An Academic Love Story

I'm at the lab and it's my first time here by myself. The "lab" is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom former medical/dental student dormitory. Some floors still function as dorm apartments.

It's VERY spacious for a dorm apartment but essentially that's what it is. The kitchen has been converted into a study with metallic filing cabinets and an arcane, academic desk and non-ergonomic chairs. The living room is now an airy conference room with mismatched conference chairs and wooden dining chairs drenched in the western sun with a view of the GW bridge. Within the long school table that serves at the conference table, I discovered a yellowed dissertation typed on a word processor dating back to 1989. The master bedroom is the professor's office: it is filled with psych manuals, journals, graduate textbooks, and assorted other literature. He has no photos in his office except a piece of paper celebrating the life and work of Dr. BD in a clear plastic frame--a lovely bushy browed, slim, academic seated in her office with her salt and pepper hair frizzing at the ends and a her hands clasped in her pencil-skirted lap atop legs crossed at the ankles.

The invitation reads: "You are invited to attend the celebration of 40 years of Sociomedical Research at Columbia University. Please join us on Wednesday, January 31, 2008 to honor our second Department Chair, Dr. BD who served from 1978-1982. Her husband and co-author will speak briefly."

Drs. D published much of their research jointly and it appears that he tirelessly carried on their work after her passing--I speculate it was sometime in 1982. He still wears a plain wedding band loosely on his left hand. A soft-spoken man who goes to the Columbia pool every afternoon from 12:30-1:30pm, it's hard to imagine him living a life outside this dorm-lab yet he led one. Undoubtedly one filled with love, a love perhaps even deeper than his love of learning and research. I don't think he ever remarried.

I doubt he has children or grandchildren but I'm not sure. In my version of his story, he has neither, just his research and us, his lowly assistants.

This story is real. This happens in real life. Real people fall so completely in love with each others shared interests, values, and life goals that their two lives really do converge into one full life.

Not that you need another to complete you (a la Jerry McGuire) but it is possible to achieve this romantic steeple albeit for a pair of academics. It happens.