Dear Family,
For the longest time, I’ve wondered how on earth The Aunts manage to be so incredibly productive. I think I’m starting to see how it probably came out of necessity; I feel like I have accomplished more in the past couple of months than I have in several years prior. At the moment, I’m waiting for the printers at school to spit out multiple copies of a transcription I did of my Grandma Helen Bingham’s scrapbook; I started it for a personal archiving project, but it’s now over 100 pages, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, despite the fact that it’s almost 11:30 at night and I’m driving to New York in the morning.
It feels as though it’s been months since our last letter (probably because it has been) so I’ll back up a bit and perhaps repeat things (apologies if that’s boring). So, Dave and I just finished up our first year of our respective programs (him: MBA, me: MLIS). The semester was rough but well-managed, and neither of us even approached pulling an all-nighter, which was nice.
When Dave finished his finals, we went on a short jaunt to Nauvoo (one of three temples from which we are equidistant, at least until Indianapolis is built) for Dave’s first time seeing anything. We got there Thursday afternoon, did an endowment session, found our hotel, tried to find dinner in Keokuk (definitely a bust; it’s kind of a hole), and spent all day Friday doing the fun touristy things in Old Nauvoo. I made Dave spend a bit of time at the Woman statues behind the Visitors Center; that’s one of my favorite things to see there. We loved the senior missionaries; they were all so kind and excited. They asked us all day if we were going to “Rendezvous,” the musical they put on each night, and we replied that we’d gotten tickets and were looking forward to it. Not the world’s best production values but always very sweet, and we loved it. Also, we’ve decided that Dave’s parents need to serve a mission there so his dad, who has owned horses forever, can be one of the teamsters; we’ll get them out eventually. ...
One of these days I will actually finish a letter I’ve started. There’s always so much going on, it seems. As the earlier portion of my letter may have indicated, I’m out east—in Jersey City, New Jersey, to be exact. Dave got a summer internship with the NYC operations division at Goldman Sachs, which happens to be just across the river from Wall Street in Jersey City, which is why we’re in Jersey. We’re here only for the summer, and then we’ll be heading back to Urbana to finish our last year of school. He really likes GS, but has found that financial operations may not deal with as much finance as he would like, so he’s also spending time with the commodities traders to get a handle on what trading is like. Dave left for AT (annual training) a week ago for the Army National Guard, where he found out that he’s getting a promotion to be the platoon leader of the battalion’s scout platoon (essentially the closest thing an infantry battalion has to special ops), so he’s pretty excited about that. He’ll be there for another two weeks before he comes back to Jersey to finish his internship.
After we found out about Dave’s GS internship, I found an internship with the New York Public Library in the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, which is a special collection of rare books and manuscripts related to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, her parents, Lord Byron, and other writers with whom they associated. So far I’ve been working on a metadata project, which has given me the opportunity to get up close and personal with Shelley’s notebooks and checks, letters from William Godwin, Lord Byron’s letters and even his manuscript for a fairly awful play. I will say, after seeing what Byron sent to his publisher (the “fair copy”) and how much editing it must have required, I’m even more disappointed that all the Shakespeare we have is printed—I bet his manuscripts would have been fascinating. I’ve also been taking a class online, Reference and Information Services; it’s pretty tedious but one of those classes that unfortunately one must take if one wants to be an employable librarian.
We have had some visitors already. Dave’s mom came to see us for a long weekend, arriving the day after I did. We went to see Mary Poppins on Broadway and went shopping in Short Hills, and she and I even stayed up late a couple of times talking. I am very grateful for a mother-in-law who is nothing but supportive (and even shares some of my feminist tendencies!)—I am very lucky.
Emily also came to visit along with two of our friends growing up, Deana Willerth and Alexis Arnone Mason. It was just a couple of days and one overnight, but we had a great time reconnecting and getting to know each other again as adults and as a group. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge when it was almost 100 degrees, hung out in Central Park, and stopped by an amazing bakery in the Upper West Side, but mostly spent our time chatting.
The other bit of news from the past month or two is less happy. As I’ve previously mentioned, Dave and I have been working with a reproductive endocrinologist for several months, and the drug regimen for May worked and we got a positive pregnancy test. My quantitative hCG tests (betas) were a bit slow rising but good, and we were in the process of setting up a viability ultrasound with a hospital out here when I started bleeding. We ended up spending a long night in the ER (odds of an ectopic were a bit higher because of the drugs, and we didn’t know where the pregnancy was yet so had to get that ultrasound anyway) and lost the pregnancy at 7 weeks. This puts our miscarriage count at 4, although the progesterone supplements I was on maintained the pregnancy even after it was no longer viable so at least the RE has figured that aspect out. Hopefully, we’ll figure out the rest of it in the near future and we’ll be blessed with a pregnancy with a happy ending.
That’s everything that’s going on with us; we hope you’re all doing well.
Love,
Susannah and Dave
I love you Susannah!
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