Bringing Jungle back
by Cheryl, posted on February 23rd, 2011 in Just me
The phone rang a few minutes before we had to leave for Little League practice.
I checked the caller ID (yep, I’m one of THOSE) and I saw the call was from the University of Connecticut. My alma mater.
Two things were apparent:
1) They don’t have my number, so someone had to have given it to them, someone who knows me, someone, say, like my own mother.
2) My own mother sold me out. She tired of having to not answer calls from them, and of throwing out the mail that somehow followed her from Connecticut to Seattle some 15 years ago.
So I took the call. Why not? And a very nice student named Chelsea started her spiel. She did not count on having me on the other end, wearing my UConn sweatshirt (for reals!), and, as always, desperate for adult conversation by that point in the day.
We chatted about the campus, whether my two favorite bars – Ted’s and Huskies – were still there (they are).
I told her I lived in the Jungle. The Jungle was a set of 11 dorms arranged in a horseshoe around an open grassy area. It was very loud, very social, and not a bad place to live as an underclassman trying to find free beer meet people.
The parties. The parties. The guys would line huge garbage cans with plastic bags and drag them into the shower, where they’d make fruit punch and then pour in three tons of grain alcohol.
During the first real snow we’d fill whatever containers we could find and bring them back into the dorm, where we’d nail people with snowballs from the second floor. The first warm spring day, girls would get in their bikinis and lie on a hill behind the dorms, on what we called Jungle Beach.
And when UConn’s mens basketball team won the NIT in ’88 – yes, this is before they got REALLY good – we showed our excitement over being #65 in the country by pulling furniture out into the quad and setting it ablaze, starting an enormous bonfire.
I mean, it was the Jungle.
Chelsea said something about North Campus.
I tried to remember where that was. Then she said she used to live in the dorm called New London. And I lived in Windham – the two dorms were connected to each other in that horseshoe. Called the Jungle.
“You mean North Campus,” she said.
“Wait. You don’t call it the Jungle anymore?”
“Well,” said young Chelsea, her dagger poised and ready. “My dad calls it that.”
And after I got over the shock and pain of someone so young being so cruel, and when I realized that I was in fact old enough to be this woman’s mother, I got to thinking. When did it stop being called the Jungle? How was that even possible? I mean, it was THE JUNGLE.
It rocked my world.
I don’t get out much.
Especially not to Connecticut. I haven’t been back in the state since 2006. And I can’t remember the last time I went to the campus. Maybe 1999?
Apparently, things have changed.
Which is why I told Chelsea what she must do.
She must bring the Jungle back.
It’d be so retro.
Retro is cool.
Right?
I’m not sure anymore. That phone call aged me in dog years.
Tags: did I mention I'm old?, I am freaking old, it rocked my world, the jungle, UConn
Karan Conover Says:
Cheryl Reply:
February 23rd, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Can you make the short drive up to Storrs and spraypaint JUNGLE on the buildings for me?
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