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Richard Downs
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after 20 minutes, the
sauna was becoming unbearable. A dip in the pool seemed
in order, though its year-round
85° waters
hardly chill one’s exterior. En route to the pool,
I made a quick pass by the clubhouse to see what
was left of the continental breakfast buffet. A fluffy
croissant
and a plate of strawberries were the spoils of my
detour. I splashed in the pool, then grabbed a bagel for
the road,
heading to the tennis courts to get in a couple of
sets before class.
It was a typical morning at my senior-year “dorm.”
Okay,
so typical might be a stretch. But such episodes
of extravagance were not altogether rare during my
time in the Sharon Green Apartments in Menlo Park,
a complex of 300
luxury units where, each year since 2000-01, some
60 students have had the chance to justify every elitist
stereotype hurled
at Stanford by its peer across the Bay.
I was assigned
to Sharon Green in its final year as an undergraduate
residence, forced into a world of
suburban elegance by Stanford’s student housing crunch.
Three years ago, with every study room and utility
closet on campus
already occupied, the University began shipping residents
off campus. Given the housing office’s solutions up
to that point, a likely destination might have been
a row of cardboard boxes under a Highway 101 overpass,
with two
people in each box. But instead, Stanford sent the
surplus up Sand Hill Road to Sharon Green, only to
outdo itself a
year later by placing additional students in the even
more chic Oak Creek Apartments down the street. That
place has
an on-site salon, for God’s sake.
I thought I’d
scored big my junior year when I landed a two-room double;
never mind that it was in the notoriously
antisocial Potter House. But my 1,100-square-foot,
two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in Sharon Green made
that place look like
a closet.
Actually, that’s a poor analogy. The closet
in the apartment’s master bedroom was way bigger than
my Potter room.
There was, inevitably, a clash of worlds as Stanford
kids invaded Sharon Green. After all, it’s the kind
of place where you actually feel bad when you spill
stuff on the floor or some friends put a hole in the
wall, and
where posters proclaiming the greatness of beer seem
conspicuously alien. An exasperated Palo Alto police
officer put it succinctly
while breaking up a late-night party at my friends’ place
at Oak Creek: “This isn’t a goddamn dorm room.”
We
did our best to turn our apartment into an acceptable
college pad anyway. Our furniture comprised beach chairs,
various inflatable objects and anything else we could
find discarded on neighborhood sidewalks. We broke
our garbage disposal the first week, giving our kitchen
the
compulsory
stench, and we filled our cabinets with the finest
china
the campus dining halls had to offer. An empty keg
of beer stayed on our balcony so long that I can’t
picture the place without it.
But it was all for naught. There
was no way to make
Sharon Green into a home suitable for Bluto and the
gang. And the atmosphere was just too classy to leave
us college
kids untainted.
The girls below us gave up early and
started having dinner parties—with wine!—featuring
multicourse meals whose preparation required more than
just adding
water. Their apartment looked like it was professionally
decorated,
and you could tell what color their carpet was supposed
to be. Soon, they were complaining more than the old
couple down the hall when our parties dragged on toward
sunrise.
My
roommate and I eventually succumbed as well. We
started subscribing to the Economist and the New
Yorker. We snubbed Safeway for upscale Andronico’s and bought
dark beer and cheeses that smelled worse than the garbage
disposal. We even cleaned our bathrooms once in a while.
Worst
of all, I began to think this was what “real
world” living would be like. That notion was cruelly
shattered in May by just one hour of combing the area
for a postgraduation apartment that would rent for,
say, $600
a month. I don’t know how much my stay at Sharon Green
cost Stanford, since we only paid the campus room charge,
but our unit normally lists at more than $2,000. Guess
it’s
back to Pabst and Easy Cheese for me.
On the bright
side, there was wisdom to be gained from all those
old (read: over 25) people living around
us.
Most residents fell into three basic groups: 80-hour-work-week
Silicon Valley types, families with young children,
and senior citizens. All are mortal enemies of the
college student who
has no concept of midnight being “late.” Our
neighbors never seemed to share any of our interests,
such as whether one can reach the pool by jumping from
a third-floor
balcony (answer: almost) or how many empty beer cans
fit on some guy’s Boxster in the parking lot (87). And
so, on the cusp of full-blown adulthood, we learned
three important life lessons: don’t work long hours,
don’t have kids, and above all, don’t get old.
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