The Eighth of December
In the fall of 1974, about a week after I had moved into on-campus housing at Sonoma State University, I walked from my apartment to the main building to check for mail, then re-traced my steps to go to my car. My route skirted the pool. Many of my classmates were enjoying the California sunshine. That early in the semester few had coursework to shackle them to their desks, and those were the days before the dire warnings of skin cancer sounded a deathknell to the fashion of getting a “healthy” tan.
Some of the people around the pool were naked. In fact, at least a third of them were. And not just around the pool. Some of them sprawled on the lawns. Some lounged on balconies. When I got to the parking area, I found a lovely redhead atop a towel on the low knoll not five steps in front of my car. Her birthday suit was exceptionally fine.
Halfway through my perambulation, I had begun to count. The redhead made it nineteen completely undraped females, with another fourteen merely topless. I didn’t count the men, but it must have been over twenty.
Quite a display for a bashful farm kid who had never before arriving at SSU seen an entirely-naked adult woman that he wasn’t related to, or that wasn’t on film or in a magazine. (What friendly female companionship I’d had to that point had not involved total removal of clothing.) I wonder to this day what ever became of that redhead. As far as I know, I never saw her again. Maybe I literally didn’t recognize her with her clothes on.
The point is, no one thought the nudity was radical. It was accepted. It was constant. Formal co-ed attire at that time was a pair of worn Levi cut-offs and a halter top. No shoes, no bra, not even any cosmetics. We were living the carefree, back-to-nature, high-ideals life that our older siblings in the ’60s had fought for. Except to us, those values weren’t revolutionary. They were normal.
In 1980 I was still in college, but in that era’s dorm community, the yuppie freshman girls would phone over to the campus cops to bust the last few die-hard nudists, and the freshman guys would tell me what a savior Ronald Reagan was going to be once he was elected. The zeitgeist had shifted.
I mourn for the way it used to be. I long for that mystery redhead I never had the guts to strike up a conversation with, though she gave me a dazzling smile once I summoned the courage to direct my glance straight at her, if only to take a moment to acknowledge her presence as simple good manners required. Seems to me my generation was in a good place. As a society, we lost something when, down the road, the times they went a-changin’.
To me, the point when the pendulum gained too much speed to keep sight of the Sixties was December 8, 1980. You know what happened that night. Now here we are. Still trending away from what we had. I have written of this before. This blog entry is an encore of the one from last year, and that one was a semi-reprint of a 2012 blog entry, and before that, I composed a version of this essay for the introduction of my story “The Eighth of December” in my 2002 story collection, Embracing the Starlight. And “The Eighth of December” itself, written in 1995 for the anthology David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible, was itself an exploration of that zeitgeist shift. I had hoped that the election of 2024 might represent the moment when finally — finally, finally, finally — the pendulum began to swing back. But no.
I miss you, Mr. Lennon.
7 thoughts on “The Eighth of December”
Did you live in T-18? I lived on the second floor. Wondering if the loft was still there when you lived there. We were the first ones to live there and my roommate and I got the guys downstairs to build it for us.
I also related to your description of those early days.
I was a dormie for five years, so I lived in multiple places. R-21a for two semesters, B-33b for two semesters, T-21 for three semesters, and T-22 for three semesters plus part of a summer. The T-21/T-22 shared-single had a couple of fantastic lofts. I really enjoyed them. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the new management cleared out the lofts. Later they even had false ceilings put into the upstairs units to prevent other lofts from being built — it was a shock at the 2010 reunion when I stepped into the living room of T-18 and saw what they’d done.
Just this morning, my sister and were chatting about the relaxed, uninhibited, au naturel aura of late 1960s and 1970s. Don’t know why we thought the peace-love-freedom-happiness vibes would last forever … guess we were just that young and naive?
Excellent post, and yeah… I miss John, too.
Yes, I miss those days! I was at the tail end of the hippies, and many of us really believed in “getting back to the Garden,” as Joni Mitchell sang. Thor and I manage naturist getaways in the Caribbean when possible, to recapture the joy of sunning and swimming au naturel. Here’s to surviving for another swing of the pendulum!
I lived in the dorms from 1981-84. In T13, S22, T17, B12, T1, C1 and S23. And I remember how we would speak with a sort of bemused reverence of the legendary old days: the nude sunbathing, Quaalude factory, the celebrated orgy in the Coffee House, the fact that the cafeteria was left open all night for residents to use, and the fact that you could actually get college credit for living there! Then too–in addition to the lofts–there were all those custom-painted doors: Be One and Be Two, that great Lowenbrau lion on B11, the vitamin formula for B12, the Grateful Dead album, that Archimedes guy on T13 (which my roommate Dave Mohr painted himself), and of course the stained glass one (in F8, I think it was). Adele was still up at the office when I moved in there, running the show (before she got bumped by the new management–with their increasingly reactionary ways). I too have written quite a bit about those times–several books’ worth, in fact (available on Amazon kindle).
I’ll have to check that out, Tony. Given that I’m a fiction writer, many is the time I’ve weighed the possibility of writing a novel or a story about the SSU dorm community of the 1970s and early 1980s. Ultimately I would always tell myself the real place was too special and too unique. To fictionalize it would mean having to put in some sort of conflict to be resolved, and I preferred to think of the place as too wonderful to think of it in terms of conflicts. I’ll be glad to see how you’ve approached it. By the way, have you visited the “Friends of T18” group on Facebook? I assume you’ve seen it?
Actually, I found that the conflicts could be rather wonderful too at times. 🙂 Once those obstacles were overcome, it made the place seem all the more richly affecting. I’ve also written with a good deal of fondness about the people I knew there…the book I’m working on now featuring (among other things) the very first trip I made to SSU in 1980 (for what I believe was the very first luau weekend)–where I met Lisa Kusel, among others. It also touches upon things like reunions later on; I hoped to make it more an ode to the place–accompanied by a great debt of gratitude–rather than the usual “objective” fictional treatment.
Yes, I have recently visited the “Friends of T18” group. Incidentally, one thing I should point out is that the living room conversions actually took place in the fall of 1982 (not 1981)–as I found out much to my chagrin when I arrived at my new 9-person B12 only to discover that it was now an 11-person (and that I no longer had a living room).
Actually though, I’m not too big a fan of facebook (there being far too many omelet pictures on it for my tastes). Back when I was on that site though, I became a member of the “Friends” group–that is, until its leader Ron Horne (who incidentally went to the same high school I did–the one which originated the term “420”) kicked me out…for some strange reason. An incident which I must admit only added to my misgivings about fb (AKA Zuckerberg’s Folly). 🙂