Oh, it’s such a perfect day
I’m glad I spend it with you
Oh, such a perfect day
You just keep me hangin’ on
You just keep me hangin’ on
Just a perfect day, problems all left alone
Weekenders on our own, it’s such fun
From “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed
Friday
The night before we left to pick North up from school, I made pizza with broccoli, and we watched Perfect Days. The film tells the story of a middle-aged man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo and his ability to take pleasure in the little things in life. Of course, it’s not that simple. We learn obliquely that he has a traumatic past, which could explain his insistence on order and his ascetic way of life. There’s a lot of American music from the 70s and 80s in the film and it takes its name from the Lou Reed song. I recommend it, if it sounds like your kind of movie.
Saturday
Beth and I set out for Oberlin around 10:15. Noah was staying at home because he was going to attend a town meeting hosted by Zeteo from MSNBC with Senator Chris Van Hollen and others to discuss the current political situation on Monday evening. I was a little sad we were going to be separated on Mother’s Day and my birthday (which fell on the same day this year), but I also didn’t want to discourage him from being politically active, so I didn’t press him to come.
On the drive we started with music and Beth chose Lou Reed’s Transformer (the album with “Perfect Day” on it) because the movie had put her in the mood. We also listened to eight out of the nine episodes of a podcast called Let’s Make a Rom-Com, about writers collaborating on, you guessed it, a rom-com pitch. It was light and more diverting than talking about politics, which is what we might have done left to our own devices. We stopped for a late lunch of salads at Next Door, a vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Bedford, Pennsylvania that may be becoming our go-to lunch-on-the-way-to-Oberlin spot, followed by gelato, and arrived in Oberlin around dinner time.
We found North sitting on the grass in front of Keep with people eating leftover wedding cake from wedding-themed party that had recently happened there. North had skipped dinner to go out for Chinese with us. After dinner we dropped them back off at Keep and settled into our rental house.
Sunday
Sunday was my birthday and Mother’s Day. We’d chosen to take a day trip to Put-in-Bay, an island in Lake Erie Beth and I once visited in college and where she’d also been as a child with her family. It’s a place Beth and I remember fondly.
We’d resolved to try to have a politics-free day, and we mostly did, though we slipped up a few times. This one didn’t count, though, we decided. In the ferry parking lot, the attendant asked us about the message “No Kings. June 14” Beth had written on the back window of the car with washable paint. (She’s been keeping it updated with the names and dates of whatever the next big national protest is.) We’d been a little nervous driving through Western Maryland, Western Pennsylvania, and Ohio with this on the car, but no one said a thing about it up to now. (Interestingly, I’d noticed there were dramatically fewer Trump yard signs, flags, and billboards compared to the last time we made this drive, in early February. The change was especially notable in Pennsylvania.) Beth told the attendant about the protest, and he said, “Is that the day he’s having his stupid parade?” So, that was a satisfying exchange.
You are discouraged from bringing cars on the island and there are golf carts you can rent, so we did that. It was fun riding in an open-sided vehicle along the roads. The day was cool (with highs in the fifties) but sunny so it wasn’t too cold. Our first stop was a short wildflower trail. There was an informative sign at the beginning so we could identify May apples, Jack in the Pulpit, blue phlox, and other blooms.
Next, we had lunch on the patio of a restaurant in town. I got a vegetable crepe for my meal and split a chocolate-peanut butter one with Beth for dessert. The wildflower trail had been both my and Beth’s first priority, so our next stop was North’s—Crystal Cave. We knew the cave purports to have the world’s largest geode, though North looked it up and found a cave in Spain says the same thing, so who knows? In any case, it contains a very large geode. In fact, the whole cave is the geode. A dozen or so people can stand inside it and walk around, and it looks just as you would imagine such a thing would look. It was very cool.
We decided to visit the butterfly house next. It’s a greenhouse filled with hundreds of butterflies, and it had just opened for the season, so there were a lot of butterflies hatching in nursery you could see through a window. North got to release a newly hatched one from a plastic cup. It wasn’t quite ready to fly, so it fell to the ground, but it wasn’t hurt, just sat there, gently stretching its wings. The butterflies were all different colors and sizes and very beautiful.
We took another short trail to a cliff overlook and then went to visit the old lighthouse before we got on the ferry to go back to the mainland.
Right near the ferry, there was a store called Cheese Haven, advertising that it sold 125 kinds of cheese, so we felt obliged to go inside and buy some (a big hunk of Parmesan, brick, and smoked Swiss) and to get some candy and raspberry-cheesecake fudge, too. Beth had been looking for strawberry fudge all day because we both remember having excellent strawberry fudge at Put-in-Bay. On consideration, Beth thought we might have actually gotten it on a different, nearby island. It is difficult to recreate memories from almost forty years ago, but we had a truly lovely day, and we made some new memories with North.
Back in Oberlin, I opened birthday and Mother’s day presents (though I was saving my cake for later at home) and we had Mexican for dinner and then went to Dairy Queen. It was packed and I have never seen so many employees behind a fast-food counter. There were so many they seemed to be trying not to get in each other’s way, but they also seemed quite cheerful. I wondered if the store was training all its new employees for the season. Anyway, the line was long, but it moved quickly, and no one seemed impatient. The atmosphere was more festive than harried.
Monday
Monday morning was North’s acting class showcase. The students were divided into seven groups with two to three actors in each and each group performed a scene from a play. They were all well done. The first one, about a married couple splitting up, seemed like it could have been a one act, but the others were clearly parts of something larger and left you curious about how the play unfolded.
North had a comic role, a thirty-something man high on mushrooms. (I asked if they did any extracurricular research for the part, but they said no.) I always like seeing North on stage and they shone. Afterward, the professor said to us, “Wasn’t North great?” and what parent is going to disagree with that?
North had three take-home finals but they’d finished them early so when the showcase was over, so was their first year of college. We had lunch at Keep (a tasty tofu scramble with sautéed carrots and zucchini, rice, and mini cinnamon muffins) which we ate on the porch. North’s friend Cal came over to eat with us and North asked the assembled diners to sing “Happy Birthday” to me, even though it wasn’t my birthday anymore.
They spent the afternoon packing up and cleaning their room, and after we helped them load everything into the car, we had a picnic dinner on Lake Erie. We got takeout from The Root Café, a hippie sort of vegetarian place. After we ate, we walked on a path near the water. You could see the Cleveland skyline across the lake. There were a lot of people walking on the path and North said they felt like a character in Bridgerton, taking a promenade. From there we got ice cream and drove back to Oberlin. North spent the night in our rental house because their room was vacated and cleaned.
Tuesday
Tuesday morning North attended another acting class showcase to see a friend of their perform in an abbreviated version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. It was a little before lunchtime when we left Oberlin. It was a long, rainy, traffic-stalled ride home. We had lunch at a highway rest stop and dinner at a dinner in Western Maryland. When we got home, North was reunited with the cats—Willow initially ran down to the basement on seeing them but soon remembered who they were—and their brother who had been saving funny memes on his phone to show them.
I had a very nice birthday weekend. I can’t say they were perfect days because I was separated from one of my kids on Mother’s Day, but it was nice to reunite with North in a special place and then it was nice to be back home and all together again for the summer.
Plus, my birthday celebration was not over…