To begin the story at the beginning, read "Part 1: Post 1: Beginning Again," published in January, 2013. To consult a description of the campus, read "Part 1: Post 14: The Greening of Campus," published in March, 2013.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Mastery Year 2: First Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel-of 2018, here.

I don't have much to say. It was curious writing last week's post on the birth of Steve and Sarah's child, since so my of my reaction to those events had to do with my awareness of not being a father yet. The idea of being on deck, that Steve was the first of us to have a child but that the rest of us would follow. And now, of course, I do have a child, so writing that post just really reminded me of how much my life has changed.

I never had that feeling about the men I went to high school with, or about the men I went to grad school with--that sense of there being an us, a kind of generation or cohort, going through milestones together. I'm not sure why. I mean, I know how, I know the mechanics of the cohesion and its absence. My high school buddies and I drifted apart as we started separate careers and partnered up--I'm still friends with most of them, but barely. I see them on Facebook. We don't talk much except to say how we should talk more. And my grad school friends were never close (except, obviously, June), and most of them were married, or otherwise in committed partnerships, when we met. So there wasn't this before-and-after feeling.

Ollie, Steve, and I were single together. Now we all have families. Andy and Eddie and Rick were part of our group, too, and still are, but haven't taken the plunge. Eddie is still in love with every woman he meets, Andy does not seem to date, and Rick...is still Rick. But the sense of brotherhood holds.

What I don't know if why moving on from adolescence broke up my adolescent social group, or why I never developed that sense of brotherhood with my friends in grad school, even the ones who were single with me.

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm not friends with women. You know I am friends with women. It's not even that I'm closer to my male friends. Maybe it's that I identify with men more. Or something. I've never had this sense of camaraderie in the face of milestones with the women.

How did I get on this topic?

I have only one "programming note," as it were. Steve's wife's name is Sarah, and she's going to become an important "character" this year, which presents a problem because, of course, Sarah the farm manager also remains a character. We never gave them separate nick-names or anything like that. Usually it was clear from context which was which, and if someone wasn't sure they could ask. But you can't ask, or at least I'd be a pretty sorry writer if I made you post comments to the blog in order to find out who I'm talking about. If I were writing all of this as pure fiction, I wouldn't run into this mess because I could give everybody unique, un-mix-up-able names, like you're supposed to do in fiction, but the fact of the matter is, in the real world you end up with a repetition of names.

So I'm just going to have to use last names more often than we actually did. Sarah Grimm was the farm manager and Sarah Kelly is Steve's wife. They get along fairly well, incidentally.

-best, D

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