Periodically, when I am bored, I will use google street maps to look up places I used to live. Yesterday, I looked up the dump I lived in while a college student and found this:
Holy crap! My house is gone! I actually got a bit choked up. I figured it would always be there and some day I'd drive my kids by it and say, "Kids......hasn't your Mom really moved up in the world since her college days?"
Yeah, I never did that. None of my kids had any interest in attending my (and my spouse's) alma mater. I did take two of them on college visits there, but we never made it off campus. Too late now! I was able to find one photo of the old place, boarded up and obviously ready for the wrecking ball. Honestly it pretty much looks the same as when I lived there in 1984-85:
It's the house on the left, thankfully. The one on the right had about a dozen creepy guys living in it. Our house had five bedrooms, plus a tiny attic bedroom. My room was the window on the middle right side. We had one shower for the six of us and an extra toilet off of the kitchen. We also had a basement with a washer and dryer. It was a quick walk to campus and I think I paid $140/month, plus we split the phone bill. Not bad!
Living in dumps is a rite of passage for most college kids. When we've driven through my son's college campus on the way to his current dorm, we pass through some sketchy areas. I always say, "How do kids live here??" And then my husband looks at me and says, "Who ARE you? There was a time when we didn't care where we lived either!" I beg to differ..........my house was a palace compared to some of these places.
Living there was like MTV's 'The Real World' before there was such a thing. We were six strangers who chose to live together and found out what happened when people stopped being polite and started getting real. We had an overweight grad student who worked on the school newspaper and was sort of the 'house mom,' a homely accounting student with the most super irritating boyfriend, a girl who was a night student and a bank teller during the day and went home to PA every weekend, a nursing student whose goal was to sleep with every member of the soccer team, and a psychology student who only ate apples and popcorn. And me. I was the normal one.
We rarely did anything together as a house, but I did go to parties or the bars with the psychology and nursing majors and I even got reconnected with the psychology student a few years back when I found out she was living in the next town over from me via facebook. I remember a particularly odd dinner we had with our landlord (a weird dude who was about 40) who brought over some type of bird that he had shot (pheasant?) I just ate the mashed potatoes. I also remember the 'house mom' wanting to have a Christmas tree decorating party. None of us could stand the accounting girl's boyfriend (who was ALWAYS there), so we made it a point to say it was a party for 'just us girls.' The boyfriend got pissed and wouldn't even 'allow' (yes, I used that word) the girl to stay for our party. He picked her up and they left. We proceeded to talk about them for the rest of the night!
Honestly, this boyfriend was a cross between Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe and Overly Paranoid Rob Lowe, if you are familiar with those DirecTV commercials. I can't tell you how many times I would come out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me after a shower, and he'd just be standing there outside his girlfriend's bedroom (she always locked her door, so he would wait for her to get back). One day I blew up and told him I was sick and tired of him ALWAYS being there! He never looked me in the eye after that and I think the house mom told him he had to wait on the main floor from then on.
I will always remember the good times though........it's where I got the call for my first real job and where I lived for a few months after I started the job, the first place I parked the first car I ever bought, where my boyfriend-now-husband sent me love letters while he was living in NYC for his co-op job, where I got dressed for my college graduation, where some of my best college friends hung out with me.
Gone, but not forgotten.
Holy crap! My house is gone! I actually got a bit choked up. I figured it would always be there and some day I'd drive my kids by it and say, "Kids......hasn't your Mom really moved up in the world since her college days?"
Yeah, I never did that. None of my kids had any interest in attending my (and my spouse's) alma mater. I did take two of them on college visits there, but we never made it off campus. Too late now! I was able to find one photo of the old place, boarded up and obviously ready for the wrecking ball. Honestly it pretty much looks the same as when I lived there in 1984-85:
It's the house on the left, thankfully. The one on the right had about a dozen creepy guys living in it. Our house had five bedrooms, plus a tiny attic bedroom. My room was the window on the middle right side. We had one shower for the six of us and an extra toilet off of the kitchen. We also had a basement with a washer and dryer. It was a quick walk to campus and I think I paid $140/month, plus we split the phone bill. Not bad!
