The Colt 45 Chronicle #54

I lived with my girlfriend almost my entire time as an undergraduate. 

I was a year ahead of her. My freshman year I spent living by myself off campus in the Elmwood neighborhood. As soon as she completed her senior year of high school, she pretty much arrived on my doorstep. Her application had been rejected by the university, and she had been offered admission to U.C. Santa Cruz instead. But she appealed the decision and won.

We quickly started looking for apartments. I was working at the Doe Library as well as the Bancroft Library. She managed to get work as a babysitter. We found a small one-bedroom, railroad apartment on Durant Avenue across from Edwards Stadium where my father had flamed out at the state high school championship track-and-field meet 25 years earlier.

And there we would stay for the next five years; or, I should say, I would live there for the next five years because my girlfriend, who would become my wife the following year, moved out the summer of 1987. This is what the little drunken germ of a letter that was never sent (and can be found below) refers to.

For me it was a wonderful time (see photo). It was as if a gigantic boulder that had been crushing the life out of me had been blasted free. The San Francisco Giants were winning and so too were the Oakland A's. I had lots of buddies to drink and eat with. We listened to music and guzzled beer and watched baseball. I worked as a laborer at a construction site in downtown Oakland close to the public library. I read what I wanted. That summer I read Robinson Crusoe (1719), Homer's Odyssey, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) and Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black (1952, 1960).

It is hard to top that experience.

Autumn 1988

Old-time philosophy and construction and being young and the Odyssey and the girlfriend having moved out. Too much too perfect forever.