Nikas Culinaria

In the spirit of my last post, regarding the split between our blog world and the “real” world, I thought I would share a bittersweet moment in my life.

As I was growing up, my engineer father was always coming up with ideas that he wanted to get patented. I got this message that getting a patent was of great importance and something to really aspire to. Weird huh? I guess its better than emulating something like a beauty queen or basketball player.

I went on to become a scientist. The summer after I defended my dissertation my dad and I drove from Virginia to Los Angeles for my first postdoctoral fellowship. It was a grueling and crushing trip, not because of the miles but because my father could not even remember my name at times and he grew more and more disoriented. I got half way across the country and called my mom in desperation, asking her if she realized that my dad had Alzheimers. She didnt know, she was in denial I guess.

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