Living in dumps is a rite of passage for most college kids. When we've driven through my son's college campus on the way to his current dorm, we pass through some sketchy areas. I always say, "How do kids live here??" And then my husband looks at me and says, "Who ARE you? There was a time when we didn't care where we lived either!" I beg to differ..........my house was a palace compared to some of these places.
Living there was like MTV's 'The Real World' before there was such a thing. We were six strangers who chose to live together and found out what happened when people stopped being polite and started getting real. We had an overweight grad student who worked on the school newspaper and was sort of the 'house mom,' a homely accounting student with the most super irritating boyfriend, a girl who was a night student and a bank teller during the day and went home to PA every weekend, a nursing student whose goal was to sleep with every member of the soccer team, and a psychology student who only ate apples and popcorn. And me. I was the normal one.
We rarely did anything together as a house, but I did go to parties or the bars with the psychology and nursing majors and I even got reconnected with the psychology student a few years back when I found out she was living in the next town over from me via facebook. I remember a particularly odd dinner we had with our landlord (a weird dude who was about 40) who brought over some type of bird that he had shot (pheasant?) I just ate the mashed potatoes. I also remember the 'house mom' wanting to have a Christmas tree decorating party. None of us could stand the accounting girl's boyfriend (who was ALWAYS there), so we made it a point to say it was a party for 'just us girls.' The boyfriend got pissed and wouldn't even 'allow' (yes, I used that word) the girl to stay for our party. He picked her up and they left. We proceeded to talk about them for the rest of the night!
Honestly, this boyfriend was a cross between Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe and Overly Paranoid Rob Lowe, if you are familiar with those DirecTV commercials. I can't tell you how many times I would come out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me after a shower, and he'd just be standing there outside his girlfriend's bedroom (she always locked her door, so he would wait for her to get back). One day I blew up and told him I was sick and tired of him ALWAYS being there! He never looked me in the eye after that and I think the house mom told him he had to wait on the main floor from then on.
I will always remember the good times though........it's where I got the call for my first real job and where I lived for a few months after I started the job, the first place I parked the first car I ever bought, where my boyfriend-now-husband sent me love letters while he was living in NYC for his co-op job, where I got dressed for my college graduation, where some of my best college friends hung out with me.
Gone, but not forgotten.
Heh. . . I'm tempted to ask, how normal were you really, if those were your housemates? But I won't. . .
ReplyDeleteI mostly lived on-campus when I was in college, but when I was in grad school, I lived in a run-down house about 5 blocks off-campus, with big ol' frat houses all around us. Four bedrooms, 13 guys (they'd had 18 guys the year before I moved in). Some real, uh, unique personalities in that group; some of whom have become life-long friends. . .
I haven't had one of my old houses 'cease to be', but the last time I was back to my hometown Up North, the house I'd grown up in had been pretty drastically remodeled, to the point of unrecognizability. And my old junior high school was a grassy park. . .
All my college friends had already made housing arrangements for our senior year by the time I finally landed a campus job and was ready to stop being a commuter from my parents' home that summer. It's not like I picked my housemates!
DeleteMy junior high is completely remodeled and unrecognizable, but at least it's still there! That would be sad!
I did a trip down memory lane last year, and one of my homes as a single gal was a grassy yard.
ReplyDeleteWas it a shock? I'm still sort of disappointed about this.
DeleteOh, Bijoux, that's such a nice story. It's really a shock when these places from our past are taken away. They be monuments to us, but to others they're just in the way.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your "Real World" descriptions. It sounded much more interesting than anything MTV has to offer. I wonder what ever became of the creepy boyfriend...?
I know they got married, but lost touch with everyone else after a few years, so the gossip ended. I used to love Real World when it was about their lives and the work they all had to do together. Then it just became about booze and orgies....zzzzzzzz
DeleteOMG, what a faaaaaaaabulous memoir! I could see everything you explained so clearly, as if I had been there.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it something how houses hold such sentimental memories? I remember driving past the house I grew up in when I first moved back to Philly in 2001 and being extremely emotional. It was like watching my childhood on a movie screen. I got very teary-eyed.
