Dressed in white ties, tails, or formal black dresses, we sang Brahms’ “Requiem” in the Collegium Musicum. Banging cymbals in the Marching Band, we shouted to Yalies at the Harvard-Yale game, “You may be winning, but you have to go back to New Haven.”

I met friends from all over the country and some from abroad. I learned about John Coltrane, the Allman Brothers and Jimmy Buffett from them. We even met Buffet at a concert in Boston once and hung out in his dressing room between shows.

We wanted domes, brick and ivy for our house, but many of us ended up in Mather. We jogged along the Charles, ate cheesesteak subs at Tommy’s Lunch and labored for hours in the stacks at Widener. We learned French impressionism, American transcendentalism, Keynesian economics and behavioral psychology.

I typed my thesis work on a typewriter like most everyone else. Mine was on T.S.Eliot: “The evolution of The Waste Land from the original manuscripts to the finished version.” Like the world Eliot envisioned, it was chaotic.

We went to mixers, swapped stories about romantic encounters with classmates and some even counted them. I spent much of my sophomore year at Wellesley.

Aging though we are, we all still remember these stories, plenty of them. The friendships and the memories endure.