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Thursday, September 9th, 1976
I have written before that, since March 1 of this year and to December 31, the synchronization between days and dates, is exacrly the same as it was for the same period in 1976---perhaps the most significant ten months of my life.
On Thursday, September 9th, one of the most traumatic incidents of that period, or of my life, happened: my parents transported me forty-five minutes northward to a small, almost rural, campus where I would begin my freshman year---completely severed from my local friends, from c.b. channel twenty-two (the community that had welcomed me on the evening of Friday, July 9th), and from my First Beloved, who had helped me, on the evening of Saturday, July 10th, find the handle, Starwatcher, which had set me free from the mundane identity that had been slowly strangling in the shadows of my parents, Lloyd and Betty. In those days, we had no internet and no email; long distance calls were expensive, and alhough I was an inveterate letter-writer, my close friends were not.
My parents had very carefully inspected the items I took with me to my new dormitory residence, 120 North Hall. My c.b. had to remain behind---along with my Cocker Spaniel, Monica, and the details of the lkife that, in two short months, I had been constructing around Starwatcher. I was a wimpy, limpwristed, unathletic, awkward bookworm in my mundane existence. But none of this came across on the c.b. My radio, a Midland product, was, apparently and most serendipitously, defective from the factory: the system of electronic governors, to restrict its broadcast power to be at or below the legal limit, did not function. The radio broadcast at twice the legal limit without an amplifier (what was commonly called a "kicker") which my Beloved delighted in describing as "barefoot" (suspecting, I think now, that this meant more to me than a fortuitous condition in my radio; and thus mentioning it at least once each night that we were together). The effect of this condition was that Starwatcher, when heard on other receivers, sounded much differently than I did in person; and at our several meetings with others in our community, my identity as Starwatcher was not always immediately believed (but my Beloved would vouch for me, and also take another opportunity to mention that, when together, we broadcast on that radio "barefoot").
What I was too immature to realize by logical reasoning, but what I learned very quickly by the experience of being rather quickly transported to, transferred into, and abandoned upon that campus, was that I did not need my "daily fix" of c.b. chatter to continue to be Starwatcher; and that appellation protected me during those first ten weeks (and beyond, of course; but I was incapable of anticipating that). I did not share the handle with many others once I began my life on campus that day (Freshman orientation lasted for four days).
Now, forty-five years later, I am not ashamed to admit that I wept that night, before falling asleep, and quietly, lest my roommate be given another reason to support his decision---never retracted---to dislike me. The next ten weeks opened before me like a great chasm which I was not sure I would be able to successfully cross. But, though the college and those around me knew me by my mundane name and identity, I was still Starwatcher; and they could not intrude upon that, or wrest it from me, the way my summer habitat had been wrested from me by my parents when they delivered me to the campus. I was already doing the math to figure out how long I must linger there, and when I would be able to return to my home (not Lloyd and Betty's, which was merely a sleeping place; but channel twenty-two), and two my Beloved so that we could once more broadcast "barefoot" and together.
