Emily’s Graduation Expedition Day #3

The graduation ceremony went fine. There was laughing, there was crying, and there were pictures. I’m working on the pictures, don’t worry about it. Actually, I’m working on outsourcing the post-processing of the pictures.

This morning, we got up, well-rested after sleeping at a non-Bob Newhartish chain hotel and went for the breaking of the fast. We drove up to New Haven to a place called Cafe Romeo. It was an open concept cafe with typical fare and plenty of neck tattoos and gray-haired academics. My mother remarked, “I wish I’d stayed an academic” to which I replied, “it gets old: you can only talk about racism and gender equality for so long before you want to move on”.

The obligatory V-Lat was creamy and smooth and the woman who crafted it had that additional eye shadow at the edges of her eyes to elongate the eye – rather like Cleopatra. Unlike Cleopatra, she had a neck tattoo. She overdid the foam so that it was midrange between a latte and a cappuccino – and it was perfect. This is handily the best latte I’ve had outside of Seattle!

It should be noted that I have asked my practice manager to allocate funds to send one of our clinical support staff members to Seattle to go to barista school. I’ve been denied and ignored – that’s corporate America for you.

I had a signature wrap that was two eggs – over hard so they don’t mess in the wrap, grape tomato halves, and fresh basil. There are few things in this world as important as the acquisition and consumption of fresh basil. As a former political science major, I continue to be amazed that there have never been “the Great Basil Wars” or the “Herbal Conflicts”. It’s always race and gender equality. But one of my greatest memories has been stepping into my parents’ garden and picking a grape tomato and a leaf of basil, wrapping the latter around the former, and enjoying the fragrant aromas. My guess is that people who enjoy such simple pleasures in life cannot be bothered with such trivialities as racism – they’re too busy enjoying things that should be enjoyed.

The basil in this wrap was reminiscent of the basil in my parents’ garden. Strong and fragrant, crisp and clean. It is my belief that sugar and salt have been introduced and overused in our society to increase consumption by masking bad flavors of poor ingredients, and that their best replacements will be strong-willed spices, such as fresh basil. Safe to say that this wrap was actually under-salted, which I am fine with.

My sister got French Toast bites – which were beautifully messy, covered in as much cinnamon as powdered sugar with a bowl of maple syrup for dipping. We ended up using my mother’s wet nap, stowed in her purse either for traveling or out of habit from being a mother of four, to clean our faces, hands, and even a bit of the table.

After lunch, we made our way to the Peabody Museum of (Mostly) Natural History (but that also included an Egypt and a Samurai exhibit. Sweet, dude. I love nat-his museums. These museums really strike me from the stand-point of scale. One of my academic loves, however, is comparative anatomy. The museum had some really great large-scale skeletons (I think it was mostly replicas), including Stegosaurus, Mastodon, Brontosaurus, and the biggest tortoise I’ve ever seen (easily 8′ shell alone!). I was really surprised with how small Stegosaurus’ head was relative to, well, Stegosaurus. He must have walked around the late Jurassic period with an ego complex. I guess the things he didn’t have to worry about were race and gender equality.

After that, we went back to the hotel for a siesta. I guess we have some graduation parties to get to this evening.