2016-05-06 - 11:21 a.m.

It's not that they're Happy Places, nothing like that. They're not there as refuge, harbors in the storm, at least I don't think so. But there are places--maybe two-thirds real, one-third not--that I think about from time to time, and with great affection. Cozy places. Places I've been to, and think fondly of, but can't go back to.

A lot of people, whether they admit it or not, are enraptured by the idea of the common room in the older, tonier type of English school. Harry Potter stuff: the many-paned windows looking out on blackness, the fireplace, the chairs, the magazines and books in teetering piles, the plates of half-eaten snacks. Maybe some tobacco smoke, if this revelry is from a few decades ago. Above all, the air of slouchy learnedness, dry humor, specific cultural references given and gotten.

And there's a certain sense of shamble-ness. I had one. When I was an undergrad, 19, 20, 21, I was a tutor at the university's writing center. This was where students who were having trouble writing papers would come in and, for free, get help with their papers. It was hard work when you worked--it's hard to get someone to understand how to write a decent paper--but we had a lot of free time, too. The people who worked down there were, at the time, lovable weirdos and, it turns out, exactly the kind of people I'd soon enough devote my twenties to following around everywhere. There was a 300-pound sullen art major who was a genius and who did his homework assignments a half-hour before class, the driven Asian-American girl who turned me on to The New Yorker, the other Asian-American girl who was way into anime and weird sex stuff, the oily-haired white boy who was way into anime and Asian-American girls, the cute girl with the cool taste in music, the much-older man who always wore the baseball cap because he was balding. I'm sure there were others. We all read a lot and could write a paper fairly easily. That's what tied us together.

But otherwise, we were just interesting weirdos. I would soon become one myself, but not just yet. I was still wearing very unfashionable clothes, just whatever was free or cheap, really. I was unsure of myself, of how to act, what to listen to, what to read, all of it. But I could tell a nineteen-year-old how to organize a five-page paper and though that's not much, maybe it was just enough, and what happened is that I felt at home down there, in the basement of the library.

What I'm getting at is that there was a couch. Maybe there were two couches. But the couch I'm thinking of was sunken in the middle, had cigarette burns in it from when you could smoke down there (incredible!), and was that very specific taupe/light brown/tan color that it seems was the color of every couch produced between 1975 and 1990. That couch, all slacker attitude, all quiet bookishness, all wit, took whatever it was we put into it. It smelled bad but not too bad. It looked bad but was not too ugly. It was comfortable enough. Some threw legs over the arms. Some napped on it. I reclined on it, read whatever it was I was always reading back then. I was always reading back then. We all were. And we talked and laughed and poked fun and tried on our fragile selves.

I think about that little basement office, about that couch, about those smart weirdos, and while obviously I can't go back and don't really want to (not really), I know that it'll always be there nonetheless, and that it was the start of something that's for sure still playing out. It was a science-heavy school, a school for biology and math and chemistry. But not us and not me. None of that happened on that couch, and thank goodness for that.

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