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 marveled 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.
