Priscilla's Workshop

 Three post pandemic stories from just yesterday although I am almost certainly jumping the gun on the "post" part:

We moved into our current house just before Thanksgiving in 2019. That means we never really got to know the neighbors but everyone is now making tentative forays into meeting new people again. Yesterday my immediate next door neighbor came over. She told me that she was so glad that we moved in because the previous owner was obnoxious. Apparently she told the neighbor that the only "colored" people allowed in her house were maids and service people. Having my husband and I, a mixed race couple, move in made her amused. It sort of makes me amused too. The same neighbor told me that one of the other people who live on our street asked her if my husband were the Japanese gardener. That's so offensive that it ends up being funny.

Another story involves one of the kids that I tutored years ago. This young man ended up going to Yale, majored in economics and worked as an analyst at the Fed immediately after graduation. After a couple of years of that experience he applied to graduate school and initially intended to go to business school but when Harvard Law School accepted him he jumped at the chance. That was immediately before the pandemic so his first year of law school that just ended was not in Cambridge but in his parents' house in Utah. He just got his first year "grades". As he reported, his overall scores were simply average and he was disappointed, but every first year student has to take writing courses. In those, he was designated a Dean's Scholar which means that he was either the #1 or #2 in the class of 70 students. Pretty darn cool. He told me it was because of my stern tutelage all those years ago when he was still a teenager. Smile.