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I think it was fall. I think it was 1995. What I am certain of is that it was one of those warm days with heavy rain that we sometimes got in Oberlin. Dan and I finished our Stevenson Dining Hall lunch as we often did, with a "frapp" (a beverage of Dan's concocting that consisted of much soft vanilla ice cream and a bit of root beer, whipped together in a tall glass with a fork. Most of what we ate from CDS was a bit of this mixed with a bit of that since any of the single dishes to be found on the CDS menu was inedible by itself.) This isn't a story, though, about CDS or Stevenson or the things we ate there. It's a story about what happened on North Quad one warm rainy day after lunch.
Dan and I left Stevenson after eat/drinking our frapps and set out for our dorm, Barrows. We crossed the quad as the sun broke through the clouds, and I reveled at the warm wet and mud that squelched between my sandalled feet. Just before reaching the far side of the quad, we encountered a very deep and expansive puddle. Without speaking, and as if we'd planned it in advance, we turned north, the puddle on our left and walked some yards. To an observer, it might have looked as though we were merely making our way around the puddle. Indeed for a while, it looked like that was our plan, but even when we came to the puddle's end, we continued northward. Having gone sixty feet or so, we turned around and faced south. By turns, one after the other, Dan and I sprinted.
When we reached the edge of the puddle at a dead run, we threw ourselves, headlong across the plane of the water's surface. We slid. We hooted and hollered with muddy glee. Run; hurl; slide; howl and giggle with the fun of it; repeat. Eat your heart out, slip-and-slide. Who needs longs sheets of wet plastic when slippery, squelchy mud is so much more fun?
Dan and I stood together panting, dripping, laughing and congratulating one another on a pastime well devised while we took a break to catch our breath. "Is that Lisa?" I asked and pointed. We squinted at a distant figure approaching from the far side of the quad. As she neared by a few paces, it became unmistakably Lisa. Again Dan and I acted in unison as by some silent order. Again we broke into a sprint, though this time not toward the puddle. Lisa saw us coming only just in time to squeak before we had her wrapped in a wet, muddy sandwich of a bear hug. After some laughter all around and a shrill, "You jerks!" we all three headed for our dorm. We split up inside, each to our respective rooms. Lisa to change her now muddy clothes and Dan and myself to get towels to shower.
Dan and I continued to congratulate one another in loud voices over the shower stall partition and shouted out in rodomontade style our fun in catching Lisa by surprise. When all the mud was rinsed out of our hair and the water finally ran clear through the drain we each turned off the water. I heard Dan's shower curtain open and he stopped talking in mid sentence. When I opened my shower curtain and looked out, I saw why. Someone had stolen into the bathroom while we showered and taken our towels. There we stood, naked and dripping. One of us yelled, "LISA!" which was met by laughter outside in the hall followed by the sound of Lisa's retreating feet. We stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. Certainly by my senior year, and possibly even by my sophomore year, I would have strode out and through the halls in my dripping nakedness until I found Lisa and took my towel from her. In my first year, however, that sort of contextless public nakedness was out of the question. I took down a shower curtain. Dan followed my lead and together we went out into the hall in search of Lisa and our towels, clad only in vinyl.
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