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In the late afternoon of a day that may have been much like today, 29 years ago, I was studying in my dorm room, #336 in Haskell Hall. I think it was a weekend, but I can't be sure about that. The building was pretty quiet, and the weekend-evening atmosphere of calm hung in the air. I had my door open, which was encouraged, to help residents build community; I just liked having the door open so that I didn't feel stifled, closed up in my room during the marathon reading required of English majors. The resident assistant for our floor was an older, very intimidating girl named Sally, who lived two doors down from me. That night, however, the assistant hall manager was on duty, and it was she who passed my door and then stepped back for a minute's conversation on her 10 o'clock rounds.
I don't know what we talked about, or for how long, before she looked over at a bulletin board next to the closet. Her eyes lit up, and she stepped over to the board. Among the usual college melange of concert ticket stubs, photos, and keepsakes, there was a postcard of an evening-lit Mount Rushmore superimposed on a brilliantly red and black sunset. It was an icon of my home-away-from-home, the South Dakota farm where we spent our summers. To her, it was much more.
"Have you been to Mount Rushmore?" Laura asked, smiling----for, as you might have guessed, if you know me at all, it was Laura.
"Yeah, lots of times!" I replied excitedly; not many people of my age at that time had traveled the way we did or had much curiosity about other places as I did. "Have you been there?"
"Yeah, I grew up in South Dakota, in Sioux Falls."
"Ohhh, so you're East River?" I laughed. Dakotans jokingly refer to others according to which side of the Missouri River they live on.
"What do you know about East River!?" she exclaimed.
"Well, I'm West River." Everyone knew that East River was higher class, just a little more sophisticated, a bit more urbane, if there is such a thing in the northern plains. West River, on the other hand, was scrappier and more hardscrabble, tougher but also more sparsely beautiful. That good-natured opening gambit was all it took for an immediate bond to form. We talked as easily as neighbors across that river might.
If I'm not imagining things, that was the first time I met Laura, and the first time I saw her cry, just for the homesick happiness of meeting someone who spoke the native slang of her childhood. I could not have known at that moment how the gearboxes had shifted to click my entire life into motion that winter evening. I knew only that I had made a new friend, one who loved the same place I loved, one who loved it with the pure adoration of a child.
I did not know then the story of her mother's long, terrible death from Crohn's disease when Laura was barely 19, how her father's hands started shaking the day of the funeral and never stopped, and how he was forced into retirement soon afterward. I didn't know that she was at NSU because her father had then sold the house and told her she could take what would fit in her car, and they were moving to Owasso, where her half-sister lived. I couldn't have known that a simple postcard evoked all that she had loved and lost, nor that God placed it where and when she needed to see it. Never could I guess at the blessings that were planned for us from then.
We didn't become inseparable, not right away. I was a devoted student, and she had a lot of friends she kept up with in addition to work and school. But I remember hanging out in her room occasionally, sometimes with a crowd of admiring girls in there chit-chatting. Laura was two and a half years older than I, but she carried herself with a little bit of sphinxish mystery that made her seem even more mature, so the younger residents really took to her. I remember a couple of sisters from Muskogee who weren't twins but could have been, who Laura took under her wing, teaching them about makeup and clothes. She didn't gossip or talk smack like some of the other girls, and we learned quickly that she fought for whatever was the "right" thing to do for the residents. Once Laura befriended you, unless you proved yourself unworthy, you had an ally in your corner no matter what.
She proved that the summer after we met, when she got me an RA job in Ross Hall, sight unseen. The hall manager hired me on her word alone because I was in South Dakota for the summer. That next year in Ross yielded two other good friends, ones I still keep in touch with and see from time to time. I have Laura to thank for that and for them.
After doing my internship and a semester of grad school living off campus, I had a mini-nervous breakdown about my party lifestyle and decided I needed a change. Miraculously, literally the very moment that I made that decision, I received an offer to serve as a graduate assistant for that fall of 1986. It was manna, but not enough to eat and pay rent. Laura was by that time a permanent full time Hall Manager, and I headed off to see if she knew of any open jobs on campus, although housing was probably out, since RA training would start in two weeks. She had just lost one of her RAs for the fall because of failing grades. I had a job before I walked out the door.
And a confirmed loner was about to have a family of her own.
...To be continued...
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