November 27, 2001
a flood of memories last night on the way home, we ended up behind a car with an iowa license plate and cornell college license plate frame. i couldn't even keep from shouting, "cornell college!!" in my boobala's ear. now, i know that other people from my alma mater have ended up here somehow...many of them for graduate school, like me...but this was the first time i'd seen it so declared. if s. hadn't been with me, i think i would have had to make a conscious effort not to follow this guy wherever he was going, pull up next to him, and yell out my car window, "hey! i went to cornell, too!" *lol* funny thing was, he turned onto this street where r, an old friend of mine and another fellow cornellian, used to live...and where i spent a lot of time during my first year (and his second) of grad school...and rushing back came the memories of that era...the late '80s, when i had just come out of the closet, just moved to a city, and was embarking on the adventure of the rest of my life...all of which was a pretty big deal for a small-town iowa girl like me.
i've lost touch with most of the people i called my friends back then...most, because we just lost touch...a couple, because they're no longer of this world...others because we remind each other too much of the good times we had before people we knew and loved started dying of AIDS-related illnesses. back then, you could discover that you were HIV-positive one week, and be dead the next. when i learned that my friend e was sick, i didn't even get to see him before he died; i was busy trying to convince him to let me come over...suddenly, it was too late. my friend d (one of the first people i met here, and one of THE most brilliant people i've ever known) lived a lot longer...but rather than letting his friends and colleagues witness his mind and body being ravaged by this unforgiving disease, he packed up and left for his home country of canada, and i never saw him again. i heard, tho, that he was reading derrida and foucault right up to the end. *s*
it's a different world, now. i know people who have been HIV-positive for over a decade and they're happy and healthy. one runs marathons. another did both the california and dc AIDS rides last summer, within a week of each other.
still, we all know that AIDS in africa is getting worse all the time, exacerbated by governments who seem to care even less about those who are afflicted than the u.s. and even in this country, AIDS cases--especially among women and ethnic minorities--are on the rise even today, despite all the new knowledge and new drugs that we have now, even with all the educational efforts that have been undertaken for so many years.
whew *shaking head*...this is so NOTwhat this post was going to be about when i started it. sometimes the onslaught of memories takes you to places you don't expect to go...
12:33 PM
|
|
