VISITING CAROLINE
Tuesday I drove with my son, Tom and his wife, Kathy, to Raliegh to see my granddaughter Caroline and to attend a North Carolina State basketball game that they had gotten tickets for. Raleigh is the capitol of North Carolina and is located in a region called the research triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, each of them the home of a large university.
Caroline is in the last week of college and was in the process of studying for two exams the next day, one in a very complicated genetics course. Almost all of her courses have been complicated and difficult science course in chemistry, biology, physics and mathematics. She was determined to do well on these last four exams and determined to maintain the 3.99 grade average (out of 4) over her four years (the only exception to all A’s was an A- in some course. She majored in biology and minored in psychology and public health. She wants to go to a good medical school after college. She is graduating in 3 1/2 years instead of the usual 4 and will spend the next semester in her apartment in Raleigh in intense study for the standardized test for gaining admission to a medical school. Then she is going to take a year off from study, a gap year, before going to medical school the next year. So she is doing extremely well and I am proud of her.
Her four years of college were dominated by the Covid pandemic. After a normal first semester Covid hit and for a long while all her courses were on line and she moved back to Asheville and learned over zoom. But her last year has been pretty normal.
Because of Covid Kathe and I were not able to visit her in Chapel Hill, which Kathe would love to have done. So this visit was the trip that Kathe always looked forward to making and never could make because of Covid. I was the first grandparent to be able to visit. So this was a bittersweet visit because I was looking from Kathe’s perspective as well as my own.
The visit had several parts and I will summarize them one by one.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 