“The Fall of the House of Oakley”

That’s what I’ve always called it… July 28, 1999, 10 years ago today, I lost the best graduate school roommate of all time (Dr. Paul Schafer) from our Oakley Avenue place to his new job in New Orleans. I still had another year to go in Chicago, this time as a faculty member, but it would be in a smaller place by myself. (Oddly, there were almost as many parties there as we’d had at Oakley Avenue, though I am most definitely not the party-throwing “type.” It was an anomalous year.)

None of the details mean a thing to most of you, of course, but perhaps you can catch the tone of what I’m thinking– a lot happens in 10 years! On July 28, 1999, I was still more than a year away from setting foot in Egypt for the first time, and by now Egypt feels like infinity.

The cross-street for the Oakley Avenue place was called Shakespeare. Can’t beat that.

How fun was the Oakley place? I once calculated that I’d crashed on the couch there 45 times before ever moving in. Paul was the stalwart as several different roommates rotated through, and of course I jumped at the chance to move in. It’s also the only place I’ve ever had where I was the subject rather than the initiator of noise complaints. Perhaps that was the needed attitude of revelry for two housemates to finish off their dissertations simultaneously after an ungodly number of years. (No wait, I was the target of a few noise complaints the following year as well. But that is most out of character.) [ADDENDUM: And of course, there is no such thing as a “noise complaint” in Egypt. Most people and objects are noisy here. You have to toughen up. The bedrooms in my current place may as well be located in a carnival midway.]

Missed opportunity: the music collection between the two of us was so vast that we could have started up a d.j. operation quite easily, and we even discussed it at one point.