I have many treasured memories from my four years at the University of Washington, and to this day, they bring a smile to my face.

Below I share a handful of them with you so that they may lighten your load in a heavy time. Here’s one from the vault of 1984.

It was a late September day, the first day of my second year at the UW.

I had just risen from the button-down first to the noisier ninth floor of the Terry Hall dormitory, so as yet, I had not met any of its denizens. Thus, I was clueless what the group of guys that invited me to join them in “something” was up to. There were about six of them, and they were cagey with details about that “something.”

We were all in ordinary street clothes, except for that one dude concealed head to toe in a white plastic garbage bag. He kept to the back of our troupe. A suspicion rose in me that this oddball held the clue to what was about to go down. I hoped it had nothing to do with a collective mooning. Other than that, I was game.

I soon found myself among that band, going from room to room, knocking on doors. Whenever one opened, our guy out front would begin warbling, “I’m an acne pimple, as lonely as can be.”

Then, a second voice, moved by compassion for his solitary companion: “Don’t worry pimple, I’ll keep you company.”

Ah, ha! The first reveal: seems I had joined a brotherhood of zits.

A third enjoined: “Say fellow pimples, would three be a crowd? Come on all you pimples, sing out loud!”

As the full chorus burst into song, the dude in the bag got up and pushed his way forward, to the general alarm of the pimples, who read the tell-tale label on his side and moaned, “Oh no, it’s Clearasil!”

These performances all ended in a pigpile, with the would-be tube of cream doing his best to “Clearasil” the lot of us as we went along.

One comment stood out.

“What was that?” a woman’s voice inside a room called out to the person who’d opened the door.

“Just a bunch of idiots,” came the response.

Okay, we weren’t the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but for a newly constituted Acne Chorus, we weren’t bad.

Time moved on.

One winter’s day at about 9 p.m. came yelling from an upper floor of Condon Hall, the law building across the street: “Hey, you on the eighth floor, I see you naked!” Dorm windows opened, and voices shouted, “Pervert, weirdo!”

The windows shut again, so I thought that was it, and I turned back to my book.

Seems the unclothed person, however, did not get the message, as 30 minutes or so later, the herald of Condon Hall again bugled, “Hey, you, eighth floor, I still see you naked!” As before, indignant voices, insults and a curse or two.

The final installment begins the day our neighbor stuck a bunch of pencils up his nose, and ends the following day when a young woman innocently, unknowingly, chewed on them

Thank you, Ed, Keith, Steve, Jason, Travis, Zog, Liz, Phil, Terry, and the immortal John Tsugi, and all the others whose names I may have forgotten. You made it a time to remember.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.