Waiting for Joy

Posted on December 7, 2024 by Steph

We’ve been home from our Thanksgiving week trip for almost a week now, but once I got back into the swing of work and chores, I never did get around to blogging about the last few days, so I thought I’d finish that before switching gears.

Black Friday

On Friday morning Beth and I lingered at the hotel long enough to have a soak in the hot tub after breakfast. It seemed it would be a waste to stay there five days and not use it. We showed up at Beth’s mom house in the late morning and took separate walks in snow flurries that persisted on and off all day and gave the day a festive feel. (The snow never did stick in Beth’s mom’s neighborhood, but when we went back to our hotel that night there was a dusting there. Wheeling is a hilly town and apparently it has microclimates.)

Most of us ate Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch and then Noah and I finished The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and Beth went ice skating at Wheeling Park. In the mid-afternoon, Beth, North and I left to do a little Christmas shopping. We went to the Artisan Center and Centre Market. We got a few small gifts for my niece Lily-Mei, who at eleven and a half is redecorating her room in a goth theme. This turned out to be the holiday project I didn’t know I needed. Maybe because it seemed more like Halloween than Christmas it was the only gift buying that interested me (and even now it’s the only gift buying I’ve done). We got some little figurines of cats in goth outfits, a painting of a raven, and picked out a wooden statue of another raven (though by the time we returned to that store to buy it, it had closed).

We went into a vintage clothes and record shop to look for a warmer winter coat than North currently owns. Since the thin down coat that served them for a couple winters in Maryland seemed to be about right for November in Ohio, they suspected they will need something heavier for winter, but they couldn’t find anything at this store. Next, we stopped at a coffee kiosk and got a half-sweet gingerbread latte for me and chai for North and headed home.

When we got home, Beth’s mom was watching a WVU-Arizona basketball game (WVU won) and then Beth, North, and I watched an episode of Gilmore Girls. Beth went to pick up pizza for us to eat in front of Hot Frosty, which was Noah’s pick for a Hallmark-type Christmas movie. It was just what you’d expect from this kind of movie. I don’t think I need to say more.

Small Business Saturday

In the morning, Noah and I started Dracula. I taught this book for years in my horror class and I’m deeply gratified to be sharing it with him. We went out for lunch at Later Alligator. (The promise of crepes was how we enticed Noah out of the house for the first time in a few days.) I didn’t read the description of my crepe carefully enough and when it arrived, I was a little dismayed to find it had white rice in it because rice tends to spike my blood sugar and unlike a lot of other things I was eating that week, it wasn’t worth the splurge. I did my best to eat around it.

We met up with Beth’s mom for more Christmas shopping at the Schrader Environmental Center gift shop in Oglebay park. Because of the rice and because I wasn’t really in a good headspace for more Christmas shopping, I decided to take a walk in the park while everyone else shopped. Next, we proceeded to the park lodge coffeeshop for coffee and pastries. Beth and I had noticed lavender lattes there earlier in the week and they are North’s favorite, which was part of the reason we returned. (Thanks to the walk, my blood sugar was low enough so that I was able to have half a slice of gingerbread cake.)

Back at the house I did laundry and made cranberry applesauce out of our apple-turkey centerpieces and some leftover cranberries. But before dinner, we headed out to Oglebay to drive through the light show. We haven’t been to Wheeling for Thanksgiving or Christmas for a long time—this was the last time—because in recent years we’ve been going to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and Blackwater for Christmas, so we haven’t been to the light show in nine years either, though when the kids were small we went almost every year.

I think a lot of people who live in Wheeling think of the Festival of Lights as a touristy thing, and find the traffic it attracts annoying, but I am quite fond of it. It’s been around for forty years, and I probably went for the first time in the late eighties or early nineties, so I’ve seen it grow bigger and bigger. I like seeing the old familiar lights, like the candles surrounded by poinsettias, and the newer LED displays. I only took one picture and didn’t ask Noah to take any because it’s hard to take pictures from a moving vehicle and I didn’t want ask Beth to stop the car repeatedly. I knew which one I wanted, though.

Back when North was in preschool and knew their letters but couldn’t read, they used to insist every word that started with a J was their name because their birth name started with a J. So, the year they were two and a half, when we drove through the Festival of Lights, they saw the word JOY and got very excited about seeing their name in lights, so to speak. For years afterward it became a family joke to say the sign said North’s old name. But we hadn’t been through since North changed their name and when I said, “Look, it says North,” everyone laughed.

