When I was in college *mumble mumble* years ago, I lived and worked on campus. I wasn’t far from home—just far enough that living on campus made sense but I could get home quickly if I wanted to.

I met my best friend Stephanie in college (Are You Who Your Friends Think You Are?). We were very different then, and we’re still very different now. But that’s what makes our friendship so perfect, I think. And that’s part of what college is all about. Thrown together with people from all over, you just figure it out and make it work. Some people you gel with, and some people you don’t. There are those you wish you could forget, and others create fond memories. Some people become lifelong friends.

Before I opted into a single room, I had two roommates. (Stephanie was not one of them.) Introvert that I am, I would guess I’m not particularly easy to live with (Introverts Need Dialog Too (Book Dialog, That Is)). I preferred staying in to going out. I spent more than a little time studying. When you’re a freshman trying to navigate a new school, even a small one, you have to put yourself out there to get to know people.

My first roommate was another freshman. We got along alright, but we never became hard and fast friends. We went our separate ways after the first semester, and she eventually transferred to another school. I found her on Facebook a few years ago.

Second semester freshman year, I roomed with a girl a year ahead of me who I knew through mutual friends. We both majored in journalism, so we had a few classes together. We weren’t good roommates, but we did become great friends. She invited me to my first-ever concert (Squeeze) and introduced me to artists I never would have listened to on my own (Depeche Mode, The B-52s, Howard Jones, to name a few).

As a Protestant (in a Catholic school), I didn’t abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. A handful of friends and I would go to the local Sub Diggity and bought ourselves sandwiches to eat in the cafeteria…in protest for not having a meat option available. (This was before the days of college meal plans. You either bought into three meals a day, or you paid cash as a commuter.)

This particular friend really wanted a sub one week. I asked her: If I wasn’t going to Hell for eating meat, did she really believe God would send her to Hell just because she was Catholic? (Spoiler alert: I was a bad influence. She had a sandwich that week.)

We have more than a handful of mutual friends, and although our only contact now is the occasional Facebook Messenger, I would certainly get together for a drink if the opportunity presented itself. Along with a number of others, she is etched in my core memories of college life.

Dozens of people on my Facebook friends list are from college, and so many others are extensions of those friends. I could tell you at least one story about each of them and many stories about a few of them. These people, who started as strangers to me, created an environment where I was allowed to test the waters of adulthood before I actually had to swim in them.

I have amazing memories from those four years. Taking at least four pens to Dr. Boeke’s political science class because you were screwed if you ran out of ink mid-class. Skipping class and working round-the-clock for three days during every newspaper deadline. Playing backgammon at the security desk during the 2 a.m.-6 a.m. shift. Telling the freshmen that the music hall was haunted.

Staying on campus to work security for the summers after my sophomore year, we rotated schedules each week so no one missed back-to-back weeks of ladies’ night at W.C. Flick’s. (I think I may still have my souvenir glass somewhere that counted as your cover charge if you brought it each week.) Having breakfast with a business professor-turned-friend every week, including the morning he came straight from the airport after the Bears won the Super Bowl.

Sitting in the hallway talking outside our respective dorm rooms so no one missed a phone call by being in the lounge. Driving to Ontario with a professor and a van full of students for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Hotel parties where our “cooler” was a bathtub filled with ice (🤫, don’t tell my dad…or my daughter 😮).

These experiences defined my early adult life, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

A book I finished a couple weeks ago revolves around a group of college friends (plus one not college friend). It brought some awesome memories flooding back. Call me sappy all you want. I’ll just be sitting over here in a corner reminiscing…while you go buy this book.

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for Impossible to Forget by Imogen Clark

384 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: February 1, 2022
This title was an Amazon First Reads selection.

Publisher’s Description

Just turned 18, Romany is on the cusp of taking her first steps into adulthood when tragedy strikes, and she finds herself suddenly alone without her mother, Angie, the only parent she has ever known. In her final letter, Angie has charged her four closest friends with guiding Romany through her last year of school—but is there an ulterior motive to her unusual dying wish?

Each of the four guardians possesses an outlook on life that Angie wants to give her daughter as a legacy. Three of them have known each other since university: the eternally nomadic and exotically named Tiger; the shy and practical Leon with his untapped musical genius; and Maggie, a brilliant lawyer who doesn’t know her own abilities. But the fourth guardian is a mystery to the others: they’ve never even heard of former model Hope before…

As the guardians reflect on their friendship with Angie, it becomes apparent that this unusual arrangement is as much about them as it is about Romany. Navigating their grief individually and as a group, what will all five of them learn about themselves, their pasts—and the woman who’s brought them all together?

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Main Characters:

• Angie – single mother, grew up without a family of her own, free spirit who never seems prepared but also never seems concerned about her lack of preparedness, has been close friends with Maggie, Leon, and Tiger since university
• Maggie – the complete opposite of Angie, an attorney/solicitor by trade, always organized, driven to succeed in her career, never does anything without thinking it through
• Leon – an engineer with a penchant for the arts, has his life planned out to go a certain way
• Tiger – a nomad, world-traveler, goes where he feels like going at any given time, picks up work to make money to move to his next stop, has never had a place to call home
• Hope – Angie’s newest friend, 20 years younger than the rest
• Romany – Angie’s daughter, just turned 18, preparing to take her A levels and head off to university

I’m going to start with the reason I rated 4 stars versus 5. This book is not about the guardians reflecting on their relationship with Angie. It gets there…73% of the way through. At a full length of 384 pages, that’s a lot of pretext to get to what the publisher describes as the main point of the story. We could have done with a little less pretext and a little more resolution, and this would have balanced out nicely.

When the story begins, we know Angie has passed away and has left some unusual but specific instructions for her friends in regard to her daughter Romany. Maggie is to help her with all things legal and formal. Leon is to look out for Romany’s cultural needs. Tiger is to ensure that Romany travels whenever she can. Hope is supposed to guide Romany regarding relationships and affairs of the heart.

Once the friends have heard the specifics of the will and landed on how they’re going to follow Angie’s wishes, the book takes us back to the mid-80s when everyone met…everyone except Hope, that is. I truly enjoyed getting to know these characters, and I think this book will especially appeal to GenX based purely on the ages of the characters and the lives they’ve led.

A story of unlikely friends, we experience how they managed through life together, always in touch, never too far apart, seeing one another through all the highs and lows that life has to offer. As we get to know each of the individuals, we can see how well they understand each other. We can see how much they love each other and how much they need each other.

I do wish the author had spent more time on the resolution after Angie’s death. Hope is such an instrumental part of the story. We don’t meet her until halfway through because Angie and Hope don’t meet until Angie is in her late 40s. Two chapters later, we’re back to the core group of four. Five chapters later, we’re back to Hope, and that’s when we (the readers) learn the significance of Hope’s inclusion in the guardianship of Romany. The author spends close to 300 pages covering almost 35 years, and then the last 100 pages span a single year.

All of the characters find a way through their grief, and it may or may not be what you expect from the beginning. I actually went back to reread the first two chapters because the characters had changed so much for me, even though they kind of stayed the same. I definitely formed an impression of each of them at the reading of Angie’s will, and I wanted to see if my impressions held up. (I won’t spoil it one way or the other.)

If you’re 40+, it will likely bring back some memories from when you were 18 and just starting to make your way in the world and thought you knew it all. Those of you in your 30s will feel the before and after…before you were settled where you are now and what you have to look forward to. Those of you in your 20s might realize that you still have a lot to learn.

This is an intimate—and memorable—read.

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