Our Story | In a glass case of emotion

This past weekend was madness, pure madness. We were planning to attend one graduation and party on Saturday, another on Sunday, and then host my Mom and Aunt who were up from Florida on Monday night (and celebrating a belated Mother’s Day). So, most of the latter part of the week was spent somewhere between denial (”we’re going to be HOW busy this weekend?”) and slavishly cleaning up the apartment, doing laundry, and catching up on all the things we would normally do if we were in town.

My sister asked me to babysit my dad for her graduation day on Saturday. This involved, in part, keeping him a safe distance from my mom because, after their divorce, my parents apparently became highly reactive agents that could detonate in each other’s presence under the right conditions. It also meant politely discussing the finer points of non sequitur topics such as company incorporation, the stock market, holding companies, getting a mortgage, the housing market, and the the value of the “1943 steel penny”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_steel_penny.

Jaime’s graduation was a three-hour waiting game full of uninspiring speeches and awards for people I didn’t recognize. The best and most important part, of course, was when my sister had received her Masters of Science in Management after five long years of work. In comparison to her effort, it was a moment so fleeting that the best I could do was capture a “blurry glimpse”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/149090731/ as she took her degree from the dean. That afternoon, I lunched with dad and headed over to Jaime’s “graduation party”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/149078512/ for a much-needed beer.

Later that evening, I met up with Schmoo to head out to Ithaca for my brother-in-law’s commencement for _his_ Master’s degree. We stayed on campus in one of the dorms where I really got to see Russ’ tuition dollars at work. The Ithaca College ceremony was shorter and more interesting. The student-body president’s speech paled in comparison to the message given by US Senator Bill Bradley, but that didn’t stop him from rambling on about “those good times, man” at Ithaca College and asking his mom to stand up in recognition of Mother’s Day. Three-quarters of the way through, Russ sends me a text message with the perfect summary for what we were all thinking: “Kill me.”

We got to spend a good amount of time with “Russ, Sarah and Evan”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/148459770/, having planned to take Monday off for the drive back. We rarely get to spend more than a rushed holiday meal together with them, so it was nice to enjoy leisurely strolls to Wegman’s together and talk.

Monday afternoon we headed back to spend some more time with my mom and aunt — also nice because quality time comes even less often with their being in Florida. Over dinner, my mom told us some family news that made it an even bigger week for my sister than she might have expected. Last night, I got an excited call from Jaime that confirmed the news: her “boyfriend of five years”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/149097021/ took her out to the beach in Sarasota and popped the question. She said yes. :)