There are several tunnels made of lights along the route, and these fixtures also inspired nostalgia. I reminisced about how the kids used to try to hold their breath in them. The tunnels are not long but when traffic is slow, which it generally is, it takes a long time to get through them. I remembered how this used to lead to conflict and tears. When they were nine and fourteen for instance, when Noah was trying to hold his breath and North wasn’t, he claimed they had “forfeited” and he had won, which made them mad. So, at the next tunnel, North retaliated by breathing as loudly as they could to torment him while he tried to hold his breath. Reminded of this tradition, of course, both of them held their breath and it took so long to get through one of the tunnels I thought they would pass out, but they didn’t. And no one cried, so I guess that’s improvement.

That night after a dinner of leftovers and cranberry applesauce, Carole came over to say goodbye because we were leaving the next morning.

Advent

Even though I am not Catholic, it always pleases me when Advent starts on December 1 and the little chocolate-dispensing calendars are accurate. This was one of those years. We didn’t buy an Advent calendar this year, but I thought of it anyway.

On Sunday we were one the road for fourteen hours, first driving North back to Oberlin, making a lunch stop there, and then driving from Oberlin home. On arriving in Oberlin, we helped North carry their luggage up to their third-floor room and they hung some ornaments they’d asked us to bring from home on the tree in the Keep lounge.

Next, we stopped at a grocery store to get them some food because meals were not starting up at Keep for another day and a half and we had brunch at a restaurant in town. Everyone but me got pancakes—sweet potato-cranberry for Noah, chocolate chip for Beth, and blueberry for North. I had a broccoli-quinoa omelet, salad, half the potatoes that came with my meal, and some hot tea, and I did not feel too deprived. I put this photo of Beth and the kids at the restaurant on Facebook and North saw it and texted me, “I like this picture where none of us are smiling and only Beth is looking at the camera.” Believe it or not it was the best of four pictures I took.

After eating we took North back to Keep and said our goodbyes. It was not nearly as hard as when we left them there in August, partly because we’re getting used to being apart but mostly because we were going to see them again in less than two weeks when they come home for winter break. (And now it’s less than a week.)

If Advent is a time of waiting for joyful things, even in dark days, it truly has begun.

To Be Grateful

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Steph

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Tuesday

Two days before Thanksgiving, on North’s first full day in Wheeling, they did schoolwork for much of the day and I worked on a long-form blog post about nootropics, as I had the day before. Beth’s aunts Susan and Carole dropped by separately. I saw Susan, but missed Carole, as I was out on a walk.

Late that afternoon we did a photo shoot for our Christmas card in Wheeling Park. I wanted to do it that day because it was going to get colder as the week progressed, though as it was it was still kind of chilly to be out without jackets in the late afternoon.

In 2016, I didn’t know what to do about the Christmas card. This is what I said about it:

A few days ago, I told Beth I was thinking of not doing a Christmas card this year. It just seemed like a lot of work and it was hard to imagine putting a smiling picture of us on the front of it or writing a cheerful letter about what we’ve been up to this past year. The annual card means more to me than to her, so I thought she might go along with the idea of taking a pass. Instead she looked surprised.

I said I wasn’t sure if it was just post-election depression and if I’d regret it later if we skipped a year. She asked if I’d thought it was too much work last year. I said no, so clearly it was post-election depression, but that the part I wasn’t sure about was whether I’d regret it or not. She gently suggested we take some pictures at the beach “just in case.” We discussed the possibility of sending a card with no letter, of taking a more pensive looking picture, of putting some political message on the card.

I’m still not sure what we’re going to do, but I think she handled it just right. If she’d said that we should do the card, I might have said it was pointless and started crying. If she’d said sure, let’s skip it this year, I probably would have cried, too, because that would mean it really was pointless.

We ended up doing cards that year. I suggested to the kids that they look pensive, and Noah did, but North didn’t. I can’t remember what we did about the letter, and I can’t find one in the folder where I keep those documents, so it’s possible we skipped it, but my filing is not impeccable and other years are missing, too.

