The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor by Sonia Sotomayor

Author:Sonia Sotomayor [Sotomayor, Sonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2018-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

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Spring eased into summer, exams and final papers were wrapped up, my thesis review completed. Graduation brought one last unfamiliar laurel when Peter Winn called me into his office to tell me that I would graduate summa cum laude. Once again, facing the pleasure with which this news was delivered, I didn’t have the heart to inquire what it meant; for now it was enough that I should act very glad and honored. When I’d finally looked up the translation of the Latin phrase, the irony of my needing to do so was not lost on me. It was perhaps then that I made a measure of peace with my unease: the uncertainty I’d always felt at Princeton was something I’d never shake entirely. For all the As and honors that could be bestowed, there would still lurk such moments of estrangement to remind me that my being there was not typical but an exception.

I marched out of Princeton’s Nassau Gate with my classmates in a final ritual of return to the real world, knowing that I was headed back to the Ivy League for law school at Yale in the fall. Meanwhile, a summer job doing research in the Office of Social Responsibility at the Equitable Life Assurance Society in Manhattan would provide my first glimpse inside corporate America. It was, to say the least, a letdown: I was shocked at how much time presumably productive people were capable of wasting. It was similar to what I’d observed the summer before, working in New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs, only stranger, perhaps, considering it was a business with the aim of making money.

Junior by then had graduated from Cardinal Spellman and completed the first year of a program at New York University that would lead to medical school. He hadn’t grown up with dreams of becoming a doctor. His ambition at that stage of life was only to do something different from whatever I was doing, to find his own path out from under my shadow. Though our constant bickering had mellowed by then, and mutual respect prevailed, each of us was too involved in his or her own life to pay much attention to the other’s. But in a bind we would always turn to each other first, and given the experience that we alone shared, not much would need to be said. Family was family.

The big event for ours that summer was the wedding. That Kevin and I would eventually marry had been a given ever since the day I introduced him to Abuelita. With hindsight I can see how unexamined that certainty was. My aunts had married at fourteen or fifteen, my cousins at eighteen. I had long mapped out that I was going to do things in the right order and finish my education first. But with the prospect of my beginning law school at Yale, and Kevin’s own plans for grad school still up in the air, it seemed sensible that he should move to New Haven with me.

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