VII. The Present

With 500,000 words in the English language (more than twice as many as in any other language) you would think that there wouldn't be very many words that have multiple meanings. Well, if you thought that, you're wrong. Take the word “set.” Some unabridged dictionaries ascribe more than 200 meanings to the word. Well, I have no intention of setting out to discuss the word “set.” However, I do wish to talk a bit about the present.

My friend Dr. Karen Peterson, whose birthday is today, used to say that every time that she would see me or my daughter Christine, it was like having a Christmas present. Until we moved from Boston (when Christine was still a little girl – 3 ½ years old), we would visit weekly (this was pretty much an every-Saturday ritual for years). This is a picture of Christine graduating from high school last May. She is on the left, with her friends Emily and Katie (who also ended up going to school in New York). This is another one of Christine and Karen, three years ago at my Mom’s 93rd Birthday Party, and one of Christine on the beach near where Mom used to live.

Of course, when it comes to feeling that I had gotten a present, I felt (and feel) similarly about Karen. I think that Christine did (and does), too. What Karen said used to reorient me to the here and now. One really is in the present when one is in the presence of a present. Friendships are like presents.

What’s especially nice about this “business” is that I am surrounded by people with similar values. Some of them, such as Karen and Dr. Prakash Gupta, become lifelong friends. That seems to be happening now with a number of people around here including Drs. Mangesh Pednekar (who is Associate Director of Healis) and Rajiv Sarin. Not only do these friendships produce such warmth and comfort, they are pretty productive in other ways, too. For example, on the academic side, Karen and I published seven papers together last year and Mangesh (on the far right), Prakash, and I published two. What's probably more important is that these people are changing the world in fundamentally important ways (such as setting tobacco use policies for the largest country on the planet and revolutionizing cancer care).

Yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail from Dr. Sarin asking me if I'd like to go for a walk. I love going for walks here. So, I finished up my work at Healis and took Ruby back home to ACTREC. Just around sundown Dr. Sarin, Dr. Pradnya Kowtal (the director of the lab in which the single nucleotide polymorphisms for our breast cancer study will be tested) and I began a tour around the campus. It was a long and elegant walk on which we greeted patients and talked about the philosophy of patient care and careful use of scarce resources. Part way through the walk, Pradnya mentioned that it was Dr. Madhavi Chilkuri's (another one of these most interesting radiation oncologists – I’ll talk more about that later!) Birthday, too! So, we stopped by the Guest House, where both Madhavi and I are staying and where I took this picture, and proceeded to walk. Madhavi lagged behind because of her fear of snakes. We ended up having this very nice birthday toast with sweet lemon juice. Of course, we made sure that there were no snakes lurking before sitting down. Later, on our walk back to the Guest House, Dr. Sarin shared some stories about his appreciation for snakes and that the ACTREC grounds keepers present them to him after capturing them and before releasing them in the forest nearby.