Her name was Christine, or maybe it was Christina with an “a” — I’m afraid I don’t quite remember which — and she had eyes the color of an overcast sky just after the rain has stopped. For all the books I’ve read in which characters have grey eyes, she’s the only real-life example I’ve ever encountered. Curiously, she didn’t like them very much. When I first met her, she was covering them up with cosmetic contacts that turned them a rather ordinary brown. She lost one of those lenses at some point, and for a while she sported a startling, two-toned Jane Seymour look. Eventually she gave up and just let her real color show.
We had a class together our freshman year of college, back in the fall, winter, and spring of 1987-88, an honors philosophy course called Intellectual Traditions of the West. That was a great class, one of the very few I took during five years of undergraduate studies that I still have distinct memories of. It was a bit of a pain, schedule-wise, because it was held from 5 to 7 PM, three nights a week, whereas the rest of my classes were at more traditional times in the morning or early afternoon. I was a commuter student who lived some 25 miles away, so I couldn’t very easily run home during the downtime, or do much of anything else, either, except hang around in the union or at the Marriott Library or on the grass under a tree somewhere, and just wait. Looking back, though, I think the oddball time was a big part of why the class was so memorable. We handful of earnest freshman honors students who were still on campus after the grounds had grown quiet and the shadows long with approaching sunset enjoyed a kind of esprit de corps that I never felt in any other college class. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the most friends I ever had among my U of U classmates were people from that class.
A couple of those were long-established friendships from high school, Keith and Cheryl. Then there were my fellow Trekkies: a guy named Jaren, and his friend Melonie, and the Japanese kid who doodled a new rendering of the starship Enterprise during every two-hour class period. He had a whole notebook full of them. There were a few others who’ve now dimmed in my memory to hazy faces without any distinguishing information attached to them, but I can still sense some residual affection for them, so I know I must’ve enjoyed their company at one time. And then there was Christine. Christina. Whatever.
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