COLUMN: Straight From the Hog's Eye - Open doors make for best friendships

I stumbled the other day across a song some friends and I had recorded as a joke during our freshman year of college. I found it while listening to my computer’s music player on shuffle. The random song selections often bring up an artist who I haven’t heard in a while, but really clicks with me again when I hear it unexpectedly. As a result, I’ll dig up an album or two by that musician or group and do some more intensive listening.

I rarely hear any of my old recordings that cause me to think, “Man, I’d love to go back and hear more of that.” Sometimes, it’s painful to go back and hear how rudimentary my musical skill was, although I’m occasionally surprised with a creative moment within my otherwise nascent ability.

That wasn’t a concern when I rediscovered this song; in recording it, a group of friends just got together, someone threw out a concept for lyrics, and we made the thing up on the spot. It was no pressure, and for that reason, it’s aged fairly well for me.

What those musical sessions were born from, however, was the open-door atmosphere that existed in my freshman-year dormitory at the University of South Carolina. I haven’t experienced that kind of environment ever since.

The year I was 18 was probably one of the best years of my life. Some of the friends I made then are still musical collaborators of mine to this day. We could just wander into one another’s rooms and listen to a new album someone had bought, and maybe it was something we wouldn’t otherwise have heard. On the weekends, you could just take a study break and find yourself in the middle of movie night with your neighbors.

In more extreme cases, like that with me and my friends, we would take advantage of any opportunity we could find to make noise and record songs. The residence life coordinators would schedule “loud hours,” especially as a way to relieve stress during exam times. And boy, would we be loud.

Everyone was sad to see the freshman year come to an end. We all went our separate ways for the summer and returned to Columbia in August. During our sophomore year, many of us again shared a dorm, the much more vertical Capstone — the one with the circular rotating restaurant on the top. It’s a part of Columbia’s skyline from several spots in the city.

Capstone was more visible than the freshman year dorm, where we were tucked away in a corner of the university’s historic Horseshoe area. But my friends and I unfortunately grew more secluded from one another. Our musical endeavors became more infrequent and eventually stopped. Doors were closed more often than they were propped open.

The following year, most of us had on-campus apartments with our individual rooms, and I saw friends even less as a result.

After graduation, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have made it easier to keep in touch not only with college friends, but friends from high school and even earlier.

But back to the old recording I’d found. Unusually for me, I wanted to hear more of the old songs we’d recorded, but I couldn’t find the CDs I’d put them on. Thanks to e-mail, I caught up in the middle of the night with a friend who had the songs, and he sent them to me.

The Internet has connected us like we never have been before, even on a global scale. But it’s nothing next to the personal and in-person connections we made by actually spending time together that first year of college.