I encounter the sisters about once every ten years. We've crossed paths on hot days at summer music festivals. We lived in the same neighbourhood in the early-to-mid 1990s, but at different ends, so we only ran into each other once or twice. My wife once took a class on Art History. Sister Sonia taught it.
This weekend, I found them at a funeral.
I met Monda in the mid-1980s in American History, a senior seminar course consisting of an authentic American professor, several History Majors, and me.
Brian, whom I'd known since first year, was in the same class. He'd asked me at one point to assist with his university students' council presidential campaign. I was busy at the time, and declined. Pity. While he did not win, his campaign sounds like they had the most fun, in that way that the gregarious popular jocks always seem to. Brian presented a paper on the political-cultural significance of the rise of WWE Wrestling. Actually, it was WWF then-- they hadn't yet lost a lawsuit to endangered animals. Monda focused on American women's history. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's "The Female World of Love and Ritual", published a decade earlier, remained a groundbreaking paper at the time. It's still considered influential. My presentation was on, for some reason, A. Mitchell Palmer and the post-Great War Red Scare. It's a fascinating story, which provides insight into what happens when oncoming challenges help push a democratic society off-track. It also features a cameo appearance by some not especially competent terrorists.
The class ended. We graduated. Brian went on to produce sports-related television. The sisters became professors. We've all published books. I couldn't tell you what anyone else from that class might be doing.
About five years later I took a bus to Toronto to attend the wedding of my university housemate. I wore my suit since I would otherwise have had to take both an overnight and a garment bag. Monda and Sonia were sitting in the next seat. Thus began our string of sporadic post-school meetings.
The groom from that wedding, notes wikipedia, is "also known for providing the first response to Andrew S. Tanenbaum's "Linux is obsolete" Usenet post. His response then evolved into the famous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate. The bride has made short films.
The funeral memorialized a man whom my wife and I didn't really know until after his best days had passed. He ran a film company, travelled, won awards. We knew a man in a wheelchair, with health issues, attended by his wife. They were also members of the Jane Austen Society.
Their daughter and her husband host a moderately popular YouTube channel.
Andy Warhol had something to say about all this. For some of us, of course, it might be fifteen seconds.