The guide for college freshman, bright blue and packed with useful information about registration, immunizations, campus emergencies, includes an observation about roommates: many students, it appears, have never shared a room, and thus, may have some trouble adjusting to the presence of another person in their space.    Apparently, this is a learned, not intuitive skill, and some students are having trouble coping. Well, pardon me! I thought. And then reflected that it could be true of my own boys, who have had their own rooms since Dylan moved upstairs when he was eight, and Bruce, five.

Each of them has been king of his own domain longer than I ever had a room to myself, which is a little more than one year out of fifty. There was the time in New York, nine months on the upper west side and about the same in Brooklyn — and that room was a “pass-through room”.  I don’t count the time in Hell’s kitchen, because my futon in living room folded up to a sofa during the day – there was no door. My husband and I each shared rooms as children.  My mother, one of three girls in a bed; her brothers, seven or eight in an attic dorm.  My father, likewise.  Big families, small spacing, much sharing; there we go. Would I like a “room of my own”, as Virginia Woolf asserts? Maybe a space where my stuff doesn’t get moved and interfered with. But a single room? I don’t really know; it could get lonely.

You shall know them by their rooms: this is true of my boys.  The older, Dylan, bravely moved upstairs when he was eight, to a commodious, slant-roofed room which shares a small, full bath with the other upstairs room. Dylan’s room is cozy in winter, warm in summer, with lots of daylight, two twin beds and my parents’ old bureau and chest. It’s painted celestial blue, with blue and white tye-dyed bedcovers and a brown carpet.  The twin beds were pushed together to accommodate his growing size, and the slanted parts of the ceiling are covered with music and concert posters, plus one of Johnny Cash giving the finger, a subject of some controversy in its early days, now part of the furniture. The old office desk, and Dylan’s own computer which he uses to stream the television shows.  His bureau is Neat – the souvenirs and trophies periodically ordered and arranged, similar to how Dylan would, as a toddler, line up his balls according to size. Generally picked up and uncluttered, Dylan goes on a room reorg every once in a while, and doesn’t get out of shape if I’ve thrown a couple things into drawers. 

Bruce, on the other hand, is a little Pasha, as the Armenians like to say.  He likes his treasures around him in abundance.  The room, unlikely as it is, is a pale lavender, with sheer white curtains and a floral wreath, because it’s not his room at all, but the guest room, where my mother stays on her visits, so she doesn’t have to climb stairs.  Bruce has his own room, “the green room” on the top floor, across from Dylan’s, that he has never in fact slept in. Although he and I together took pains to pick the right color and linens and pictures, it was not to be – he did not want to sleep so far away from us. Or, actually, he had noticed the luxuries of the guest room – the double bed, its own TV, a desk with the family computer – his, all his. Full of stuff, lots of stuff. His collectibles – Magic cards, Tech Deck fingerboards, pressed coins, fancy erasers, arcade tickets and party favors of all kinds. Trophies, art projects, a $2.00 bill.  On the bookshelves, chairs, and on the floor is more stuff: his paintball gun, a baseball gloves, etc. etc. But the thing is, if I touch it or rearrange it, he is very put out – it’s “fung shui”, according to him. 

I realize about kids and their stuff – or adults and their stuff – the gadgets, presents, the memorabilia – as Tracey Chapman says, “Mountains of Things”, because things, after all, are so much less confrontational and easier to deal with than real, live people.  My sister told me about a visit to a girls’ freshman dorm room, shared by two girls, where there was just a very narrow alley down the middle, each side was so full of “stuff”.  A pile of stuff is, like beetle-ly black leather jackets, another barrier for the thin-skinned against the outside world, an assertion of toughness or weightiness, a protection against the vicissitudes of relationships.  I get that, but do they need to be like bunkers, against the next time of war or disaster.  And can’t they just be peaceful, wide-open spaces? 

Our boys' rooms are their own domains – as far as is safe and practical. Fortunately, the sports equipment stays downstairs, so the smell isn’t bad. The cleaners come every couple of weeks, and their dad and I make their beds every day, jointly, as a kind of morning ritual. Otherwise, they rule, these boys.  So, what happens when they have to share, I’m wondering?  Not for nothing, I think to myself, that my two best friends in the world, my husband and my sister Maura, have been my longest roommates – my sister, the first 18 years, and my husband the last 22.  One way or another, it’s about getting along.