Were you lonely when you were a freshman?

A boy asks me, Were you lonely when you were a freshman? and suddenly there I am again in the bottom bunk of my small room in the old hall, with my roommate snoring above me, the roommate I hardly saw and hardly knew, and when we did talk we could hardly find any common ideas where we could stand together for a moment; thank God for basketball, a language we both did speak, or I might have spent an entire year saying no more than hey and see you later to that boy, a boy who like so many boys was so shy that he was loud and florid and extravagant and dramatic, to prove that he was anything but shy; that is the way of boys, and probably always has been; and I have known several men who never were able to stop being that boy, it grieves me to say.

Was I lonely when I was a freshman? Yes, for a while, for a time, most of the time, early on; and then I was lucky to find boys whose humor fit my humor, whose smiles were genuine, who didn’t mind when I slouched into their rooms to try to fit into my new life somehow; and then somehow one or two began to walk to class with me, and two or three seemed to eat at about the same time that I seemed to eat, so we began to claim a corner table, and so I had a target, in the dining hall, to aim at across the sea of seething laughing burbling students who already fit in, somehow, in ways that I did not yet understand.

And there was always basketball, thank God for basketball, because you could play a game and say good game and shake hands and the next time you saw that guy he would say hey and maybe pick you for his team and then you would meet other guys with whom to say hey and good game and let’s play tomorrow at four.