The wonderful folks at Swarthmore keep surprising us with their care for Orion. AS you know they are making it possible for him to graduate by being flexible. In this they gave him three tasks to complete. He had to finish a paper in a history class- DONE! He had to submit his physics thesis and give up honors- DONE! He has to complete an email tutorial on Counter-Factual History with Professor Burke. WORKING on it!
What else did Swarthmore do? Move all that work into the previous semester, put him on leave and did not CHARGE us for this semester. That's twenty-five grand folks! Yikes.
Okay what about all his stuff back at the dorm? They packed it all up and shipped it UPS. After UPS found a driver willing to drive down our icy driveway and deliver the six boxes, each 50-60 pounds, Sally hauled them up to Orion's room. How she did this is a mystery since she weighs about what she did when we fell in love (about two boxes). Now imagine me picking up half my weight. Not possible.
So Orion starts unpacking all of his college life and discovers that as a gourmand he owns a very large container of mustard powder. This has broken open during shipping and covered everything in the box with yellow mustard powder. He spent many hours today cleaning out this mustard powder.
Ah! The connections begin to come together. Chemotherapy was invented/discovered during WW1 when British soldiers, gassed by the Hun using mustard gas were recovering. Doctors noticed that those soldiers with cancer went into remission. Holy Smoke! They started giving cancer patients mustard gas derivatives and saw some great results. One hundred years later, a century, one of Orion's deadliest drugs is Ifosfamide, a mustard gas derivative.
The other thing Orion and I did is visit our new condo in Northampton. Sally and I had long planned to move to downtown Northampton in our dotage. A perfect walking location, close to all amenities. We found such a place and made a deal just two weeks before Orion was diagnosed with brain cancer. We followed through, knowing what horrors we might come to, because life does go on. If we manage to get it fixed up and settled it will make life easier on Sally with the shorter commute to work and Boston and the far fewer chores involved in battling Nature in the Hills. As for Steve in Boston, he has his rat studies.
Good old Universal Putaforkliftiniit Service.Everyone loves a good mystery. Mustard, wow!Enjoy your visit to the hills.See you soon in Boston......Willing UPSMan.
ReplyDeleteGreat! Glad thing's are going so well!
ReplyDelete-Vanessa
As for Sally, I always knew that under that demure intellectual disguise she was Wonder Woman! Always so amazing.
ReplyDeleteI've known Sally longer (not better--just longer) than any of you (except her sister or any other relative reading this blog) and I am not surprised that she could heft those UPS boxes to Orion's room. I have a great photo from our best summer camp experience (Tsungani "primitive" camping which must have prepared Sally for rustic life in the country) which she would probably pay me not to post. This photo occurred one particularly silly afternoon when we were all cold and wet from the rain. She had a blanket around her, and when she leaned forward, you could see the unmistakable hump on her back. Anyway, it proved that she is a camel, so that is how she was able to carry half of her weight! Steve, you must not be a camel if you can't carry half your weight. So--that explains it.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Swarthmore rocks! You get to keep $25,000 that you would have spent on tuition this semester and Orion still gets professor time and gets to graduate with his class! Orion certainly chose his college very well! Kudos to a college/university with ethics and a kind spirit. What a gift to have that money to use to support your living in Boston and travel to and from Boston.
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