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By Root 1065 0

do a lot of the shopping and cooking that would otherwise eat up so much of my time. He enjoyed having something to do, and I loved it. I would wake up in the morning and pass him in the kitchen on my way to do my meditation, saying, “Are you making breakfast for graduate students this morning?” followed by, “What’s for lunch.” After a reprisal of those hearty bowls of oatmeal from the Camp Wig days, he would send me off with a little lunch basket filled with a sandwich and nuts, teabags, and a thermos of hot water. I would load them into my bicycle’s cherry blossom saddlebags, along with books and notebooks, and pedal across the Charles River to class, saying hello to my friends the geese and the sycamore trees along the way. In the evening, I’d come and lay out all the work I needed to do that evening, organizing reams of paper, coordinating readings with class notes. Dad would have been in the kitchen preparing a beautiful meal, which we would share, and I would talk excitedly about my invariably interesting day. When I hosted dinner for classmates, he and Mollie did all the work, making sure the food was wonderful, the table adorned with cherry blossoms. (They, along with me, hung on every word my Palestinian and Israeli classmates, who took part in their countries’ top-level negotiations, were saying.) It was like living out my childhood dream of having full-time parents to take care of me—a need that one doesn’t outgrow, whether in kindergarten or in graduate school. It was what I had always hoped family could feel like.

When the weather was bad or I was running late, Dad would drive me to class. I introduced him to all my professors, and he audited a few of my classes. Diane Rosenfeld, who taught a course in gender violence at Harvard Law School, actually sent him home with reading assignments. He told me it was all he could do to keep from raising his hand in class. Although Dad does not share my politics, defining himself as somewhat right of center, we respect each other’s opinions and would have interesting political discussions. He wanted to read everything I was reading for class, from scholarly articles to entire books. He would look at me when he was ready for more reading material, his eyes tracing back and forth from what I had in my hand to my face, making me smile because it reminded me of what Buttermilk does when I am eating something and he wants a bite of it. It was nourishing having him back in my life.

Within weeks of the fall term, my joy was intense, bordering at times on the ecstatic. In certain classes, such as “Public Narrative: Self, Us and Now,” taught by my glorious advisor Marshall Ganz, my biggest challenge was making my papers short enough. More than once, my work would be sent back to me with stern reminders about length. Once, I had a point deducted, which was absolutely the most effective way to induce my respect for page count. (I was obsessed with making straight A’s at Harvard and nearly succeeded. Two profs had the “audacity” to give me a B plus!)

My enthusiasm was unbounded. My mind and soul were on fire, which is my favorite mode of being. I sometimes wept in classes, overcome with the connections crackling inside of me, overcome with gratitude and a specific type of happiness I hadn’t felt in years. At times, in classes such as “Health and Human Rights” and “Informal Economy: Linkages with Growth, Economic Crisis, and Gender,” I stopped taking notes, pushed back from desk, and just enjoyed the show.

When Dario won his second IndyCar championship, I fortuitously had a long weekend break from school. Missing class for anything was not an option: Once admitted, we were told to cancel all prior commitments, and I did, including my personal invitation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to be on a panel with him about the role of girls and women in securing peace. Thus, good ole Columbus Day allowed me to be with Dario at the track when he took the checkered flag. Later, in the hotel room, he basked in the glow of this life-changing moment, answering hundreds of emails and texts