Page 298 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
did not want to live alone in law school (I thought that the Morrow experience was not helpful), and I thought that, if I waited, I might secure suitable housing at the university.
The unfortunate result of that decision is that for what I believe to have been all or most of the first semester, I was living at home, not a great idea in any circumstances at that age, and was traveling on foot and by subway for one and one-half hours in each direction, predomi- nantly during rush hours. Thus, I rarely secured a seat on the train from which I might have been able to study or, at least, hold the heavy case- books on my lap. Worse, as a commuter, I had next to no contact with other students and could not participate in a “study group,” where stu- dents got together and tried to work through the problems that were posed by the assignments or by their professors. Most of the other stu- dents joined study groups, which almost everybody said functioned very beneficially, both academically and socially, if not psychologically. Around exam time, each member of the group would produce an out- line of one of the courses for the benefit of the others. For my part, I did not even become aware of the existence of such groups until well into the school year and, by the time that I did and was living at Columbia, the groups had gelled, it seemed to me. I guess that I was never good at being a joiner anyway.
Sometime late in the first semester, Columbia notified me that a room, a single, had become available. If you went out of your way to manufacture a depressing living arrangement—other than living at home when you’re twenty-one—you could not approach what Colum- bia offered up. The room had one thing going for it: it was neither in Brooklyn nor on a subway car. On the other side of the ledger, the com- mon bathroom far down the hall had no sinks! The heat was provided through exposed pipes, the walls needed a fresh coat of paint, the floor was old and creaky, the bed made its own music, the mattress was tissue thin, the lighting was virtually nonexistent (but at least made the roaches invisible), the corridors were excellent conductors of noise, the win- dows hardly worked and were covered by paper shades that had yellowed with age, and the sounds of ambulances from nearby St. Luke’s Hospital
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