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2023 Update
PERSONAL
Over the past decade Marianne and I have continued to divide our time between Watertown, Massachusetts, and a getaway home we built in 1988 on the coast in Corea, Maine. We never had children, but now we can enjoy grandchildren vicariously through friends and relatives. Marianne has long retired from her publishing job as the art director at Harvard Press, but she continues to produce and show (and sell) her own art projects, which are now mostly text and alphabet-inspired constructions. She has always enjoyed building things. She also keeps us healthy with her sound food instincts and well-practiced kitchen skills. My own health has remained surprisingly strong despite the passing of years, although I tripped and fell while jogging in 2021, breaking my left hand, which required two surgeries for repair. No more outdoor jogging for me; we got a Peloton treadmill.
My older brother, Don, passed away in 2007, and since then I have remained close to his son, Michael, and to my sister-in-law Heeja, both living in Virginia. Michael has a PhD (in political science) and is teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has been deeply engaged in policy writing and advising on Latin America, doing more international travel than I ever did at his age. Marianne’s sister, Dee, and her spouse Andy, live in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, less than a two-hour drive away, so we can see them on a regular basis, and we get to see their two married daughters as well, with spouses and grandchildren, when they fly in from Colorado and California.
In the past several years it has become more of a strain to maintain our 1925 house (and yard) in Watertown, so we shopped around for a smaller cottage in a continuing care community that will handle all the maintenance and give us full health-care security going forward. We have put our name on the waitlist for Piper Shores in Scarborough, Maine, close to Portland (check it out; classmates welcome). It could be as much as a 5-year wait, but we are already intimidated by the downsizing challenge.
PROFESSIONAL
Since our 50th reunion, I have stopped teaching but continue with my research, writing, and consulting on international food and agricultural policy. Over this past decade I have written two more books, one for Oxford University Press titled The United States of Excess, explaining why the United States is uniquely prone to the over-consume both food and fossil fuels, and the other from Knopf titled Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat, examining fashionable beliefs about food and farming that are not well supported by scientific evidence. I have also done a 3rd Edition of an earlier OUP book titled Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will be published on September 1 this year.
I retired from teaching at Wellesley College in 2015 and switched to teaching as an adjunct at the Harvard Kennedy School, but that ended with COVID in 2020. I continue to hold a research appointment at the Kennedy School, where I have now joined a faculty team with a three-year grant to study climate change challenges in West Africa. This project will take me in July 2023 to Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire. Face-to-face professional meetings have finally resumed, so in the past year I have traveled on two occasions to Iowa, once to Minnesota, twice to Washington, D.C., and once to Bellagio, on Lake Como.
PHILOSOPHICAL
Sixty years after graduating from high school, I am still struggling to establish my personal philosophy of life. It seems I function best through a counterpoised mix of optimism and stoicism. I avoid taking big risks so when things to go well I feel validated. When things don’t go well, an inner voice says “things could always be worse.” I know this kind of stoic optimism will become harder to maintain when something finally does go seriously wrong for me or for Marianne. When this happens (sometime after our 65th reunion, I trust), I will hope to find strength in the example of personal resolution set in each case by my mother, father, and brother, when their health finally failed. See you at the 60th!
2013 Update
Rob on Cape Cod
Not a
great deal of news at my end since my last report 5 years ago. I am
still teaching at Wellesley College, but I have gone onto a
retirement plan that will have me leaving Wellesley in June 2015.
Meanwhile, I'm now also teaching a class at the Harvard Kennedy
School, and that might continue. I enjoy being part-timish
regarding teaching, because I can say yes to other opportunities
that require travel. I have not been to Africa this year, but I
will be going next summer. Marianne and I are now spending more
time each summer at our house in Maine, where we have a second
circle of close friends.
2008 Upate
Rob in 2007
Classmates,
It looks like I won't be able
to make it to WL for the 45th. I enjoyed the 40th, and recall that
someone joked we would be holding our next reunion at Westminster.
Not quite yet, apparently. No dramatic changes in my own
situation. Marianne and I still live in Watertown, we still have
our house in Maine (that's where I will be at the end of July), and
I'm still teaching full time, both at Wellesley and as a visiting
professor the past two years at Harvard, where all the students have
SATs much higher than my own. I just published a new book this
spring on agricultural science and Africa (titled "Starved for
Science") from Harvard University Press, and my next project will be
a study for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN on how
to feed the world in 2050. If only I can hold on until age 105,
perhaps I'll be able to see for myself. The hardest thing to happen
to me, ever, came just last fall, when my older brother, Don, lost a
two year battle with cancer. We have been spending more time with
his wife and son, but there is nothing to replace a loss such as
this. I still have an uncle and a cousin in WL, and I was back
there in December for an event at Purdue. I will hope to get back
again soon, and will certainly miss seeing you all later in July.
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