First Days

We registered for classes in the gymnasium by appointment time. We stood in lines for each subject we wanted to take. When we got to the front, we would tell the person at the desk the section number we wanted and he or she would hand us a computer punch card. Then we would move to the next line. For $195 you could take as many or as few classes as you liked for the quarter. It was a bargain.

Sometimes though, when you asked for a class, there were no more cards which meant the class was full. Some people had gotten into the habit of trading. Take a card from a class at a popular time and then try to trade it for something you wanted. "I have an eight o'clock Intro to Sociology," someone would yell waving a blue punch card in the air. Then the horse trading would begin. The cards had no names attached, so they were completely transferable. By the end of the day, I had made a schedule and took my stack of cards to a table where they were run through a computer. I'd registered for twenty-one hours, seven classes. I would go to them all and drop the two I didn't like that first week. I learned quickly.

The apartment complex I lived in wasn't a primary residence for students, but there were a number of students there. I lived on the second floor across from some fellows from my high school including Mick who had been on my volleyball team at the j.c. It felt good to have some friends around.

At the last minute that summer, Vladi had decided to come up, too. I don't know how he did it. He was enrolled in a private school and didn't like it, and suddenly he was at the university. He had gotten a place on the opposite side of town, but we had a Cytology class together mid-day. The class was in a large lecture hall with about a hundred students. Vladi and I had the lab in the afternoon, so we usually took off for lunch.

One day, Mick asked me if I wanted to play basketball in one of the intramural leagues.

"Sure," I said, "do I have to sign up?"

"Well, you already are. . . sort of. We're playing in a dorm league for the dorm Stony lives in."

Stony was a friend of Mick's from high school who was the school's star shooter. I'd never really liked the guy, but that was years ago now. Maybe he'd changed.

"We're going to play as two guys who live in the dorm. They've already signed up. Our first game is Wednesday night."