Recaptured

Of all the rooms on Two North, Barbara's was the neatest, the rarest sitting still.  She was the most organized, the highest-achieving, the one who never slept.  Now she has three babies, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, she's likely sleeping even less than never these days.

It was Barbara who oversaw my very first all-nigher, complete with 2 liter of Coke, and Barbara who also had the wisdom to foresee that just as every possible problem in life has a correlating episode on The Golden Girls, there are by now enough songs in Jimmy Buffett's catalog to address any stage or roadblock humanity may face.

I went to her room one day early in sophomore year with the then-devastating news that at campus newspaper column which had been originally promised to me was assigned elsewhere.  Barbara watch me lie on the floor as I wailed it out, and then she reached not for the Coke (or rum to put in it, as any lesser college student might have done) but to her CD player.  (This happened a very, very long time ago.)  She told me the story of the United State's yacht racing team losing the Americas Cup to Australia-- or, to loosely quote Dave Barry, "their snobs beat our snobs in a sport nobody cares about."  Jimmy cared 32 bars worth-- the musical kind. 

"When I was a senior in high school," she said, "I was going for valedictorian, and then I found out that someone else had a higher GPA than I did.  And one of my friends played this song for me and told me to take back what was mine."  You know the rest of the story-- she of course became valedictorian, I nabbed back the column at the earliest opportunity, and Jimmy Buffett made another umpteen bazillion dollars in licensed plastic parrot sales.  Not bad for two college girls and a dude producing a fight song for a yachting team.