It is impossible to grow up in such an environment and not have a healthy amount of respect for Mom and Dad. For me and my sister, those small, repetitive gestures that Mom and Dad exchanged were like the individual dots of color in a pointillistic painting; relatively insignificant when viewed on their own, but ripe with significance when viewed collectively and from a distance. And once the whole painting is fully appreciated, the individual dots can never be looked upon as mere individual dots again. Now that my sister and I reflect upon our childhood – now that we are both grown women, professionals, and parents, and have had the benefit of both time and maturity to see things in an entirely different perspective – the meaning of all of those small, repetitive gestures comes into view. A parent performs many gestures on behalf of a child, of course. But one in particular has seared itself into my memory, when it comes to Dad. It is the sort of gesture that – were I an actress and a script required me to cry Oscar-worthy performance tears (which thankfully my relatively asceptic, serious, and rule-driven practice of law never requires) – would be the deep-seated memory to which I would turn to get the job done. This is one of my most treasured ‘individual dots’. Few days compare in my life to the day that I moved in to Harvard Yard in 1992, at the start of my freshman year in college. There is
nothing more magical than early fall in Harvard Yard: the soft grass has been well groomed by the landscaping crews to welcome new students and their families; the sunlight filters through magnificent oaks, their tops just beginning to burnish with the gold and orange hues of the season; the zigzagged pathways teem with students, small groups each seemingly speaking languages from different corners of the world, their conversations punctuated only by the occasional ringing of the Memorial Church bell. As I collected my dorm room keys from the housing office representative from the white tent that had been set up in the middle of Harvard Yard, I was bursting with nervous anticipation and excitement. This was before the days when smart phones were a compulsory fashion accessory. Calls home were still made from the single land line in the dorm room, which was equipped with an extra long cord so that the phone could be toted into the closet and the door closed if privacy was needed. There were no iPads or iMacs or iAnythings. Messages to friends were scrawled on small white marker boards hung outside our dorm rooms, not texted. I distinctly recall opening the Harvard University phone book and seeing that some, not all, faculty and staff had these odd designations underneath their office addresses and phone numbers ending in ‘@harvard.edu’ and thinking, “What sort of odd Yankee university phone system is this?”
A Festschrift in Honor of Thomas Chiu, MD
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