“Happy birthday dear Kyle… Happy birthday to you!” I really was happy. Eleven at last – not yet a teenager, but old enough that people were starting to listen to me rather than treating me like a little kid. Everyone sang as Dad brought out a large sheet cake with eleven candles on it. We were all in our swimsuits and huddled around a patio table next to our enclosed pool. How cool it was to have a pool party in December!
My birthday cake was decorated with the likeness of a vinyl record on it, with a tone arm in place on the record and musical notes on both sides. It was ironic, ’cause I was just about as anti-vinyl as an audiophile could be, but nothing exemplified music more than an image of an old-fashioned record player and so that’s what was on my birthday cake.
Not that I was happy with most digital music either. Not by a long shot. Oh, the songs were OK, but 99.999% of music today was mastered for streaming, which I thought should be classified as a war crime. Although vinyl is phenomenally better than compact discs, which are way better than Spotify or Apple Music, it’s fragile and even the best vinyl degrades with time. That’s why Neil Young was making it his life’s work to save music by digitizing the original multi-track recordings in high resolution, so it could be saved in a format that preserved the full dynamic range of the music and that would last forever. I had a huge collection of high-res music on my computer, and nothing – not even vinyl, could touch it.
Not many eleven-year-olds that I knew of were as passionate about music as I was, but then not many eleven-year-olds that I knew of were in their senior year at Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s elite public high schools. Not many eleven-year-olds that I knew of were out and proud either, nor did they have a boyfriend like Freck. Freck was another prodigy, but he was a couple years older than I. His birthday was coming up in a couple of weeks, and he’d be turning thirteen. Freck was about to become a teenager.
After I blew out all the candles, my cousin Jason, from California, and my friend, Asher White, broke into singing a rendition of the Beatle’s Birthday Song. Jason, who was thirteen and had won national competitions for the jazz band he formed when he was only nine, was playing his keyboard while both boys sang along. Asher, who was fifteen, was a soloist with the Stuyvesant Men’s Chorus and had a magnificent voice. After singing Birthday Song, Jason started banging on the keys and he and Asher segued into Elton John’s Crocodile Rock, followed by The Who’s Pinball Wizard, Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke, Carole King’s I Feel the Earth Move, The Police’s Every Breath You Take, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and lastly, Billy Joel’s Piano Man. Truthfully, I loved all kinds of music, including classical, jazz, country and even hip-hop, but my absolute favorite music was classic rock. The sixties, seventies and early eighties were a special time when music recording was at its peak, before the digital revolution came along and wrecked everything.
My baby and I danced away until we could dance no more. Only then did I realize that I’d yet to eat my own birthday cake. Although I’d cut way back on my caffeine intake, I still loved the taste of coffee and never missed an opportunity to eat coffee-flavored anything. Dad had searched far and wide for a baker that could make a birthday cake flavored with real Kahlua, and man, was the cake incredible. Served with coffee Häagen-Dazs, it was perfect.
Finally, we got down to the opening of presents. I had a Sony PlayStation gaming system and several of the gifts were new games for it, but I wasn’t what you’d call a hard-core gamer. I enjoyed playing for fun every now and then, but I didn’t play enough to be competitive and so I never got into online gaming. I got some Kindle books, including the latest book from Orson Scott Card that I’d been dying to read. I got a Blu-ray version of the latest season of Star Trek Discovery and although I wasn’t a hardcore Trekie like Asher or Seth, I knew I’d enjoy watching all the special features that weren’t available when streaming from CBS All Access.
Freck gave me a pair of opening day tickets for the new Star Wars movie as part of a package with limited edition Star Wars 3D glasses, a signed limited-edition movie poster and a soon-to-be-released limited-edition steel book 4K-HDR Blu-ray set of all eleven movies. I had to chuckle at the thought of receiving a collection of eleven movies for my eleventh birthday. That was something my boyfriend would enjoy even more than I would, as he was a diehard Star Wars fan. In any case, it would be fun to see the latest Star Wars movie on opening day on the big screen with him.
