David Hormby:
CLASS OF 1968
Dickinson High SchoolClass of 1968
Wilmington, DE
University of Arizona - EngineeringClass of 1981
Tucson, AZ
University of Maryland - Civil EngineeringClass of 1979
College park, MD
University of DelawareClass of 1972
Newark, DE
David's Story
The photo is a logo I made for Kathie’s “Walk to De-Feet ALS” fundraiser team. Thomas and I printed them in the garage on Dodger Blue tee shirts. If you cut Kathie, she bled Dodger blue. One of the many charms she seduced me with was her ability to throw a slider.
I added the photo because it was the only way I could figure out how to add an epilog to my earlier message. After all my years of education, I am still a social media ignoramus.
Epilog
Kathie stayed in the nursing home two years until we hit the lifetime limit on our health insurance. It looked like a mountain of money but skilled nursing homes suck that trough dry in a hurry.
At work, our CFO worked out to the day when the money would run out. Kathie dubbed the date the Pekoyple day (PKOPL: Push Kathie out in the parking lot). With help from friends and our church, we got the house ready for Kathie’s return. When PKOPL rolled around, I quit my job and took her home.
We settled in to a frugal but manageable life. Thomas battled his way through Hume Fogg, the academic magnet high school. Thanks to some creative administrative maneuvering by an RN angel, Medicare allowed two one hour shifts of CNT a week and one RN visit.
On her last day, I got Kathie up and into the van for her favorite outing, a matinee. When I got her home, I set her up in her bed with her miracle computer (After getting disheveled on outings, it took me about 40 minutes to get her sheveled again). As I left the room, she was beeping and booping on the internet to check the Dodger box scores.
When I heard Thomas come in the front door, I walked back to Kathie’s room. I could tell from the hallway that something was badly wrong. Thomas and I went into autopilot. I rushed to set up the ambu bag on Kathie’s trach and started resuscitation, as I was taught. Thomas took care of the emergency calls and directed the EMT’s when they arrived.
Kathie died three weeks short of our 31st wedding anniversary and five weeks short of Thomas’ graduation. In the last few years of her life, Kathie was in desperately poor physical condition but, in a testament to her toughness a...Expand for more
nd spirit, people were still shocked when they heard she died. We all assumed she would live forever.
Tom and I began “Thomas and Dad version 2.0”. Thomas headed off to Martin Methodist University where he found the academic intensity to be lower than his high school. I returned to the engineering consulting firm I left three years earlier.
After one semester, Thomas, unbeknownst to me, applied for and was accepted to two American universities in Europe. One was in the Balkans. It had 27 letters in its name with no vowels. Thomas accepted the other offer from John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.
His three years at John Cabot formed the basis of a series of Tom and Dad adventures in Rome, Tuscany and northern Italy (my family lived in Varese, Italy in 1965… gad! That sounds like forever ago. The class of 1968 is getting old.). Our trips were always very light on planning. We made memories from adventures, misadventures, and serendipity. Misadventures like knocking on the door of a barn on a snowy November night outside of Montalcino led to serendipitous discoveries that we still talk about.
After working in Nashville for a few years, Thomas applied to graduate school at Kaiser Wilhelm University in Bonn, Germany. He graduated this summer, but he is well and truly stuck in Germany due to the pandemic. He has a permanent position with Eppendorf in Hamburg, a firm that makes laboratory glassware and equipment (2020 was not bad for everyone). We plan a graduation blowout as soon as we’re sure neither of us will get trapped abroad. Some misadventures are not good.
I retired in 2015 and have fallen in love with retirement. I still wake up some mornings and get excited because I have a day off. With a house full of projects and hobbies, I calculated that I need to live to 107 to get to all of it.
Go Rams*
* I realize I used that weak closure before. I also realized I ended two sentences above with prepositions. I think I will play the geezer card so some young buck will rush up and ask, “Oh, sir. Can I fix your syntax for you?”. Getting old ain’t for sissies but it does come with some percs.
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