Tim, you may not remember this because we were pretty young, but when you were about 3 and I was 5, we were walking from the Stables down to the lake and you tripped over a rock and scraped your knee. You were clutching your ailing limb with your tiny toddler hands, horrified but curiously so by the odd fact that the blood gushing out was not red but in fact a deep blue, an elegant hue just short of navy. “What’s happening to me?!” you wailed. As the adults around us worried about internal oxygen levels, hypothesized about lake-bred parasites and potential demonic possession, I knelt down and surreptitiously pulled off a band-aid that covered a scabbing cut on my elbow, an injury I had earned from a minor bicycle accident. “Look,” I whispered, pointing to the blue stains on the inner pad of the bandage. “Mine’s blue too. There’s nothing to worry about, little one.” It wasn’t until many years later, in spring 2014, when I opened my acceptance letter and immediately recognized the blue of Georgetown’s emblem as the blue of my own blood, that I realized I had always been bleeding Hoya Blue. I did my best to feign surprise when, two years later, you also got in, because naturally I had long since put together the pieces of your destiny. On the day of your graduation from this esteemed institution, a day that comes with mixed feelings, your excitement surely tempered by the nerves and sorrows of change, I urge you to remember that you always have, and always will, bleed Hoya Blue.
-Beau D.