Mom
Still working out how often to post on here, clearly. But it's been an interesting week. Mostly because my mother fell. My mother is a set of contradictions, as much as anything else. She's a working-class Italian American girl from a tough neighborhood who was going to be a school teacher but somehow stumbled into the sciences and became a laboratory technician (she finished her Ph.D. in biology the same year I did, only weeks after me; I think that makes her a second generation Ph.D. but will have to look it up somewhere). A committed atheist who hates religion but who went to all Catholic schools right up through college, she once told me that Catholic schools are good training for atheists, because having gone to one atheism seemed the only logical course of action to her. A political radical and fierce advocate for racial equality who for years told my Indian wife, then girlfriend, stories about an Indian roommate my mother had once had. An incre...