Travels with Samantha Slide Show Page 22

Huge steel plates came in by train from Pittsburgh and were assembled into triangles on-site. Each triangle comprises an outer skin of stainless steel and an inner one of carbon steel with space enough in between for steel tendons. Once welded, a triangle would be hoisted into place on top of one arm and its tendons attached to those sticking out of the preceding triangle. Five hundred tons of force were applied hydraulically to stretch the tendons and then concrete was poured in between the inner and outer steel plates (this concrete no doubt contributes to the fact that the arch weighs more than an aircraft carrier).

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[BIG]

Note that this is three months after the Great Flood of '93. And still the world's only Riverboat McDonald's floats in its own parking lot .

Two seconds of watching Lily walk through the parking lot reintroduced me to a part of myself I hadn't seen for 14 years. Lily and I were sophomores together at MIT back in 1979. My memory of our first conversation has faded a bit with the years, but I remember one thing clearly: after one hour, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Circumstance conspired against us, though. We were young (15 and 18). The subtlest miscue from one would slash the other to the bone. During my three years at MIT, I never thought about physics or math except for during brief lulls that separated tempestuous thoughts of Lily. Depending on where we were in our on-again off-again romance, the thoughts might be bliss, hope, anger, pain, regret, or curiosity.

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Cambridge, Ohio, differs from Cambridge, Massachusetts in having a nightly Passion Play . It wasn't showing in September, so I wasn't sorry to press on to Filthadelphia where I could try to fill the Great Man's shoes and see things from his lofty perspective .

I was just enjoying the multiethnic community [BIG] [BIG] when some kind soul decided that my van was overloaded and decided to remove all my clothing and the cameras underneath.

I returned to MIT on September 8, 1993, and in particular, to the cradle of so much computer science 545 Technology Square.

The End