Monika and I flew into Baltimore and an old friend of mine from high school, Beth Raymond Heerdt, (who is not old at all, as she's the same age as me!) met us at the airport and took us directly to Johns Hopkins University for a campus tour. My friend's daughter had graduated from JHU and was able to add a tid bits to the tour as well as taking us to a very small "whole in the wall" for the most wonderful lunch. It was a grand late morning/early afternoon. We stole moments to chat and spent most of the driving time catching up. Neither of us had really had much contact, outside of Facebook, for more than 25 years. When I saw her at the airport, waving us down, I saw the best friend I had had 30 years ago. She looked exactly the same. When her husband saw me for the first time, he exclaimed the same notion, "You look exactly the same!" For which I thanked him profusely. The truth is both of us are marked with the lines of time and age spots of wisdom. The crazy feeling that it seems like no time has passed as we chatted (the same feeling I had with Angela last weekend) mingled in with the notion that we are now so different the world of being in high school that is long gone, the details are hard to remember accurately.
After lunch, we drove out to the Naval Academy for Jessi's swim meet. It was so fun to get to see her by the pool again. It was a big meet against Virginia (six-time defending ACC-champions) and Yale. Jessi swam well but the Navy team lost badly to Virginia, not so badly to Yale. She swam a nice 50 and I was surprised to see her swimming on the 400 relay A team. She anchored the team with a good split. The event was much longer than anticipated because of the tri-meet action, interspersed with technical difficulties and a huge Virginia mens team, so we did not have time to have dinner with Jessi, but we will tomorrow after the football game.
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