ROOMMATE EXTRAORDINAIRE
I had over a dozen roommates during the four years I was a student at BYU. All of them added some kind of positive influence to my life and enhanced my relationship experiences in various ways. But it was a young woman I met when I first arrived at BYU that made the biggest impact on me.
Sue actually lived upstairs from me during our freshman year, however we became friends and decided to be roommates the next year…and the next. That was a choice that had so many great outcomes.
This roommate was president of our dorm. I was a counselor in the Relief Society. That gave us double opportunity to be together because our dorm mother was the Relief Society President and included the two of us as partners, not only in helping the girls build friendships at our dorm home but also helping them build a sisterhood at Church.
Even though I had seven sisters, they were all much older than I was. Therefore, we didn’t have the kind of sister connection many sisters who are close in age have. I found that kind of bond with this new friend. I remember lying in bed one night while we were talking to each other and thinking how much I loved Sue! This was the “sister” experience I had never had.
We had different majors. Nevertheless, our interests were very similar, so it was easy to discuss a lot of different topics related to our classes. We even took a couple of required classes together. Each knew the other’s student number and would check exam scores, etc., if we were near the other’s classroom. We had similar ideas of keeping house, doing the cooking responsibilities, and how to have fun. It was a symbiotic relationship in a lot of ways.
Neither of us was even remotely athletic, but we were game to try the same Women’s Physical Fitness class since we had to have a PE credit to graduate. What a hoot as we bounced up and down doing jumping jacks, learned the basics of soccer, and devised a routine to the theme from Peter Gunn, a popular television series at the time!
I’ll never forget how we got through the required biology class we took together by making up pretend “Headlines” for every remotely funny incident that happened each period. “Coed Penned to Death Following Ballpoint Malfunction” was one of the attention-grabbing titles after another student’s pen came apart and the tiny spring zinged her neck. We would fall over laughing about that one every time either of us repeated the headline.
It was Sue who introduced me to the local folk trio The Three D’s who were so popular at BYU during the 60’s. We just about wore out the LP “The Soul of Poetry” playing it over and over nearly every day. My memories were still so vibrant of the classical poetry set to the contemporary folk music of the 3 D’s, I even went online a few years ago and found the CD with all the original selections including Jabberwock by Lewis Carroll and Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. What reminiscences of those days at B-15 Wymount Terrace.
We shared our family histories with each other and pretty much knew the names of parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews and significant others—including the idiosyncrasies and the sad experiences, too. We felt like we were related.
When we graduated in 1968 and each began a different road in life, Sue and I kept in touch with news over the years until it finally became only an exchange at Christmas and birthdays. Still, we were friendly and interested in each other in spite of the years slipping by. But when her son called a couple of years ago just after Christmas and said he had seen my latest holiday greeting to her, I was truly saddened when he said he thought I would like to know Sue had passed before Thanksgiving.
It was a friendship that long outlived my college career. I miss her!
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