Profile: Hutt-Tiwald, Mara

Name: Mara Kristine Hutt-Tiwald

High School:  Naperville North High School, Naperville, Illinois, 1995
College:  New York University, New York, New York
Where the "Place" link goes:  State of Nebraska

I never know what to say about Mara, and it always seems like whatever I say, it isn't enough. Sometimes I think we are very similar people. Other times, looking at the same information, I think we are different to the extreme. In either case, I know she is my friend, and the most important one I have at that. Mara is a '95, which means that she didn't know me when I was a freshman. This, I have resolved, is a good thing, as I think it might have adversely affected our relationship. I actually didn't meet Mara until November 1992, during my junior (and her sophomore) year at NNHS. That year (as well as the following year) we both worked as statisticians for the NNHS boys basketball program. I had a lot of trouble remembering her name (as well as the names of the other statisticians) that year, but I've never mispronounced her name, mostly because I can speak English. Mara can speak English, too; she was Outstanding Communication Arts Student at NNHS in 1995 and is now a "feeble English major" at New York University. This seems to me to be the opposite end of the spectrum from me, NNHS's Outstanding Mathematics Student in 1994 and a mathematics-secondary ed major at UIUC. Despite those significant differences, we have become friends, much to the surprise of a few people who only know one of us. I don't have an explanation for them. I also don't have an explanation for why Mara and I became better friends after I graduated from NNHS, but it is very much true that we did. Her senior year at NNHS she took over my position with the softball team as well as doing basketball again. I talked to her a few times, and corresponded via e-mail through most of that year while I was off in Urbana-land. Mara has taught me a lot about dealing with other people, and she has shown me mostly by her own example much of what it means to be a friend. We don't always agree on everything, nor would I hope we would. We occasionally have arguments, some of which have been relatively heated. Each of us has other friends, and we don't necessarily have to be friends with (or even like, for that matter) each other's friends. We do have to accept each other's friends as just that. For a long time Mara has been one of the most mature people I know, and that is one thing she taught me. I've been around Mara at some of my highest emotional levels and at some of my lowest. She was with me on 11 March 1994 when we celebrated our basketball team's triple-overtime victory over Naperville Central, and she would be with me again on 16 November 1994 at the funeral of NNHS Head Math Team Coach Robert Martin. I feel I have gained more from my friendship with Mara, in many ways, than from any other friend I have ever had. Yet, if I think about it, I really don't know very much about her, less even than most of the other people in the peopletrace files. To a certain extent, I'm happy with that, but at the same time I don't like it. On one hand, I don't want to know a lot of things I don't because I don't want it to affect the way I feel about her. The other hand sees that as unfair, in that I should base my opinion of her on all of her, not on just some small filter. Perhaps I'm just paranoid. Perhaps that's why when she's seven hundred miles away, I wish she were around, but when she's sitting right next to me she seems so far away. (This is a phenomenon I noticed last summer: I really missed her when she was in London, but when I took her to a White Sox game, she seemed like she was 100 feet away. I told her this, and she then poked me to verify her proximity.) What I do know is that she is my friend. She is the best friend I have ever had, and she is one of the most wonderful people I have ever met. She's very important to me; I find it difficult to think that she could be any more important to me if she were my own sister. I once had someone say to me, "I think you love Mara as much as you are capable of loving anyone." It was an interesting thing for me to think about then. I cannot imagine not knowing her, not having her as my friend, and I hope that many years hence I may still count Mara among my dearest friends.

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