By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

He did not pay it. He is paying it, on a schedule, until he is forty-two.

But that is not the part I think about.

First week of first year, anatomy lab, thirty-three years old, and there is one box left on the shelf with one pair of gloves in it.

A tall kid of about twenty-three had his hand on the box at the same time I did, and he looked at me and said, “Oh — sorry, did you want these?”