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OotGwgtWaLWC

Our children come in several varieties, as all of us do.  We are genetically related to some of them, by one or the other of us.  The genes of some are several million years away.  We are genetically related to our kids in about the same way Mari and I are related:  by choice, chance, accident, or design.  It is the best of all possible worlds. 

This last week, Dan graduated from medical school, and was given the official title of "One of the Guys who gets to Wear a Long White Coat (OotGwgtWaLWC).  Nothing else matters very much.  The Medical Profession has a thing about wearing discarded clergy albs.  It is their problem. 


We flew out to Portland, Oregon, with Steve (Dan's dad) and Lindy (Dan's stepmother).  I am the other step.  We had thought it would be sweeping through town, wearing our albs, laughing our way from restaurant to event and back though the Japanese Garden, ignoring the rain, laughing, looking for the wine store, again.  Instead, it was beer and a moving truck.  Dan found a new apartment.  No, actually, he found an apartment.  He has been living, almost constantly since high school, in a single room in any old house his friends were willing to sublet.  He found a nice place. 

We did, in fact, help him move, and even more, we had a fine time, taking every chance to quit moving and restocking the apartment to find another restaurant.  Portland is a delightful city.  The best food we had, in that cosmopolitan restaurant town, was at the Berlin Inn, hardly more than a slightly converted, inadequate house somewhere not in downtown.  Fine, delicate, German food of a kind I have never experienced, even while once living in Germany (on a student's budget)). 

We met Ellie, Dan's good friend, also a medical school graduate, who is shorter, younger, smarter, better-looking, and a lot more fun than Dan, in that she did not need to move from her house while we were there. 

About the only thing finer than family and fine food and friends, is a diverse family, with better food, and interesting friends.  And a rented truck.

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