Lazy Hot Days, Old Days & Numbered Days
We celebrated Father's Day on Sunday. My parents visited me, and we drove into the countryside for a local winery visit. We dropped by the local peach orchard after some wine tasting, but before getting pizza for dinner at a family-owned establishment that I consider to be one of the best kept secrets just outside of town.Sometimes you forget just how good a fresh-from-the-tree peach is until you have your first one of the season. You press the fruit to see if it's ripe, it gives ever so slightly to the pressure of your thumb, and then when you bite into it, the fragrant juice runs down your chin and makes your fingers sticky. Summer is definitely here.
Yesterday, over lunch, I reconnected with a friend from college that I had not seen in 14 years! Crazy! She had lived just down the hall from me during the 1994-95 school year at Mt. Holyoke. She was so bright and full of neat ideas, especially as a Women's Studies major, so we had some of the most stimulating conversations, often about feminism, sexuality, and politics, but also about music...and men and dating. But one of my favorite random memories of her was this one time when we were simply talking about guys and love, and she had let her feminist guard down a little bit as we talked about boyfriends and ex-boyfriends and how it depressed us to see some of the men who visited from the Coast Guard Academy, Dartmouth, and UMass, so visibly desperate for a hook-up. We talked as we were walking up the hill to the local bank and shopping complex across the street from the college...eating out of open container of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. It's such a random memory, but I found out yesterday that she remembered that specific conversation.
She graduated in 1995 but we lost touch after a couple of e-mails. We found each other last summer thanks to a certain popular social networking site with blue and white logo. She and her philosophy professor husband moved back to VA from Ohio last year, so that he could take a faculty position teaching at a small liberal arts college about an hour from here. Isn't it crazy how you can pick up a conversation with ease with someone after 14 years? It was so, so awesome to see her.
I also felt a little bit sad and scared for her when she told me of her struggles with a new diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, and that she was under the care of a neurologist at UVA (hence the Charlottesville visit). Although MS is a neurologically-driven, different beast from rheumatologic conditions (in my opinion it's scarier), many of the base issues of having an autoimmune condition are similar. So I can't help but think that things happen for a reason, and that maybe we're back in touch for a reason (other than that we're friends anyway).
On another note, I need to tell you that my faculty advisor's husband is unlikely to live much longer. My professor and her family returned from Boston a few weeks ago, thinking her husband's bone marrow transplant was successful b/c he passed the critical 1st 100 days and got an "OK" from his doctors to come home and recover. Yesterday, she sent an e-mail telling her students that the transplant did not work, the leukemia is back. I talked to my sister (a doctor) and our guess is that he likely won't make it through the summer. I have a host of feelings about this: I'm incredibly sad beyond words for her whole family. And yet, not to sound selfish, but, I'm also very legitimately worried about how this will affect me as a student, as I take comps and do my dissertation. Will these circumstances have a subtle ripple effect that delays my graduation because my advisor is essentially unable to be present?
OK. Before these thoughts and worries take over, I need to get out for a lunchtime lap swim workout (the best kind of workout in summer!). More as it happens....
