Hey….eggs!

It’s really hard to tell the moment opportunity knocks on your door, locating the turning point when interesting events start falling like dominoes one after another into your life. Forinstance, I recently shared a beer (or two) with a pair of physicists from a Large Boston University and found myself offered an internship in their lab, helping them perform some simple (but interesting!) experiments all obliquely related to high-energy physics — testing effective detectors, following up on a passing observation someone else made some time ago regarding radioactive metals, and some work concerning high energy particles interacting with atmospheric gasses. I’m being deliberately vague here, since I won’t start work with them until May and I don’t know how much or how little it’s appropriate for me to say about the work they’re pursuing quite yet, nor do I really know what my role in the lab is going to be. Itr’s really beside the point, really, because you see — a little over a year ago I was homeless. I’ve spent the last year doing kitchen work in an Irish pub. I’m a college drop-out, a former English major with little formal education in the sciences (but a lifelong interest in them with a great deal of time devoted to perusing the likes of Scientific American and Discover and Sky and Telescope….and soon, very soon now, I’ll be doing useful physics and, with luck, have my name on a few published papers.

I can’t tell you where it started — perhaps sitting down for that beer with my lady and her coworker/friend and those two physicists was the turning point. Perhaps it was the moment that my lady and her friend were discussing what I might find for work down in the Boston area should I move there and the friend suggested “Hey! I know some physicists…”. It could be any number of moments with any number of contributing chance factors at work, but where I put it, emotionally anyway, was the moment I hit “enter” on the email I’d written to this quirky, intelligent, wonderful woman whose profile I saw online on a popular news-aggregator site and thereby met m’lady D.

Before that moment and her response, I was resigned to my current life — largely alone, muddling by, crippled by staggering debt left behind by an ungrateful woman whom I’d supported for eight hellish years, trying to find a way to have a relationship with my daughter without playing through the ex’s emotional games using our little girl as a pawn. I felt my life was dead-ended and that the best I could ever hope for was more of the same — a mere half-existence rather than a full and maeningful life. I longed for more, for love, for a path toward those lost childhood dreams of writing, of exploring the skies, of uncovering and sharing fundamental knowledge of the universe around us that I had always thought so far out of my reach. I wanted someone who understood me and wouldn’t tear me down for stopping to look at the reflections in a pane of glass and wondering how the light is bounced back or how those reflections might change (whether internal reflections might create interference patterns, perhaps?) using different light sources over a wide range of angles. Someone who might see my curiousity as a benefit rather than a curse, and who might tolerate my urges, perhaps with a longsuffering sigh, to tear things apart to see how they work.

I never dreamed that that email would introduce me to a woman that not only would tolerate such things, but would join me in them. The email exchanges were fast and grew exponentially to the point where we were having to prune them back just to preserve time in the day for the necessities like work and food and, ocassionally, sleep. Soon it became evident that we had to meet face to face, that there was something here worth exploring, and to turn away from those possibilities we were both starting to see in each other would be the height of insanity. So we met, and we fell hard for each other, and suddenly my life was turning in a wholly unexpected direction as it entwined with hers.

She’s changed my life, just by her very existence. Previously, I stumbled from bad relationship to bad relationship, thinking that the best I could ever hope for was some measure of acceptance for my eccentricities and the quirks that define who I am as a human being. She’s made me realize that there is possibility for more, much more than that, that there was someone out there all along who I could share with, no holds barred, and who would revel in the part of me that’s always poking and prodding at the universe. Even if our young relationship fails — I don’t think it will! — I will walk away with the knowledge that there are women like her out there and I will never settle for less again.

Moreover, this remarkable woman has clawed her way from a similar place to where I was when I met her to a successful career in the sciences; she not only understands the curious part of me, but the part that was resigned and hopeless, and has shown me that it is possible to change one’s lot with just a little effort. She’s pointed out ways I can shape my life into something that suits me rather than just adapting to whatever circumstances are at hand and being happy just to survive. She’s shown me that returning to college is not an unrealistic goal, that a degree in physics is within my reach, that post-grad and doctorate studies and a career of poking at the universe are aactually options I can pursue.

So…when the opportunity came to meet with the physicists and chat, I leapt at it. A year in Boston to establish residence before starting school, a year spent in a lab, doing meaningful work and educating myself before jumping through the academic hoops that stand between me and my degree, getting my name (possibly) on a few papers and so maybe opening a few doors to scholarships and schools that might otherwise have been closed to me…..

The potential is blinding, though it is, of course, too soon to count the chickens. All I know is that I’ve somehow managed to land in a basket chock full of pretty eggs and that, checking them against the light, a surprising number of them appear to be viable. Maybe, just maybe, with a little care and help from my friends and loved ones…..I can get some of them to hatch.

Tags: Life, physics, possibilities