Because my birthday was so close to Hanukkah, I always got a single present for both from my family every year. It kinda sucked, as my combined present never seemed like as much as the two presents my brother, Roger, got each year. I had a feeling, however, that this year might be different, as it would be my last birthday living at home. I wondered what kind of present I might get this year as my dad handed me a sealed envelope. Last year, I got my A&K portable music player, which cost $1800. I already had one of the latest iPhones, and I’d probably get a new laptop for graduation. I was way too young for a car, but a new bicycle would come in handy if I got into MIT.
Taking the envelope from Dad, I opened it and started to read. The MIT letterhead immediately piqued my interest, but I was totally unprepared for what followed. “Dear Mr. Goldstein, We are prepared to offer you a position as an undergraduate in the class of…” I couldn’t continue reading, as my eyes filled with tears. Finally, I turned to Dad and asked, “How did you get this? Acceptance letters aren’t supposed to be mailed for a couple of months.”
“Let’s just say it helps to know a Nobel laureate in physics,” Dad replied. Dad was referring to Dr. Jeff Franklin, an endowed chair at the American Museum of Natural History and the life partner of my friend Seth’s grandfather. But then I had a critical thought and asked, “But what about Freck?”
“If you read the rest of your acceptance letter,” Dad answered, “you’ll see that they have agreed to your request to share a dorm room with your ‘friend’, François San Angelo. Speaking of which, consider this an early birthday present,” Dad added as he handed a similar envelope to Freck.”
Moments later, Freck let out a whoop as he said repeatedly, “I’m in. I’m in!”
“The joint program in Architecture and Civil Engineering?” I asked my boyfriend.
“Absolutely!” he responded. He was practically jumping up and down, right next to me, but then he got a puzzled look on his face and asked, “Not that I’m not grateful for the news, but how is this a birthday present?”
“Are you kidding?” Dad responded. “Between you and Kyle, the tuition’s over a hundred grand a year, not to mention the cost of room and board.”
“But my parent’s will be paying my share,” Freck countered, “and you’d be paying Kyle’s college expenses regardless, so you still owe him a birthday present.”
“Indeed, I do,” Dad replied as he handed me another envelope. I opened it and immediately noted the logo of the American Museum of Natural History. I’d looked into a number of summer internships in top labs around the world, but of the very few that allowed participants younger than eighteen, none were for anyone as young as me. I’d not encountered anything about an internship at the AMNH – not one that was open to high school students, let alone those younger than eighteen or even sixteen, yet here I was reading a letter of acceptance into such a program. How was this possible?
Before I could even ask the question, Dad answered, “The museum doesn’t even offer summer internships to high school students. Of course, there are learning programs all the time, but they’re geared more toward a basic STEM curriculum. There are a limited number of positions associated with specific research projects and exhibitions, most of them for graduate students. Undergraduate internships are rare and high school internships unheard of. But then they’ve not had a Nobel Laureate in an endowed chairmanship make such a request before.”
“Internships?” Freck asked.
“Yes, you both have internships there this summer,” Dad continued as he handed Freck a letter. “Of course, there could be no quid pro quo involved with the internships. Other than specifying that they be open to graduating high school seniors, regardless of age, the only stipulations were that one required fluency in five or more languages other than English, and the other required completion of advanced courses in vector calculus and complex number theory.”
“Gee, I wonder where they could find applicants still in high school meeting those qualifications?” I asked.
“Believe it or not, there were multiple applications for both positions,” Dad related, “even though they weren’t exactly advertised. You’re not the only exceptional kids out there, you know.”
“That’s a scary thought,” Roger interjected, eliciting laughter from all of our friends.
“I hope you understand that these internships really are a gift, even though they didn’t cost me any money,” Dad added.
