Snow Fall

As snow falls on this chilly, grey Friday morning I think about my first year at New York University.  At the merest hint of any sort of precipitation my mother would get on the phone, from Philadelphia, and call my dorm room at around 7am to tell me to bring an umbrella because it was raining/snowing/sleeting there.

My brother attended college but he lived at home while doing so.  My mother did not quite understand what dorm life was like and how, in a suite of 5 people, a 7am phone call is not appreciated by anyone -- especially 5 young men smart enough to get into NYU and who can look out the window before leaving and notice the weather.  Well, that's an overstatement.  Not all of us who lived in that room had the awareness to look out a window.  I have a feeling some still haven't really looked out.

The Texan who was a close friend for many years, and who I have now fallen out of contact with, had many odd proclivities.  When I would go home or away for a weekend, I would come back to the dorm room to find all my movies posters turned around and re-pinned to the walls.  Posters included: Slaves of New York, True Romance and Interview With the Vampire.  I would also find my bed unmade.  Turns out the Texan liked to bunker down in my camp while I was gone too.  Odd.

The strangest thing he ever did was spend a weekend homeless.  I'm still not sure why.  He did grow up in the rich city of Austin.  His parents seemed very hands-on but I could tell from overhearing phone calls that he very much wanted to please them.  He was a film major and I'm sure there are reels and reels of me acting out scripts in our dorm room and around the city somewhere out there...

Anyway, he spent a weekend homeless, wandering the streets of NYC.  He slept in Grand Central.  He would occasionally make phone calls to the room to his other friends to keep them aware of his status.  The Texan very much wanted to be noticed and wanted.  He wanted to incite concern and hysteria and have people beg him to come back to the safe confines of our little concrete rooms on 10th and Broadway.  I don't remember when he actually relented but he did come home smelly, dirty and exhausted eventually.

He had his own relationship with the Island to work out.

Snowy days make remind me of those crazy, innocent years we lived shielded in our dorm rooms downtown.  And of my mother at home worrying that I'd go out and get cold and wet; become a victim to the elements.