When I was in college, I lived in a house that was named for a mythical Brown professor, Josiah S. Carberry, professor of psychoceramics (or cracked pots). He was created in 1929, presumably before the crash, but maybe not, and he lives on. The legend is that he is traveling the world in researching his field of expertise, and to prove it, postcards streamed in from around the world to university telling tales of his adventures. In 1974 the New York Times did an article on him as the most traveled person. There are many things that I learned during my time in Carberry House that I don't much dwell on now, but the tradition I have carried forward is the celebration of Friday the 13th. We always had a party, taking an "unlucky" day and transforming it into a reason for celebration. One thing I had forgotten is that leap day is also a Carberry Day, and this leap year we had the biggest of celebrations in that one of our son's got married. It was a huge party that was really on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic reaching home for us. Our community of 90,000 people has 16 COVID-19 positive cases, all from a trip they took together to Egypt, so we are now moving swiftly to social distancing, so this Carberry Day was vastly different from the one just two weeks ago, with a quiet celebration at home after my spouse returned from working to screen patients for the novel virus. Get ready, it is going to be a rocky six weeks or more.
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