Yesterday's Men

September, 1981.  I arrived at UC Davis, my residence for the next two and a half years.  Up to that time I had never been away from home for more than a few weeks, and never by myself for more than a couple of days.  When I opened the door to my dorm room, there was a pile of clothes on the bed under the window, but I didn't see my roommate for a couple of more days.  The first person I met was from directly across the hallway.  Long straight hair, glasses, three days growth on his face, Birkenstocks without socks, a fan of the Grateful Dead, from Encino, CA, home of the valley girl and "the mall".

Little did I know that Casey and I were to become fast friends.  We went off campus for dinner one night and ended up at a Chinese restaurant, which was the first time had ever had Chinese food.  We both laughed about my inability to use chop sticks and my wanting to know if you really ordered one from column A and two from column B as I had heard on some television show.  The biggest laugh was my trying to make sense of the designs on the tables, which looked like the head of a bull.  Armed with the new knowledge that I liked Chinese food, I wanted to know what the designs meant, so I asked the waiter, who promptly informed me they were steer heads and the restaurant used to be a steak place. What a schmuck I was (something else I learned from Casey).

Casey listened to a wide range of music, and while my tastes were pretty middle of the road, we did have some overlap, reveling in The Concert in Central Park by Simon & Garfunkel, which happened the weekend before we met.  I listened to mainstream pop and British Invasion while he listened to heavy metal and something called ska, the walking bass line accented with rhythms on the upbeat of Madness performing "One Step Beyond" passing through the concrete walls of the dorms.

Birkenstocks.  Chinese food.  Madness.

While I don't wear Birkenstocks, they are familiar to me and no longer unusual.  Chinese food is a staple in our current household, and I remember being home one day from college and talking my parents into Chinese take-out.  And I continue to listen to Madness, which lead to other third-wave bands such as Let's Go Bowling and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

"Hey you. Don't watch that watch this." And so began the sheer exuberance of it all.  They were great times.