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Once upon a time I was a college student. That was back in the era of peace, love, and rock and roll. Love was, of course, "free" in those days, but I don't want to get ahead of my story. My senior year I lived off campus. I'd put up with dorm life for three years which was long enough. Colleges felt the need to keep tabs on students who lived in their dorms, but I'd chaffed under their "in loco parentis" policy. As soon as I was a senior, I found a place to share with a couple of buddies, and my girlfriend, Kara, got an apartment that year with, Joyce, a friend of hers.
I'd met Kara a year ago in a conducting class. I was getting a degree in music education, not because I had such a burning desire to teach, but mainly because I had a burning desire to avoid being sent into the thick of the Vietnam War right after graduation. Teachers could get draft deferments. Kara, however, was a full-bore performance major in piano.
I was okay on the piano, but my instrument was the classical guitar. Since most guitars were electric, I sometimes felt a bit lonely. I didn't get gigs playing with groups in bars. My prospects for making millions as a rock and roll star were nil, but I enjoyed playing. Sometimes I'd just lose myself in the music for hours.
Kara and I hit it off from the first. She was a blue-eyed, blond farm girl who was fit and tanned from her love of the outdoors. She was tall for a girl ? just under six feet. Still, I had a lanky couple of inches on her. Although I may have looked like someone who played basketball, I'd never had much enthusiasm (or ability) for the sport. I was one of the band geeks through high school. And no, I didn't march the guitar. I was an indifferent baritone player.
Anyway, in the conducting class the instructor paired us up for mutual critiquing. Kara's first observation about me was that I looked as if I was trying to swat flies. She poked my pride, but what really hurt was that it was so funny, I couldn't help but laugh. That set the pattern. Her sense of humor just cracked me up.
We became study partners in that class, and, after a couple of casual dates, a couple. For our first real date, I took her to see Easy Rider. It wasn't the type of movie that either of us would have chosen on our own, but her Popular Culture prof had assigned a critique. We stayed for a second showing, and still weren't all that enthused. I offered her a few thoughts of my own which she said she used, but she was satisfied with the B she got.
I remember that particular date because we kissed for the first time. On the walk back from Lot 6, the student parking lot which located a convenient mile or so from campus, we held hands. I was totally smitten by this time, but I also didn't want to ruin things by pushing her too fast. Kara settled that nicely by pushing me up beside one of the big oak trees lining the walk where she kissed me thoroughly.
Neither Kara or I had had much experience with sex, but we got the essentials figured out pretty quickly. Kara had no hesitation in trying out anything she'd heard about and enough creativity to make it exciting. At my age and level of experience, just seeing a naked woman made it plenty exciting. However, we lived on campus that year, and opportunities for anything more than a grope in a dark corner of the library were few and far between.
All of that changed for the better our senior year. Josh, a friend from my home town, and I found an apartment about a mile and a half from campus ? not exactly convenient, but not exactly expensive either. In many ways it was just another student housing zone with lots of parties, noise, and other annoyances.
Kara did much better. She was able to find a decent apartment on a quiet dead end street about five blocks from campus. A fair number of the other residents were grad students, many of whom were married. All in all it was a lot quieter place (discounting the hippopotamus tap dance troop which lived upstairs for just three weeks at the start of fall term).

Kara's roommate, Joyce, was a dark-haired beauty and a free spirit. She was smaller than Kara, and as a dance major, she was fit from top to bottom to toes. She had been in cross country, track, and gymnastics in high school but had studied dance on the side. Once at college, she'd decided she wanted to make a career of it. Dance majors at BU (which stands for Big University just in case you were reading too much into that) had most of their classes in the Music