Us... Freshman year

So I ran across a series of posts on Confessions of a CF Husband about how he and his wife met. I don’t even know them, but it was still fun to read their story. Some of you already know our story, and others of you may not care. But I will write it anyways, because I miss my lovely bride while she is away in Michigan. Plus, being 1900 miles away, she can’t smack me if I embarrass her. My memory for this kind of thing is awful, and what I do remember has likely been clouded by the passage of time. So if I get something wrong, Paige will just have to correct the story in the comments. I think most of our college roommates also check the blog occasionally, so feel free to chime in with some color commentary!

Let’s see, where to start? I was the only child from my family who went to Dordt College. I am not sure why. Maybe because I felt like that is what the “responsible” oldest child should do. Maybe because I am a weee bit anti-social, and wanted to get away from everyone I knew, even though new social situations absolutely terrify me. Probably a combination of both. But off I went to the cornfields of Iowa for an education. When I left, I distinctly recall the friendly harassment of my good friend John: “You’ll go off and find yourself some good Dutch girl to marry!” And he proved to be right…

The first thing I remember about Paige is that she was “the man hater” in the freshman girl’s dorm. She’ll vehemently deny that, but this is my first memory. But first, let’s take a little detour.

I didn’t know anyone at Dordt when I went, so I got assigned a roommate at random. My first room assignment was somehow rigged by three professor’s kids, who managed to get into the sophomore dorm as freshman, and needed a forth roommate. I guess that was me. They were weird guys. Goth, before it was in. I know can be a little odd at times… but apparently not “professor’s kid” odd.

My parents quickly managed to get me paired with another random stranger in the freshman dorm, Mike. Mike is from Montana, and since I didn’t know anyone else at Dordt, I just started hanging out with the other Montana guys as well. Mike is a very cool guy, who I don’t think I have talked to in 5 years, because he never checks email, and I hate talking on phones (Mike… get online more!) Mike’s cousin is Andra, who was also a freshman. Andra somehow became friends with Paige (that part of the story has slipped my mind.) Thus when Mike and I would go say hi to Andra, we would run across Paige.

Paige had a loft in her room that apparently became the graffiti stop for any freshman girl going through a bitter breakup. Scrawled in locations around the loft beams were various messages expressing the antipathy of jilted girls towards their former boyfriends, and by extension men in general. I am sure I will be accused of exaggerating (and I probably am) but this was the impression it left on us guys. Let’s just say the loft didn’t exactly communicate the message that she was looking for a relationship with anyone of the male persuasion. I do believe that I discovered part of the old loft once, up in the top of the Meyer barn, that validated my story of the man-hating sentiments scrawled on the 2x4s. Anyways, I’m not sure I could have even told you her name freshman year, but I do know I was mildly afraid of her.

Paige and Andra are in the back row.


Photographic evidence of the infamous loft. If you look closely on the back post, it says "Love sucks." And that was one of the milder ones...


We literally do not have one picture in our albums of me freshman year. I avoided cameras like the plague.