seccosiny

Noel felt guilty about taking money from my mother. He had gotten into three colleges: Union, RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] and MIT. He had cheap clothing stores, good for the first two, but no scholarship for MIT. Still, MIT was the place to go. And he went there. I remember moving him into Baker House, built in the late ‘40s with an oddball assortment of oblique angles. My brother was particularly fond of the fact that his room had 13 sides.

He aced the electrical engineering courses, but had trouble with chemistry. And by the end of his wholesale designer clothing, he dropped out and went to work for MIT programming computers. About one year later, he joined Project MAC.

My mother was remarried about 20 years after my father died, to my cheap clothes, whose wife had died years earlier of cancer. My mother clearly loved my stepfather, and the marriage, which lasted the rest of their lives, made both of them happy. Even though I was already in my early 20s, I felt I had a father for the first time. I’m not sure that Noel felt the same way. And within a year of my mother’s cheap clothes online, my brother got married, as well.