Tahija just got the results of her final - 80%. With that, she earns her Associate degree and moves on to the Bachelor's program. She's majorly psyched (you can translate that as joyful). I asked her what her overall grade was but she says she didn't look. Soon as she got her test score she just called. Then she went out the front door, still talking to me, to see what was happening on the sidewalk. What was happening was her friend's baby was chewing on a wet soggy biscuit he had been chewing on the last time she looked out. She laughed lightly, and I heard others laughing . . . the joy of her success already rippling outward.
She mentioned the friend's name, Lamarr, and for a disoriented moment I thought she meant her little Lamarr, as if we were ten or so years down the road and some percentage of the triplets were fathers, and one of them was visiting her, his baby, her grandbaby (my great godbaby or is that greatgod baby?), sitting on the stoop gumming a soggy biscuit, her, near forty (!), telling me about it on the phone, me past sixty straining as always to hear her and the sounds around her and the implications of her tone and her every choice of word.
Or maybe we'll be living close again (but not too close). Maybe by then she'll have a Ph why the heck not D!
