Roommates!

Last night I hung out with Susannah Forde. Susannah was my freshman year roommate at Penn State. Here's the thing about freshmen and their roommates, they are randomly selected from the mix of students in your graduation year, and the most you could have in common is that you are both becoming Nittany Lions. Unless, of course, you are amongst the exceptions. The exceptions could be the few who, scared of the random pick and being left feeling alone, hand-pick their roommate from either a choice of best friends who are coming along or even the jerk they never liked but at least they knew that jerk. The exception, as in my case, could also be the athletes. Yes, when I left for Penn State as a naive freshman, I was a student athlete recruited to play softball. This meant I was assigned to the nicer, more centrally located dorms (a disadvantage, I felt, in many ways because we were not with all of the other freshmen) and your random selection of roommate was exponentially reduced to other freshmen on your team. By random selection of freshmen softball players I was put with Susannah Forde and it turned out, in my case, random selection was a much better result than hand-picking a roommate ever could have been.

I remember when we met the first time and we instantly liked each other. She was a Southerner with just a twang of proof in her voice. I was the first Jew she had ever met in her life. And so it went! I really liked Susannah and she became a really good friend. I remember having fun with her.
Several months later I was cut from that softball team and I let it destroy me. As a result I pushed Susannah away due to a scarred ego. We did keep in touch once we were no longer roommates, but only to a degree.


Years passed since college, I had healed and laughed at myself from the softball debacle and, several times, I had searched for Susannah via the internet. The internet, however, had gotten me nowhere until along came facebook. Through the networking site I found Susannah and thanks to her work travel to Philly we were able to hang out the other night.

We had so much fun! Despite not hanging out in the last 15 years, we picked up right where we left off sharing stories of our lives, our husbands, our children. We ate a little, drank some, and laughed a lot.

I regret, still, letting the game I was unsure I even wanted to play in college corrupt a blossoming friendship, but am grateful we could both put it behind us in order to move on and share a bunch of laughs!!