Graham turns 19

Yesterday was Graham's 19th birthday, so of course he planned to come home and eat pad thai with us. In the afternoon he went first out to Chapel Hill High School for an open house that the CHHS and East Robotics teams were conducting for kids with an interest in the sport. Then he went out with some of the team for Boba tea. The night before he took Carolyn, his girlfriend, out to dinner and to a movie at the Lumina in Meadowmont (turns out it was the same movie Natalie planned to see in Juneau that night). Tonight he plans to drive up to Raleigh with some other East-UNC kids to have dinner with some of the East Robotics-NC State contingent. He also mentioned that -- had he stayed on campus this weekend -- he might have gone out to the home of one of the graduate students who run the UNC Quiz Bowl team --which he has already joined -- where a bunch of those guys planned to watch The Magic Flute or something like that. 

It is both astonishing and most gratifying to see how far he has come socially but also in other ways. For example, he will be driving Mary out to RDU in a little while to send her back up north to be with her mom and siblings (I'm staying out of the car because I had a COVID exposure Friday night and have therefore been banished to the porch pretty much all weekend).

Late yesterday afternoon I went for a walk, and I decided to walk down to Eastgate and then through the settlement basin/park behind Eastgate and the shopping center where Breadman's and the Tienda Guadalupena are. This "park" had been criticized by the opponents of the town's proposed Booker Creek settlement areas, who termed it a "heat island" and said that it wasn't growing trees and other foliage at the rate it was supposed to. I wanted to assess.

On the way back, up near Whole Foods, there was a dad who was exasperated with a 10-12 year boy and was waving his hands around and talking loud. The boy had clearly been crying and, when he saw me, turned away to hide it because, of course, boys don't cry. I'm pretty sure I've never been through this little rite of passage with Graham, a fact of which I'm proud.