Recuperation

A typical tray outside my quarantine room

My final road trip stop was a weekend with my friend D and his partner T in Chicago. D and I are old foodie friends, so we ate many delicious meals- Georgian, Polish, and Italian. We make great food partners because I´m willing to do all the cooking and he´s willing to bankroll the ingredients (and make the cocktails). The Italian meal was inspired by a cooking show episode he saw about Amalfi lemons, including a lemon pound cake and lemon pesto.

Unfortunately, at the end of the weekend, I started feeling ill. I managed to drive partway to a hotel that afternoon, and by the time I made it to my parents´ house the following day, I was testing positive for Covid. So I´ve spent the last week in my parents´ guest room. It has all turned out pretty well, in that I seem to have avoided infecting them, and my mom is the best caregiver ever. She makes delicious lunch trays and even includes extras like a cloth napkin or a little chocolate. I felt so lucky to bask in that love while I slept all week. I´m recovering, and I think I should be well enough to drive home tomorrow so I can discover exactly how overgrown my garden has become.

Farewell Tour

Camping, instead of hotelíng, at a conference

One of the things I wanted to do this summer is visit friends and relatives who I will likely not see once I leave the US. My road trip through the Midwest has been part of that. In Champaign-Urbana (Illinois), I attended a family wedding and caught up with cousins and aunts. I ate ice cream with my friend E, a tradition we have maintained since graduate school, and I spent time with his lovely partner J and their menagerie of guinea pigs, a rabbit, and a cat. I ate pizza and played Little Chicago with my friends in Kankakee, where I grew up.

I also got to say goodbye to physics. For the past fifteen years, I have attended an annual conference of physics educators. I gave my first professional talks there, as a terrified young graduate student. I met professors who encouraged me and argued with me about my research and who were probably the anonymous reviewers of my published papers. I watched the students in my cohort graduate and do postdocs and become professors who now bring their own students. As my career progressed, I became the person looking for work to promote or fund, who spoke on behalf of my organization.  This conference was so important to me that I planned my wedding around it. 

Because it is a relatively small community, I consider many of them friends, not just colleagues. The conference was located in Grand Rapids, Michigan this summer, just five hours from where I had been staying earlier in the week, so I took the opportunity to say goodbye. I didn´t attend a single talk or workshop, I just sat in the hallways and lobbies and waited for people I knew to walk by. Because of the pandemic, attendance was light, but I still got to have long conversations with many people, including my doctoral and postdoctoral advisors, people who really shaped me professionally, and who are good friends. It felt amazing to see all the important work that will continue without me, and to say goodbye, in person, to the community that made me the physicist and professional that I am.

Kankakee, my once upon a time hometown

I lived for many of my growing up years in Kankakee, Illinois, a town stuck in the cornfields about an hour south of Chicago. When my parents got together with friends, they played a dice game they called Little Chicago. The origin story of this game is practically mythical, and you won´t find it on the internet. As a kid, all I knew was that it involved five dice and seemed to take hours. Children were never invited to play, nor were we ever interested in such a boring pasttime, which was clearly just an excuse to talk.

I am in visiting my parents´ friends, who are now also my friends, for a few days as part of a Midwest road trip. Last night I got to play Little Chicago with the grownups for the first time, and I won. Now I feel I must retire from the game, because my 100% winning rate can only go down. I can, however, now see the point of a relatively straightforward game that gives you lots of time to chat.

Its always fun to visit a town that you last knew as a child. Kankakee is very, very midwestern and American, full of wide streets, strip malls, and lovely neighborhoods full of old trees. Of course the buildings are smaller than I remember, but the downtown is also emptier. Is that my faulty memory, or the passage of time (and big box stores) chasing out the smaller stores? I´m not sure. In any case, Kankakee has always been able to boast about its mention on Arlo Guthrie´s song, The City of New Orleans, and I am pleased to report that they can also boast about their soda. I went to a locally owned root beer stand and had an excellent float for an absurdly low price (unlike my experience in Philadelphia). 

Tomorrow I leave for camping in near Grand Rapids and then it´s on to Chicago. Stay tuned for even more pictures of flat places.

The Magic of Rural Pennsylvania

My annual physicist camping trip this year was short a few physicists and mostly lacking the camping. We lost 1.5 families to ill timed COVID illness, and we decided to rest a shared house rather than stay in tents and cabins. Because we avoided state parks with strict reservation rules, we could plan our Pennsylvania trip for the warn month of June instead of the usual freezing early May weekend. The family farmhouse was lovely, surrounded by hay fields and gently bellowing cows.

As always, our trip included singing around the campfire, hikes, and communal dinners. A new experience for me was a bike ride through a tunnel on a decommissioned highway. The picture below doesn´t really do the tunnel justice. It was a gaping maw of darkness stretching 1.3 miles (2km). We pedaled for more than 15 minutes in the dark, by the light of a very dim phone flashlight before we made it out the other side. There were many jokes made about the literal light at the end of the tunnel. I was really impressed that the two kids in our bike group were pedaled fearlessly so long, even as I fought the feeling that a giant hole in the (poorly maintained) concrete would suddenly appear and swallow us.

I wish I could write a poem about the light of the fireflies. I have never seen such displays, which lasted hours and were dense with lights. We all agreed it was amazing, although I may have been laughed at when I suggested it was like a Disney World fireworks display.

I don´t know if the timing will work out for me to attend next year, but I certainly hope to come back to the US for more of these annual trips at some point. This decade-long tradition, with graduate school friends, and now their children, is one that I would like to continue sharing.