The Days of a College Freshman
By John Shearer
IPS Features

Now that colleges across the country are back in session after summer, I am reminded of the first semester of my freshman year at the University of Georgia back in 1978.

I thought at the time that I was quite mature and wise, but now I realize I was not.

I was particularly unschooled in caring for my clothes. I may have arrived at college being able to exempt one or two academic courses, but I likely needed the very basic and remedial lesson in washing clothes.

During the first month or so, I went home a couple of weekends, so my mother took care of the washing for me. But then I stayed at school for several weekends in a row, and I suddenly realized I had no one to wash clothes for me.

When I first ran out of clean clothes, I decided to break out a stick of deodorant to rub over the cleanest looking of the dirty socks and shirts. I referred to it simply as freshening up.

Actually, I knew I needed to do laundry, but I figured that would suffice until the next day, when I would go and wash my clothes. Unfortunately, I soon realized I suffered from another problem – I was a procrastinator.

Rubbing the clothes with deodorant suddenly stretched into three days and then into a full week. Needless to say, I went through more sticks of deodorant that fall than valedictorians go through pens and pencils.

Finally, after about 10 days or two weeks, I went and did laundry with a couple of dorm buddies. I am not sure if they had been trying the deodorant technique, but I did not dare tell them I had.

But they quickly realized I did not know the first fact about caring for my clothes because of the way I folded them when they had dried. Actually, I should say they realized I knew little because of the way I did not fold them.

When I pulled the clothes out of the dryer, I simply stuffed them in my bag. After I arrived back at my dorm room, I found more wrinkles there than in a large box of raisins. But because the clothes finally smelled fresh again for the first time in about a month, I ignored the wrinkles.

But I am sure other people, particularly the female students, did not. I had always blamed my lack of many dates my freshman year on my shyness, but I am sure wrinkled clothes certainly did not win me any positive points with the fairer sex, either.

The situation could have been worse, however. I heard of one young man who went away to college and decided to wash clothes with dishwasher liquid. Not just dishwasher liquid, but a lot of dishwasher liquid. He reportedly put so much soap in the machine that when he checked on it a few minutes later, his washing machine was overflowing with bubbles. In fact, it resembled the Atlantic coast at high tide.

Nowadays I am much better. I wash my clothes in my washer and dryer at home when I have no more clean clothes. But I have still not completely mastered my procrastinating tendencies or the art of folding clothes because I will often leave them in the dryer for days at a time. Sometimes I think I use the dryer more than my closet to find clean clothes.

I guess you cannot teach an old horse new tricks.