I felt similarly about the card this year, but we couldn’t stare moodily at the ocean on this year’s card because we weren’t at the beach. Before the election, we’d planned to pose by the Christmas decorations at the lodge at Oglebay but I couldn’t imagine doing anything so cheery now. So, instead of our usual red and green color scheme, I asked everyone to dress in muted, nature-evoking colors (blues, greens, and browns) and we posed in the autumnal, less decorated landscape of Wheeling Park. They all indulged me. Beth asked jokingly, if I’d like to take the photo in the cemetery that’s adjacent to the park and the thing is, while we were standing there with the hill of graves in sight, I had actually thought of that, but I didn’t want to go that far. Plus, as North said, it would be disrespectful of the dead to use their gravestones as props.

We walked around taking pictures by various bushes and trees, some bare, some evergreen, and some with red berries or leaves. The graveyard did show up in the background of some of them. I told people to smile or not, as they chose. I alternated between small smiles and more somber expressions. Then we approached the lake with its “Danger. Thin Ice” sign and took some pictures there (for Facebook, rather than the card), as it seems to be a good representation of the outlook for 2025.

It turned out to be comforting outing, being outside with the four of us all together, joking a little in a dark sort of way. I asked North if it was nice being back with their “weird family.”

They said, “Yes. Is it nice being back with your weird kid?”

I said, “Yes.” And it was.

When we’d finished the shoot, we went to warm up with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate at the coffeehouse in the park. Then we went back to Beth’s mom’s house and North and I collaborated on an improvised vegetable soup for dinner.

Beth and I checked into a hotel that night. This was the plan all along because her mom’s condo is small for five people. But since North had arrived earlier than expected, we’d managed the night before with Beth, Noah, and me in the guest room (he was on an air bed) and North on another air bed in the living room.

Wednesday

In the breakfast room of the hotel in the morning, I entertained myself by people watching. (Beth and I went down separately because I wasn’t ready when she was.) I heard a little boy complaining that his brother had sausage, and he did not have any. His mother fetched him some sausage and then he exclaimed indignantly, “I didn’t want sausage!”

Next a college-age young man in the same party tucked a few packages of Nutella into his pocket and his father (or maybe stepfather—based on the ages of the four kids it could have been a blended family) said, “What are you doing with your life that you’re stashing Nutella?” It wasn’t said in a joking way either. He seemed to mean it. The young man, undeterred, started putting muffins into his backpack while the (step)father started to mansplain Tik-Tok to a teen girl, opining it was “all about trends.”

Eventually I tore myself away from this fascinating family and Beth and I went for an hour-long walk in Oglebay park. We checked out the site where the winter carnival is running in the afternoons and evenings. There was a tiny skating rink with artificial ice (made of plastic). Beth decided she was not interested in skating in such a small area. We looked at all the Christmas trees decorated in different themes (culinary, floral, animal-themed, patriotic, athletic, and one dedicated to the Oglebay family—iron barons who donated the grounds of the park and its mansion one hundred years ago).

Back at the lodge, we stopped for coffee, a muffin, and biscotti. It was there I heard my first Christmas music in the wild this year (an instrumental version of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentleman”) and from then on it was full-on Christmas music, which Beth pointed out was not surprising given that the Festival of Lights is in progress.

We went back to Beth’s mom’s house and found North cleaning up from having made pie crust. We stayed long enough for Noah and me to read for a half hour (We were near the end of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires) and then have lunch. Then Beth, the kids, and I went to see Wicked.

The situation in the theater was very strange. In the lobby, there was just one kiosk for tickets and no staff other than those selling concessions. The kiosk was serving both people who needed to buy tickets and those who had bought them online and still needed to print them. The lines for both concessions and the tickets kiosk were quite long, so we split up. The kids got popcorn, pretzel bites, and soda, and Beth stood in the ticket line. She sent me deeper into the building to go look for a ticket taker so we could find out if we really needed to print the tickets (as an email she received indicated) or if the code on Beth’s phone could be scanned, but there was no one anywhere. It turned out we could have waltzed right into the theater with no tickets, and no one would have been the wiser.

But just to be safe, Beth did wait in the line (which stopped for a while when the machine broke down—and one of the two staff people did come over then to fix it). Unbeknownst to us, Beth’s aunt Susan was attending the same screening of the same film with several of her grandkids and great grandkids in tow, so when they arrived Beth bought tickets for them, too, so they wouldn’t have to wait as long in line. Susan said Beth was “an angel.” Anyway, we did pay to see Wicked, because we are law-abiding citizens. It was fun. I recommend it.

