When my dad had come to visit to see Colin Powel address our university, he thought it'd be nice to go out for lunch. We eventually settled for Sumo, the closest thing to a Japanese steak house central New York had to offer, when we drove around Outback steak house and realized it wasn't open during the awkward time between lunch and dinner. But before this, on our drive, my dad had talked about his time in college. He always talked about his days at Colby as if they were sacred. He had been on the varsity tennis and soccer teams, had received honors in both his major concentrations, biology and chemistry, and one semester he had come blasphemously close to proving the existence of god using math. Yes, my dad was both a nerd and an athlete, and apparently that had suited him.
I asked him about the parties he attended. When I was younge I remembered him telling the family about how he had pretended to get drunk at parties after cunningly adding soda to empty beer bottles. I wondered if that was still true now that I was nearer to the legal drinking age. Yes, it still was. But he added more to the details with which I painted the story of his life in my imagination. Oftentimes he would stay in his dorm room alone, working with model kits he'd cobbled together from random hardware supplies, trying to build a replica of Watson & Crick's then recent discovery--deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). College, he concluded, was a time of learning intermixed with finding ways to not feel lonely. He had had DNA. I had a pretty black dress no one ever would see me wear.
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