Kenyon College Alumni Magazine

Bruce V. Thomas and Julia H. Thomas ’80 split time between Richmond, Virginia, and Guiting Power, a village in England’s Cotswolds. Bruce is in his ninth year working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in infectious disease — mostly TB, dengue and now Covid. In seven years, he’s “averaged more than 400,000 flight miles per year, and then two years of zero flight miles,” he updates. “Headed back to India, then Indonesia, and then South America and Tanzania. Gliding toward retirement in 2023–24. Feel like these last 10 years with BMGF have sanitized the rest of my professional career.”

Maria C. “Mia” Halton, Baltimore, concluded eight years of caregiving when she lost her mother in May 2021. “It was hard work to pick up the pieces,” she shares, “but I sold her house and said good-bye. I then found myself in the business of creating this next phase of my life. Two wonderful friends had invited me to join them on a trip to the Galapagos over the holidays, mostly on a small boat. I love to travel, and this trip proved to be the catalyst and jump-start that I needed. I hadn’t been able to make art since quarantine hit, but back at it now. I’m also still teaching — ceramics to special-needs populations, and a class designed to encourage participants to identify what it is they want to ‘say.’ And I’m looking at starting a new kind of retirement com-munity. I see a group of like-minded people coming together into, for example, a one-story industrial building. Each separate space would be open and contain a kitchenette. There would a common kitchen and dining area, also wood and ceramics shops. If this idea strikes your fancy…”