“Of course I understand,” I replied and Freck nodded his head.
“I literally spent days making the arrangements, including petitioning the governor and both of our senators. There’s little precedent for allowing eleven- and thirteen-year-olds to participate in advanced internships. However, Seth’s grandfather, is an example of one. He was only thirteen when he attended a summer program at the University of Iowa that was intended for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Thus Dr. Franklin insisted that there be no minimum age and that age not be a factor in the consideration of applicants. Still, we had to get waivers from state and federal regulations in any case.
“So you’ll both be busy this summer, and although your internships will both be at the AMNH, you’ll be doing entirely different things and may go all day without seeing each other. In many ways, it’ll be a lot like it’ll be at MIT.”
The thought of Freck and I going our separate ways during the day really hit me hard. I’d always known in the hypothetical that things would be different in college, but I hadn’t really given much thought to what that would mean. At Stuyvesant, I was way ahead of Freck in math, but he was way more advanced in his language classes. Still, we had a number of classes in common, and we always ate lunch together with our friends, every day. At most, I might go an hour or two without seeing my baby, but otherwise we were always together.
MIT would be different. Not only would we be functionally at different levels in our math, sciences and humanities, but we’d be in entirely different curricula with perhaps no overlap at all. We might take a creative writing course together or maybe a history course, but that would mean spending perhaps a few hours together in a week, and no more. Maybe if we were lucky, we’d share a computer science class since programming skills were central to both our fields. Otherwise, we’d only see each other at breakfast and at dinnertime, and if we made the effort, at lunchtime. At least we’d share our nights.
But when I thought about it, weren’t our lives gonna be like that from now on? We’d each have our own careers and spend our days apart. With Freck’s career as an architect, he’d probably be away for weeks at a time as he worked on-site on his projects. And wouldn’t the same be true for me in my field? Particle accelerators don’t exactly grow on trees and the most powerful ones aren’t even in the U.S. I might be away for several weeks at a time myself, collecting data from my experiments. It was gonna take a huge effort for Freck and me to have any kind of life together at all. And as much as I’d like to start a family, what kinda life would our kids have, with their daddies always on the road?
I guess I was getting sorta morose, as Freck pulled me aside and said, “My office can be anywhere in the world, Ky. Find yourself a top academic position… maybe even an endowed chairmanship at one of the top places for physics. Wherever you go, I’ll go, and if we have kids, we’ll hire a nanny. It wasn’t bein’ raised by a nanny that fucked me up, Ky. It was bein’ treated as a trophy child by parents who never loved me. That’ll never happen to our kids,” he concluded as he drew me into a hug and hugged me tight. How’d he know what was buggin’ me?
“It won’t be easy, Freck,” I responded. “Governments aren’t investing in particle accelerators anymore, which means making do with upgrades to the ones we already have and improvising a lot for our experiments. Today it’s the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Tomorrow it could be Fermilab in Illinois. Particle physicists don’t have the luxury of choosing their country, let alone their lab.”
“Maybe that’s a sign that the field’s overcrowded,” Freck suggested. What a cheery thought! “Maybe that’s a sign you should keep your eyes open for the next big thing,” he continued.
“Particles are the fundamental building blocks of the universe,” I explained. “If there are major discoveries to be made, they’ll be made by particle physicists.”
“If that’s so, then what are the particles that make up dark matter?” Freck asked. “What happens to the quarks inside a black hole? What were the particles that gave rise to the big bang?”
“You know those questions don’t have answers,” I responded. “There were no particles when the so-called big bang occurred, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“Is it that the answers haven’t been discovered yet, or that we aren’t asking the right questions?” Freck countered. “Why is it that we still can’t reconcile quantum theory with relativity?”
I was about to respond with what I thought was the obvious answer, when I realized that it wasn’t so obvious. Maybe Freck had a point. I must’ve stopped with my mouth hanging open, as he continued, “The answer’s not so obvious, is it?
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