Dark Night

Home again

I almost cried when Grandpa folded me into his arms for a big hug; part of it was that I was really short on sleep and had been really stressed, the other part was that I had really missed him and was just glad to be back. Adulting is exhausting and it's nice to have somebody who cares about your well-being.

The cats made themselves scarce as we hauled my stuff inside and Grandpa invited Stan to dinner; I did basic unpacking; my towels and sheets went back into the closet with my beloved comforter since Grandpa had made up the bed. I freshened up a bit then went out to the living room. "I was just asking Grandpa if he'd give us cooking lessons," Stan said to me. Grandpa got up and gave me a glass of the lemonade he'd made for my homecoming. There's nothing that can beat lemonade from scratch, and it was even warm enough for it. It was a lot cooler than LA had been, but that was also a relief. I hated to be really hot.

I asked Grandpa what he'd been up to; he'd gotten interested in gardening and wanted to become a rosarian, a specialist in roses. "I put in a big flower bed out back," he said. "Stan and his friends helped dig it out. I'm consulting still, I volunteer at the library, and I joined a softball league for the summer."

"And he's finally dating," Stan said to me. "Don't forget that, Grandpa."

"That's good, Grandpa," I said. "You're not on your last legs, you should be seeing people. You have a lot to offer."

"I hate dating," he said. "But I'd like to have some companionship."

"People need people," Stan said briskly. "And studies show that retirees are having a lot of sex. Retirement means that they have a lot more free time, why not enjoy it?"

I rolled my eyes at my brother's tactlessness. A person's sex life should stay private, as far as I was concerned. "Stan's right, everybody needs people in their lives, and I can't imagine that Grandma would want you to be lonely."

"She wouldn't, she said toward the end that she hoped I'd find happiness because I was too young to be alone," Grandpa said, ignoring the bit about sex. "So we'll see. You kids are going off on your own adventures, starting your new lives, so I think it's time that I start exploring too." Then he changed the subject and I got to talk about my last two quarters.

"At last I'm done with calculus," I said, heaving a sigh of relief. "I've got three quarters of physics and I have to take a class in stats and one in computer programing, barf. I had one of those in high school and it isn't for me, but apparently it will stand me in good stead. Lots of science coming up; I don't know what I want to specialize in yet, but I have to take chemistry and biochemistry. My faculty advisor is urging me to take two more quarters of advanced math so it will make me more attractive to grad school. Then once I get the boring foundational courses and the rest of general studies out of the way, I can concentrate on the major, the fun stuff. There are five required courses, Atmospheric Thermodynamics and Dynamics, Introduction to Chemical Oceanography, Advanced Dynamic and Synoptic Meteorology, Climate Change Assessment, and Atmospheric Physics - Radiation, Clouds, & Aerosols. Then it's all electives, some of them are policy classes, which I think will be particularly interesting." There was silence around the table.

"I don't understand those classes you said at all," Stan said after a pause.

"That's ok, I don't either," I said cheerfully. "That's why I'm taking them."

"I don't understand the difference between climate and weather," Stan said. "I'm confused."

"NASA defines it like this:  Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are like over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time. It's why you hear so much about warming trends in discussions of climate change. Some of it is a natural process that occurs cyclically, but a much bigger chunk of the conditions driving the warming world is anthropogenic, man-made causes. So you can see where study of the atmosphere is necessary and there's a big emphasis on oceans as well, since water covers 71% of the globe and oceans account for 96, 97% of that."