Back at Beth’s mom’s house, North made the filling for their pie and put it in the oven, we looked over the almost forty pictures from the park and narrowed it down to three finalists, and we had Chinese takeout for dinner and then watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Mayflower Voyagers.

Thanksgiving Day

Beth and I returned to the house from our hotel around 9:20. The kids were still asleep, but her mom was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Beth and I got started on the mushroom gravy and then I left her to finish it while I folded laundry in the living room while watching the parade.

Later that morning we went for a walk in a cemetery, not the one from the photo shoot, but another one. It’s a big graveyard with winding paths, tall trees, headstones, mausoleums, columns, and obelisks. I saw stones from as long ago as 1875 and as recent as this year. There are still grassy areas to fill in. I saw surnames I would not like to have (Boring) and ones I would (Seabright, not that I’d swap Lovelady for that, but it is an excellent name).

We discussed my ambivalence about what I’d like done with my body after my death. I’ve always liked graveyards, and I like the idea of loved ones visiting my grave or strangers walking by and exclaiming “What a great name” but the idea of my ashes being scattered at sea is also appealing. Of course, I said, Beth would probably rather be scattered at Blackwater. We could have our ashes mixed, she said, after we were both dead, and scattered in both places. It’s not a firm plan, but it’s a possibility. Take note, kids.

We’d been walking a while before Beth happened to mention her maternal grandparents had headstones in this cemetery, but she didn’t remember where. In a book or a movie, we would have stumbled across the graves, and I looked, but we didn’t. On the way home, we detoured to go walk to their two-story brick house. We also walked by Beth’s middle school (which was her mom’s high school back in the 60s) on the way there and from the edge of the cemetery you just barely could see the house where Beth lived during the first half or so of her childhood. I told her I liked knowing what memories I was walking by when I’m in Wheeling. We moved a lot when I was a kid, and though we’ve given our kids a childhood in one place, I have a hard time imagining what that would be like sometimes.

Back at the house we found North making caramel sauce for their apple pie, having finished the cranberry sauce. We had lunch, and Noah and I continued to read our vampire book, and Beth’s aunt Jenny came by for a visit, followed by her aunt Carole, who dropped off a pumpkin chiffon pie. We now had three kinds of pie, because Beth’s mom made a pecan pie the night before after we left for the hotel.

Beth, the kids, and I made our traditional Thanksgiving craft of turkeys made of apples, raisins, dried cranberries, green olives, and toothpicks. They grace our table every year as centerpieces, but this year Noah wanted to take them outside to photograph them. I went with him, and he asked me to arrange them to look “natural… like they’re in their habitat.” You can judge if I did a good job.

Later in the afternoon, North basted the tofurkey roast, Beth’s mom made mashed potatoes, Beth made stuffing, and Noah chopped the green beans, and I steamed them. Various people read and napped. I listened to “Alice’s Restaurant” and a playlist of songs about autumn, since it won’t be autumn for much longer.

Then we ate our feast (joined for pie later by Carole and her granddaughter Holly). Some years at Thanksgiving we go around the table and say what we are thankful for, but we don’t do it every year. I thought about it ahead of time and decided I would not initiate this activity because gratitude is currently a work in progress for me and I didn’t want to put others on the spot if anyone felt the same. I did want to have an answer, though, if asked, because I do want to be grateful. I think it’s important. Beth recently advised me not to let the incoming President take the joy out of my life and it is good advice.

At the table no one asked for examples of gratitude. Instead, Beth’s mom asked us to recount our most memorable Thanksgivings. She told us about the only year she didn’t spend in Wheeling, early in her marriage when she and Beth’s dad were living in Bluefield, WV, and the way she described it sounded a little lonely. I commiserated and mentioned how it strange it was to be in Spain the Thanksgiving I was twenty. My Thanksgiving dinner consisted of a sweet potato boiled on a hot plate in a dorm room. “That is sad,” she said.

