I did fairly well in college. After an initial struggle with a bit of homesickness, I made the transition to living on my own fairly smoothly. Of course, I had a lot of help. I wasn’t the best with laundry, but I was skilled at getting myself invited to home-cooked meals. I worried about grades and academic performance, but my worries kept my nose to the grindstone and I earned good grades. What I didn’t do well in college during my freshman year was roommates.

I grew up in a home with four boys. I was used to sharing a room. I was, in those days, a good sleeper and could sleep through a lot of noise. I could sleep with the lights on. I was an early riser, but I was skilled at getting up quietly an getting out of the room without waking my roommate. And, my work study joy was opening the college library, so I had a place to go and a place to do my work.

What I wasn’t good at was talking with my roommates. I seemed to lack the experience and interest to carry on meaningful conversations with them. At the time I blamed my roommates. They seemed to have rather narrow interests for the most part, at least from my perspective.

My first roommate was a football player. That meant that he had arrived a couple a weeks ahead of me and had had the room to himself for that time. Then I moved in. I got the side of the room he assigned, not that I needed much space, or even cared much about which side of the room. He pretty much had come to college to play football. He was taking classes, and we even had one class that we shared, but I was into homework and earning grades, things that weren’t high on his priority list. I didn’t follow college or professional football and I barely knew the names of the teams. I knew almost nothing about the technical aspects of the game. I played in the college band, so I went to every home football game to march at half time, and I cheered for our team, but wasn’t very good for the post-game analysis of my roommate. After football season, his major interest seemed to be beer, which was against the rules in our dormitory and for which I was underage and fearful of getting caught and thrown out of school. I was determined not to mess up, so when he and his friends decided that our room was a perfect place for late night beer parties, I studied up on the process for changing roommates.

My second roommate was at least known to me. I had met him at church camp, and although I didn’t know him well, we seemed to like the same kinds of music and he had a decent stereo system. We had a few more topics about which to converse, such as memories of church camp, movies that we had seen, and even a couple of classes that we shared. It seemed at the time to be a much better match than roommate number one. But if beer in the room had made me nervous with my first roommate, marijuana in the room pretty much kept me from sleeping. I was sure that the cops would burst into the room and arrest us at any moment. I started spending less and less time in the room in the hope that at least I wouldn’t be there when the big bust occurred.

Roommate number three was a quirky fellow, but he was quiet and we had some common friends. He didn’t seem to be interested in substance abuse as an avocation and he kept reasonable hours. He could be a bit compulsive, especially when he got an idea in his head. I had access to a car and he did not, which meant that he cooked up several schemes, including a springtime trip to Yellowstone National Park that involved my car and my gas money. We made it through the year.

I found the money for a private room without roommates for my sophomore and junior years of college. Marriage then provided me with an excellent roommate with whom I seem to be compatible.

I have observed, however, that aging and especially certain health conditions can land one with assigned roommates, however. I visit int he hospital and in nursing homes enough to know that dealing with roommates that one would never have chosen can be a challenge of recovery from major illness.

So I have been trying to expand my repertoire of available topics for conversation. I’m assuming that not all roommates would be comfortable discussing the nuances of sacrificial theology or my predictions about church politics in the 21st century. I know that I am able to bore most people when I get on the topic of canoes and kayaks and wooden boat construction in general. I visit enough people in their homes to know that I’m a bit quirky in my choice of magazines. Last time I checked, there were only two other subscribers to “Wooden Canoe” in the state of South Dakota and both of them live east river. I’m thinking that “Messing About in Boats” probably doesn’t send too many copies to our zip code, either. “Atlantic Coastal Kayaker” doesn’t show up in any of the waiting rooms of doctors offices in town.

So I’ve been checking out the NCAA bracket as we move into March Madness so that I can at least know which teams are still in the tournament and which have been eliminated. This wasn’t UWyo’s year, I guess.

What has really got me worried is that I don’t watch television and unlike my years in college when there was a television in the lounge down the hall, there is a television in every hospital and nursing home room these days. With my luck, I’ll probably get a roommate who turns the thing on.

I wonder if I could memories the location of all of the circuit breakers in the various institutions of our community.

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