I married my husband, who was a graduate student at Columbia, in the spring of 1983. Most of our friends were still students and singles at the time. Our wedding gifts mostly consisted of items affordable to college students, such as a $20 electric skillet or a set of forks. We initially moved into my in-laws’ apartment for a year, but with some help from our parents, we were finally able to move out.
The townhouse we bought was in a neighborhood called Fort Greene, which was considered a rough neighborhood at the time. Originally, we had been looking in better neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, but with our budget, all we could afford was a one-bedroom apartment. So, we expanded our search into less desirable neighborhoods and eventually bought a five-story, three-family old brownstone built in the late 1800s in Fort Greene. The house came with a tenant in the ground-floor apartment who helped us with the mortgage payments. This inadvertently opened our eyes to real estate, which later became our main business.
At the age of 24, we were the only ones among our friends to own a house, and we began hosting gatherings right away. Many of our friends came and spent the night with us. Back then, no one turned down an invitation for a meal; everyone was always hungry. My husband’s best friend, Peter, was studying for his MBA at Harvard, and he would often come down on weekends from Boston with a car full of friends. They came down for Korean-Chinese food (jajangmyeon) because they couldn’t find a restaurant serving it in the Boston area. Although they came for noodles, we couldn’t have noodles all weekend so the rest of the meals were up to me. I’m not sure how or what I fed them for the rest of the weekend, but no one went hungry. We probably didn’t even have enough beds or blankets, but no one complained. We were all young and carefree. When we visited them in Boston, they took turns watching our toddler son, Kevin, and even bought us tickets to the ballet for a date night. It’s hard to keep up with friends when you have a family of your own, but we’re fortunate to still remain good friends with people from those days. Perhaps it’s because we started from nothing and shared our youth.
Since our first gathering in 1984 at our Adelphi Street home, we’ve been hosting my husband’s college reunion for almost 40 years. What began with just a dozen people grew to more than a dozen families when our children were younger. We tried having the gathering in a restaurant once, but it just wasn’t the same. There’s no late-night tteokbokki when we get hungry again, and we had to end the night right after dinner. That’s why we continue to host the gathering at home. One year, there was a winter storm, and it snowed more than a couple of feet. We were afraid people might not show up, but almost everyone came, and a friend came with a snow blade on his truck to clean our driveway. Everyone knows that if you miss the annual gathering, you won’t see most people until the next one.
Our youth is behind us, and no one’s hungry anymore, but we’re more eager to get together as we age. No one wants to leave once they sit down. We talk about the same silly stories from our college days that we’ve heard a hundred times before, but everyone laughs as if they’re hearing them for the first time. I can just imagine us recycling the same stories twenty years from now. We tease each other as if we’re still in our twenties. We’re all so lucky to have each other.
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