Beth mentioned that she had a gallbladder attack, and we’ve had lice and covid on or very near Thanksgiving. Beth’s mom suggested we consider happier Thanksgivings and reminisced about the Thanksgiving Beth was one year old, and they had her birthday cake with Thanksgiving dinner. Beth said she’d be sure to tell her younger brother that their mother’s happiest Thanksgiving was before he was born. I put in that while we’d had many happy Thanksgivings with extended family on both sides, the first year we went to the beach for Thanksgiving was memorable because it was new.

But back to gratitude… If I am being honest, I have been very sad and disappointed and sometimes fearful since the election. It’s not irrational. My family includes a lesbian couple, one of whom works in the labor movement, a young adult who recently worked to elect Democratic political candidates, and another young adult who’s trans. While we are not the most endangered people—that would be immigrants—some or all of us could be in the crosshairs soon. There are some things that make me feel less terrible, though, and each one makes me grateful. Here are the ones that come to mind:

Family, especially my extraordinary wife and kids
The kittens
Nature
Good food and coffee
Books, music, movies, and tv (especially Ghosts UK right now)
All of you who will be fighting the good fight over the next several years

Get the Party Started

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Steph

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Beth turned fifty-eight the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Her birthday is usually before Thanksgiving and when it is, it’s what gets the holiday festivities underway for us. She had a busy, pleasant day. She was out of the house most of the morning and part of the afternoon. The skating rink in Downtown Silver Spring had opened for the season, so she went skating and then to pick up her birthday reward pastry at Starbucks and a large quantity of apples at the farmers’ market so North could make an apple pie for Thanksgiving, and then on series of errands.

Back at the house, I wrapped her presents and baked a cake, the one I most often make for her birthday, dark chocolate with coffee frosting. We had a video call with North in the mid-afternoon, during which North showed Beth a pair of mittens they had knitted for her, and she unwrapped gifts from Noah (a salad dressing shaker from her wish list) and me (a dark chocolate bar and a sampler pack of four Spanish cheeses).

Noah and I made vegetarian crab cakes for dinner, at her request, and then we had birthday cake and watched the last episode of season 3 of Ghosts UK. We are whizzing through this series, which we only started watching right after the election, but between several different travel plans, it will probably go onto the back burner for a while. Speaking of family travel, after we watched tv, we started to pack for our Thanksgiving trip. We are currently in Wheeling, where we are spending a week with Beth’s mom.

We left the following morning. Truth be told, I was melancholy for much of the drive, because there was time for my mind to wander and I’ve been trying to avoid letting it do that. Thankfully, though, there weren’t nearly as many Trump signs as I expected in Western Maryland, Western Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. (I’d braced myself.) The leaves were mostly past peak, but there were parts of the drive with some muted fall color left and at the higher elevations, there was snow on the ground. At a rest stop as we walked back to the car, Beth swerved off the sidewalk to step in it and then she smiled.

We arrived in Wheeling at 4:15 and after chatting with Beth’s mom, Beth, Noah, and I went for a short walk because we’d been cooped up in the car for most of the day. Some people had Christmas lights up and there were some lingering Halloween decorations, too, but I most appreciated the seasonal touch of the house with two inflatable turkeys.

Back at the house, Noah told Beth’s mom about his plans for his upcoming trip to London. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but he’s taking a week-long solo trip to London in early December.) Beth made ravioli for dinner and then we watched Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I had not seen since college, but remains as artsy and atmospheric as I remembered.

North was originally supposed to join us on Wednesday, but the friend giving them a ride to a nearby town kept changing the day of their departure, first back to Tuesday and then to Monday. I was a little concerned about North missing so much class. We’d decided to have Thanksgiving in Wheeling (rather than coming for Christmas) partly because Oberlin’s Thanksgiving break is so short (they only had Thursday and Friday off) and we could reduce travel for North in what’s essentially a long weekend. But the decision was in the driver’s hands and of course, we were also happy to have more time with North. I got some texts from them about their change of plans Monday morning while I was taking a walk in Wheeling Park.

Late that afternoon, Beth and I drove to Cambridge, Ohio to pick North up at a Starbucks. Our car pulled into the lot probably less than two minutes before Levi’s car did. North emerged, we thanked him and wished him a safe drive—he was going all the way to North Carolina in one shot. We proceeded inside where North picked up one of the cranberry-coconut milk refreshers they’ve been wanting to try and a cranberry bliss bar. (There are no Starbucks within walking distance of campus, so North has been impatient to try the new items and old favorites on the holiday menu.) From there we proceeded to Taco Bell for dinner and then drove back to Wheeling, where North was reunited with their brother and grandmother and our Thanksgiving party was now complete.

