Short Entry: Between Chicago and Philadelphia: turnberryknkn

turnberryknkn

Short Entry: Between Chicago and Philadelphia

Jun 18, 2003 01:27

Yesterday (Monday) afternoon in Chicago was a beautiful cool, sunny day, with blue sky above and strong breeze blowing the waves torwards the shore, as my brother Gauss and I walked along the concrete of the lakeshore for almost two hours, up north from where Northwestern University medical school sits on Chicago's Magnificent Mile, up past the North Avenue Beach House and beyond, talking of many things...

Gauss and I were born less than three years apart; grew up in the same bedroom together; share a wide swath of interests in science fiction and video games and engineering geekery. We shared a common previous life in engineering and share a common work now in medicine: there are things you can talk about with another medical student that you can't easily talk about with anyone else, and Gauss and I share a closeness that goes even further...

Those who have read my diary know that I have been lucky to share many truly special friendships with extrodinary people. The kind of closeness and hugs and joy that many people long for, I have been lucky enough to share many, many times, and in a sense this diary has been an attempt to capture even a little of the magic, gratitude and fondness I have for those memories and the special friends who made them so. It perhaps offers some perspective to say that the trust and understanding I share with Gauss is an easy order of magnitude deeper still than that which I share with anyone else on these diaries. Being brothers doesn't necessarily mean being friends, let alone close ones: but Gauss and I are very close friends indeed.

It is an act of great generosity on the part of my mentor to invite me to join her at the meeting of the Endocrine Society, for five days of hard-core science entirely paid for by her. Hours of presentations on topics and data so new it hasn't even been published; evenings being introduced by her to everyone who is anyone in my field of study. It is an awesome opportunity, and very kind of her to offer it to me --especially since not a penny of my NSF or NDSEG fellowships can be used torwards $230 registration fee or the $500+ hotel bill and all has to come out of her pocket. I've been extremely lucky with her as my mentor --and with my two previous mentors, and sometime will come an entry about all of that. And it is an honor too to serve at the preceeding meeting of the House of Delegates. But it does keep one busy.

I didn't have time to plan see publius1 or prince_corwin or yarnowl or so many others, much to my frustration; and I leave for Philadelphia in a few hours unable to even offer time to plan to see anlon or Mavis, much to my further disappointment. But I did manage to hack time out for Gauss. And a quick perusal of e-mail offers the hope of happy gatherings later this summer, perhaps for the Ann Arbor Arts Fair, of dear friends from far and near...

And at the end of the day --or it's beginning, as it is now-- it is not the frustration, the stress, the anger or despair that stays with us, I think: it is the memories of laughter and hugs between friends who care and trust each other, and the hopes of those things to come. If you're lucky, you meet friends in your life who care about you and trust you like a brother or sister you never had. If you're luckier, your family is as close to you as the best friends you could possibly ever have. And if you're impossibly lucky, you have both. I've been impossibly lucky.

And that's what comes to mind as I sit in my apartment with the windows open, catching a pause between the last meeting and the next.

Off to Philadelphia and the Endocrine Society. See you when I see you. :-)