Moon River

"The time is right to make new friends," the fortune reads. I do not believe in fortunes or anything oracle. But, I'll take it as a reminder that relationships, friendships included, take time to build. School has distracted me from the fact that I still do not have many friends. My mind races, and I think that something is wrong with me.

"It's not you, it's me."

But is it you? Or is it me?

Perhaps it's all in my inner fears. Perhaps it is not real at all. But could it be?

Today is an old friend's birthday. On her eighteenth birthday six years ago, she invited me to her mother's house. We had homemade purple strawberry ice cream and cheesecake. It was truly a privilege to be a part of such a celebration.

I was seventeen then, just a girl full of day dreams about the next stage of life. I had just began my final year in the secondary school system. I thought I was going to study neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and go on to medical school afterward. I had no idea that I could be such thing as a field ecologist. My world was about to explode with opportunity. If I could have peered into a crystal ball about my future, I would not have believed my own eyes.

Who did I think I would become? I spent time wondering where I would be in my twenties. A world that seemed so far away and now here I am, swept up in the challenges of new adulthood. Of course, I still spend time wondering where I will be in the future. But, I like reminiscing about that seventeen year old girl.

Tomorrow is the first home game of the Minnesota Gopher football team. Every day, piece by piece, this new universe falls into place. Piece by piece, I realize that it is truly a new era in my existence. It will be the first home game in nearly fifteen years that I will miss. As a girl, I joined my father at the Gopher home games on Saturdays in the crisp MN fall. I wore my maroon and gold while the proud father shared his dreams of his children attending the University of Minnesota, his own Alma mater. Gopher Saturdays were the bond between father and daughter. That bond carried through the daughter's college years.

What will those Saturdays bring now?