Notre Dame, Our Mother

“Hi mom, it’s me. Steve.” My roommate would start every call home this way. I wonder what today’s student would make of the idea of sharing a phone? Of having a phone that was physically attached to the wall by a cord of some lunatic length and a receiver that was itself connected to the base by another coil, equally long? What would today’s student make of the ritual of producing your room’s answering machine message?

I howled internally whenever my roommate would reintroduce himself to his mother. I wasn’t eavesdropping on him. None of us really wanted to listen to each other’s conversations with our parents or our girlfriends from high school, but we were four young men living in one…