And speaking of Google street maps, I found my mothers house that she grew up in in Germantown. And it was so weird to look at it now compared to how it looked when she was a kid. The whole neighborhood turned really trashy. Sad.
Grrrreat post, my friend. Enjoyed it!
X
I've driven by my childhood home three times. It's very bizarre and everything seems so much smaller than when I was a kid (like the yard).
DeleteMy oldest sometimes sees patients in the 'hood' which is where my dad grew up. I got the address from him and she drove by his old house and took a picture. I was so happy to see it for the first time!
Actually, that sounds like a lot of fun! The haunted house my husband lived in during college is now completely gone. Just a piece of land. I looked up the apartment complex I lived in my last year in college (lived in dorms before that) and it was a dump like it was in college. The funny thing is, the reason I looked it up was because I was telling someone about the roaches that were there...the reviews were filled with people talking about the roaches in the apartments. They were saying management was claiming they'd brought the roaches (and bed bugs with them). I was thinking, "Um...there were roaches there 20 years ago, so I'm guessing these people didn't bring them with them!"
ReplyDeleteIt really was fun, and probably better than living with friends. That is hilarious about the apt. reviews. Don't roaches live a long time? Maybe it's the same ones!!!
DeleteTwo places I lived in as a kid are completely gone - one burned down and one whole neighborhood was leveled to make way for a new neighborhood. It makes me sad. I don't like to look them up.
ReplyDeleteSo here's the real question - was the irritating boyfriend also as cute as Rob Lowe?
Good lord, NO! Have you seen those commercials???
DeleteSounds like you definitely had some interesting experiences living there. I lived at home during college so I never got to experience pheasant or creepy people standing outside bathroom doors. Come to think of it, that's probably a good thing.
ReplyDeleteI can do you one better on the whole googling thing. My road trip to Dayton in 2011 culminated in me standing on the doorstep of the house I lived in from 1977-1980. Obviously it was still standing, though much changed. That was a pretty wild experience.
I had read that post when you mentioned Dayton in another post a while ago. What a great experience. The daughter of the original owner of our former house stopped by one time, maybe 10 years ago. She had lived there from 1966-1979. She was quite touched that we showed her around.
DeleteNow makes me curious about the house I grew up in back in Pennsylvania if it is still standing; will have to google and see. Sounded like a good house for what you needed at the time. That would be weird with the boyfriend. Wonder if she ever got wise about his behavior and moved on. Its funny, with us looking to rent here, and there is a college in town, so many rentals specifically listed for qualifications "no college students".
ReplyDeletebetty
I heard they got married in the 80's, but that's all I know. I'm sure students put a lot of wear and tear on a house!
DeleteI love blogs like this! Chock full of memories! It is so cool to think of you in college living with roomates and going to parties. Such a different side of you then I picture from your current blogs. Thanks so much for sharing!
ReplyDeleteCestlavie22.wordpress.com
Ok, now I'm worried....I hope you don't think of me as a mom blogger!! Hahahaha.......but yeah, I know I could probably be your mom!
DeleteI LIVED for the parties in college! Sigma Nu were my boyz!
Aww. It is sad that the house is no longer there. I am super sentimental about that kind of stuff. Such a huge, important time in your life. My first apartment is about 45 minutes from where I live now and in a fun little city. Sometimes when my kids and I are visiting that city I drive by my old apartment and show the kids were I lived on my own for the very first time. Good memories. I would be sad if it was knocked down.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I saw it online instead of driving by and being totally confused.
DeleteYou can go back again, but only in time eh?
ReplyDeleteLife is full of memories. Hopefully, most are good ones.
DeleteIt's true that when you're young you live in a string of crummy places and just think of it as normal, because you simply can't run to anything better. In fact I lived in crummy places until I was 34, putting cash towards buying a flat rather than paying more rent for somewhere a bit swisher. My old childhood home still exists, but it looks incredibly small now!
ReplyDeleteIt's always strange to see childhood places through our adult eyes.
DeleteI used Google Maps to do the same thing! I looked up the house I grew up in and while the house looked pretty much the same, what caught me off guard was how different the park that is located right across the street looked so different.
ReplyDeleteIt can definitely be shocking!
Delete