Notes on Dylan

Dylan and I met in the fall of 2001 in Richmond, Virginia. He claims that I forget meeting him, but that’s basically not possible. At that time, he had just moved from San Francisco, CA where he had just received his M.P.H from Berkeley. He wore allergy-inducing wool sweaters and sat at the front of the class. We became good friends during our Gross Anatomy class that year, carefully dissecting “Leo”, our cadaver. I learned that he was a die-hard Connecticut fan, being from Bridgeport, but that he had a passion for travel and had recently spent 14 months traveling alone through South America. He also spoke about his dreams to work internationally in infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. He says he knew we would be a good match when I laughed hard at his dry pun jokes, (“Have you heard the one about the corduroy pillow?!? It’s been making headlines…).

Dylan is known for being passionate about everything he does, loving a good debate among friends, knowing a lot about a lot, not being afraid to do things differently, liking everything from bluegrass to Mos Def and the Sox to the Richmond Spiders. He also has the best “Andrew Jackson” hair of anyone I know.

Since that year in Richmond, Dylan has taken (and sometimes dragged) me to a thousand places I never would have known: freezing in a swimming hole in the Blue Ridge mountains, getting strange looks at a Waffle House in Mississippi, sleeping under the stars in South Africa, drinking champagne in paper cups on the city steps in Barcelona, listening to coyote in Texas, touring Montreal on foot in January, eating peanuts and sausages in the bleachers at Fenway…just to name a few. I can’t wait to find out what happens next.