised to stay in touch, which we did sporadically and with the invention of email it became a bit easier.  She lived in the Netherlands for a while on a canal boat, while on the faculty at the University of Amsterdam. After much time spent in the field and meeting Jon, she wound up in London, working at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. We found each other on Facebook and kept track of our comings and goings and when she heard that I had been in London for a week in November of 2009, she expressed chagrin that we had missed each other.  I told her not to worry because I’d be coming back in two weeks with Mary Elizabeth and Charlotte.

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