Arsine Victoria Avakian, my wife, died in May, three months before
her 81st birthday. Vicki was one of those exceptional people who
enrich the lives of everyone they know.
Vicki and I married at the end of summer in 1963, after receiving
our SB degrees in physics from MIT in June.
Our adventure began with our honeymoon, a road trip across the USA
from Massachusetts to California. We went trekking in Nepal, and in
the highlands of New Guinea, ice climbing in New Zealand, walking on
the sand dunes in the Gobi Dessert, crawling through passages in the
Pyramids, and we saw the rising sun glinting off hundreds of temples
in Burma from a hot air balloon. We marvelled at seeing emperor
penguin chicks in Antarctica, musk-ox and polar bears in Greenland,
blue-footed boobies and giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands,
and cheetahs near our tent camp in the Serengeti.
Vicki was an artist and a craftsman. She enjoyed drawing and
painting, weaving and knitting wool in elaborate designs, faceting
gems, and cutting and polishing minerals.
Vicki was a musician. She had a French horn, an Alexander made in
Germany after the war, which she played in the MIT band, in the
Pasadena Orchestra while she was working on her PhD at Caltech, in
the Canberra Symphony Orchestra while she was a post-doc at the
Australian National University, and in the National Capital
Orchestra, of which she was a founding member, while she was
lecturing computer science at Australian National University.
Vicki was the mother of our two children. Our son, Davin, graduated
from Princeton, and has a business in Whistler, British Columbia.
Our daughter, Lucine, graduated from the University of California at
Santa Barbara, and works at Lake Tahoe, California. Most years Vicki
and I would visit, and ski with them, but after 3 grandchildren
arrived, we visited in the summer, walked with them in the woods,
and swam with them in mountain lakes.
I have a block of land in the Australian bush, populated by
kangaroos and wombats, where Vicki and I set up a camp near a field
of wild flowers, "Patersonia sericea" (native iris), which
bloom around the summer solstice, and were the subject of several of
Vicki's art works. I have scattered Vicki's ashes over these flowers
which Vicki admired.
Bruce Peterson
P O Box 8050
Rivett ACT 2611
AUSTRALIA
petersonfamily@tafir.com.au
|