I'm to go to Chicago no sooner and no later than when my younger girl goes into labor. That means that I have to be ready to sprint and ready to be away for a while. Everything I do now is with the thought that it may be interrupted.
And I am interrupted this morning. Not by my pregnant daughter, but by the grandkids in town who really, really want to come over.
The day is set.
But my thoughts run to the past. To the years when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago (sociology, but I never wrote the dissertation that would have netted me my PhD).
I had a quirky group of smart friends then. Few of them wound up doing conventional tenure track sociology at some prestigious university (well, my then husband did, but he was not really part of my set). One such quirky guy was Steve. He was funny and brilliant and he was the first openly gay friend I had. (I'd arrived from Poland just two years earlier and believe me, in those days, if you were gay in Poland, you did not disclose it, possibly not even to yourself.) Along with another friend, who herself was omnisexual (a category that I definitely knew nothing about), we formed a very fun trio of friends.
But it didn't last. I left it all and moved to Madison with my then husband who got a job here and I chucked sociology (hence the unfinished dissertation) in favor of law school. I tend to take five minutes to make life altering decisions, both in terms of career and life partners. Had there been email then, I would have stayed in touch, I'm sure of it. But, letter writing wasn't a thing with us and long distance phone calls were expensive (remember those days?)! Besides, I was struggling to be a good cook, a present and caring parent and partner, and a faculty member at the law school. My focus had shifted.
Steve died last night. I got an email from a mutual friend telling me about it. Cancer. I hadn't spoken to Steve since I stopped attending sociology conventions (some 40 years) and yet it was a real gut punch. It made me think about all the quirky friends I had over my adult life. The sets I joined, then left. The years of being intimately connected to Madison's Latin American musicians. Other years where I hung out with L'Etoile's restaurant crew late into the night finishing bottles of wine customers had had uncorked but never finished. All these friends had no connection to each other. They stayed in their own sets and I was the interloper. No one minded the presence of an outsider. And me -- I was mesmerized by the views into these other lives.
This is what I talked to Ed about over breakfast this morning. It's our ongoing conversation about how to both appreciate and work around differences between people who, like us, seemingly have nothing in common.
I speculated if maybe us immigrants who have switched cultures have an easier time of it with moving between new environments. We don't need the comfort of the same people around us all the time. Academics who mingle with academics, machinists who stick with other machinists. (I say this having been married to an academic and now having entered the world of machinists and machine designing through Ed.) My Polish friends, with rare exception, are equally entrenched in their world of economics and academia. How does it happen that we limit ourselves in this way? That we pick friends not because they're funny or clever or good cooks and talented musicians, or even just good pals, but because they do the same set of tasks as we do?
Anyway, I miss Steve and I wish I had written to him and let him know that he was a very important person in my life and that he made my graduate school years sparkle.
In the afternoon the kids are here.
And in the evening, the parents and Sandpiper join us all...
... for dinner.
First Arctic blast coming at us tomorrow. Get ready for it!
