Fresh from watching my first Truman Capote play, Holiday Memories, I too, would like to write about some memories I haven’t really thought about in a longtime.
My freshman year of undergrad, I lived in the backwoods of the University in Baits II dorms on North Campus (“Where the hell are those?” many students ask.) with an eclectic bunch of undergrads, mostly music majors and engineers. My suitemate was a guy named Sameer…a big, portly fellow with a fro.
Sameer
I bought a winter jacket earlier that fall—beige and frankly, drab. But I’ve never really been fashionable. It was my first real winter here in Ann Arbor that year, ’03-’04; while I was born in the U.S., my family and I moved to India when I was young, and so, I don’t really remember spending a winter here.
Sameer, of half Indian and half West Indian blood, hailed from the sunny, warm islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Winter really wasn’t for him. I had never heard of long johns until Sameer told me he wore them. He used to keep his space heater on full blast. And because we never really closed the door to our suite rooms, the heat eventually migrated over to my room. I had to keep the window open sometimes.
Sameer and I never fought verbally or physically, but snow was a new form of artillery we had never really encountered before. Here is a picture taken by Sameer of being struck sweetly in our first snowball fight. I still don’t know how or why I struck that pose.
Snowball Fight
The only hilly patches of land in the entire lower peninsula of this state are probably on North Campus, and we ‘borrowed’ trays from the Bursley (or ‘The Burlodge’) dining hall, far from the eyes of the famous Sexy Gramps. (We didn’t want to get on his bad side. He served us our food.) We used those trays to sled down the hills and sidewalks to get to lunch. Fridays used to be ‘Dessert Fridays’—eat no real food, only dessert.
Dessert Fridays
I have spent every winter since that one in Ann Arbor. Although I haven’t gone sledding or been in a snowball fight in years, I still love winter in Michigan, gray skies, slush and all. I think winter makes Michigan Michigan. Winter really just changes the number of items of clothing I wear—two socks, underwear, shorts, and two t-shirts in the summer versus two socks, long johns, underwear, pants, two t-shirts, a sweater, a coat, two gloves, and sometimes a beanie, in winter. There’s still so much going on around town in winter here in Ann Arbor…seriously. Sameer, though, will only visit in summer.
