My first year at NAU was sober in the daylight and loosely intoxicated at the edges. I lived in a freezing back room one minute from the History building—space heater struggling, breath visible some mornings, blankets pulled over my head like I was camping indoors. I drank only socially, worked hard, slept irregularly but not disastrously. My focus was sharp. Sanjay told me I was a tough grader, precise to the point of severity. I softened slightly, not because he demanded it, but because I understood I was being a little pedantic.

Most nights I walked everywhere—my location meant I barely needed a car. Campus was small, my room was close, and the world narrowed down to the few places I traveled on foot: the History office, Safeway for cheap groceries, the bowling alley, Gabe’s apartment. Gabe—Mexican-American, small flat, Friends reruns on VCR—was the first true companion of that year. We smoked weed twice, only twice, but years later those two nights glow brighter than whole weeks of coursework.

One evening before bowling we got high at his place. He drove the back roads with “Tennessee Jed” by the Grateful Dead blasting from the speakers. I’d heard the song before but never like that. The asphalt felt lunar, pale and distant, as if we were driving the dark side of the moon. For fifteen minutes I thought it was the greatest song ever written. I bowled maybe a 160 that night—no 200—but it didn’t matter. Those early nights had the glow of being young enough to change and old enough to notice.

The department didn’t gel immediately. It wasn’t love at first seminar; more like gradual accumulation—papers returned, conversations after class, cigarette breaks, laughter by vending machines. And then November arrived, Day of the Dead, Día de Muertos, and everything clicked. Nearly the whole cohort went out to a bar within walking distance of my house. Warm light, cool air, no need for taxis. I stepped onto the second-floor balcony with a drink despite the sign forbidding glassware outdoors. Liability. Potential weapon. Potential fall. Of course that’s where I stood.

Everyone arrived a little looser than usual. Cindy loud and magnetic, Diamond telling labor-movement stories, Patrick pushing Reagan just to watch Diamond combust, Mandiola ready for his close-up. The night had the feeling of a department not performing collegiality but genuinely inhabiting it. For the first time it felt less like I’d transferred into a system and more like I belonged to one. Somewhere near the second round I knew: I liked these people. Not tolerated them. Not simply studied with them. Liked them.

A few weeks later Patrick hosted a house party north of campus—big place, temporary-feeling, the kind of grad-student rental that looks like three relationships and a semester of chaos have already happened there. I arrived early, around seven, beer in hand before anyone arrived. By eight it was full—grad students I knew, professors, plus strangers whose relationship to Patrick was unclear.

A young Russian woman approached me, dark hair, quick smile, zero hesitation. She asked if I was married. I said yes. She asked if I wanted to get married anyway. Straight to it. No preamble. No seduction arc. Just proposition → outcome. Gabe leaned over, grinning: “It is flattering, isn’t it?” And it was. Even as I understood what she might actually want—a visa, a foothold, a passport through me. Desire and practicality often wear the same mask. Still, it gave the night a story.

The house was loud by then. Diamond and Patrick shouting Reagan versus labor history like two men paid by volume. Fritz drifting through with Vegas cocktails on the brain. Cindy incandescent. Mandiola’s tooth aching but untreated, pride > pain. I wandered the rooms, comfortable but not consumed. Just observation, beer, and the sense of being part of something that didn’t need me to steer it—rare then, rarer later.

I left the party after a few hours, steady and untroubled. Year One closed gently. I finished with straight As, a department that had finally found shape, weed-echoes still in the brain, Dead songs drifting like ghost signals, and a girlfriend in Japan I was aching quietly to return to. It was a good year in many ways.