Reconnections

I can't believe we forgot to take a picture of Jack on his five month birthday! I am really falling down on this picture-taking this, for a supposed compulsive picture-taker. The closest I got to Jack on his birthday was this photo I took the following day of him with his new friend Milena. I do think they look cute there, hanging out together in the backseat. Milena is the daughter of a friend in my program-- or rather a friend who was in my program until she got an awesome job for East Bay Regional Parks doing education and outreach. They hired her before she even had the PhD, and since then she's been trying to juggle finishing up her dissertation with this new job and her three-month old daughter. And I thought I had my hands full. It was fun to see Cat in such a different context; she was one of the first people I met when I came to Berkeley, and she was the one who gave me the sage advice: "it doesn't matter what you do for your dissertation, it just needs to be somewhere you like enough to drag yourself there for four or five summers in a row." This was what gave me the courage to shrug off my advisor's study system (the Central Valley) and choose my own (the Cental Coast). Thinking back to us, driving around as I assisted her in the field one day, wind whipping through our hair, giggling about boys, just a couple of carefree gals that I never would've imagined would be pushing strollers in a park discussing diaper services only four years later. It has recently occurred to me that this would be my senior year at Berkeley if I were an undergrad. College seemed like such an unbelievably long journey at the time, and I was so hyper-conscious of whether and how much I was changing every step of the way. These four years have slipped by kind of without me even noticing. The day we moved here, that first summer of field work, the first day of classes, all seem like yesterday. Yet since then, Danny's been through three jobs (four, if you count working for me!), we got married, we bought a house, we had a kid... how is it that everything in college seemed like such a big deal at the time and all this really doesn't? Maybe I was just too self-absorbed in college. At any rate, reconnecting with Cat gave me this sort of telescopic view of my time at Berkeley and I realized for the first time how much had changed and how, fundamentally, nothing really had. One of my other friends asked me recently if I missed doing the things we used to do before Jack was born and I thought, well, I know logically that my life is different now but it really doesn't feel that way. Sometimes I find myself thinking back to things that happened in previous years and absent-mindedly trying to remember where Jack was before I wake up and realize he didn't exist yet, that he's only been with us for a mere five months. Sometimes that in itself is a little hard to believe.