Before Breakfast: A Long Hop

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Steph

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As he came down the hill, Grenfell was chuckling to himself: “Anyhow, when that first amphibious frog-toad found his water-hole dried up behind him, and jumped out to hop along till he could find another—well, he started on a long hop.”

From “Before Breakfast,” by Willa Cather

The Day After

I cried three times before breakfast the day after the election. I had not stayed up to watch the results come in. Because it was projected to be down to the wire and the last time around it was several days before we knew who was going to be President, I really didn’t expect it to be settled that night, and I didn’t see the point of losing sleep. I did watch some MSNBC coverage with Noah, for about an hour and fifteen minutes and went to bed only a little later than usual. No swing states had been called and none of the states that had been called were surprising. Still, I was a little nervous about the granular analysis of results that focused on how Harris wasn’t getting the margins expected in the counties she was winning, and how she was losing by more than expected in the counties she lost. Based on the rate at which he was putting Halloween candy away, I think Noah was nervous, too. Even so, I didn’t have too much trouble getting to sleep.

In the morning, I looked at Facebook before getting out of bed and I learned from a friend’s post what had happened. At first, I did not believe it. I thought maybe the election had not been called and maybe it was looking bad, but perhaps my friend was being hasty. I guess that was the denial part of the five stages of grief, but it only lasted a few seconds until I saw another post and another. I skipped right over bargaining. (How would that even work? With whom would I bargain?) I have felt anger. Mostly, though, in the past twelve days, I have been stuck in depression, with very little acceptance.

Beth, who got up before me, came back into the bedroom, got into bed and gave me a hug and that was when I burst into tears for the first time. The second time was when Noah emerged from his room, and I pulled him into an embrace in the hallway outside the bathroom. The third time was when North answered the text I sent shortly after getting the news. They had not stayed up either and my texts and Beth’s, read on waking, were how they found out.

The day after the election was Noah’s last day at work. From Monday through Wednesday he was working on a montage of clips from election ads his company made for female candidates that would be used to promote the firm to future clients. So, he wasn’t home when we had a video call with North that morning to touch base and share our sadness.

But North also had some good news. The day before they’d learned they had a part, one of the leads, in a student-written play. It means they will be in Oberlin over Winter Term instead of home as they had planned, because they have four weeks of daily rehearsals, starting in early January, and then the play will be performed in early February. Beth and I plan to road trip up there to see it. This was very heartening news as North was never satisfied with the roles they had in high school plays. I am so glad for them that I don’t even mind that they won’t be home for as long as we thought.

Even though before the election I had advised North not to isolate themselves and skip meals or class if things went poorly, I did not take my own advice, at least in one instance. I skipped book club on Wednesday night. In the thirteen years I have been attending this book club, I have never done that unless I had a schedule conflict, or I’d decided ahead of time I was not interested in the book. This was the third of four meetings on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. I’d been to the first two, but I just couldn’t imagine talking about nineteenth-century Russian literature that night or leaving the house.

Instead, Noah, Beth, and I started a new series, Ghosts UK, which I highly recommend if you are looking for something light, funny, and distracting. It has made me laugh more reliably than anything else the past couple weeks. It doesn’t feel like exaggeration to call it a lifeline, which is a little ironic, considering it is about dead people.

The Week After

I muddled through the next few days, doing the things I was supposed to do (work, cooking, housework), operating on autopilot. On Saturday Noah and I made homemade whole-wheat pumpkin ravioli. He’d been wanting to do it for several weeks, and we never seemed to have time. If I’m being honest, I was not initially enthusiastic about the project, because we’ve done at least twice before, and I know it’s a lot of work and I just wanted to phone things in at this point. But he wanted to, and imagining what it might be like to want something someone else could give me, I wanted to do it for him. And it turned out to be kind of therapeutic, to make something difficult and to do it successfully. There are tricky parts rolling out the dough in the machine and not breaking it, and I found myself focused on that and not the potential downfall of democracy for a little while. That was a relief.

Two days later, Beth and I went to Great Falls, on the Maryland side of the park. It was Veteran’s Day so we both had the day off. We went on the theory that getting outside never hurts and sometimes helps. We walked for two hours to various overlooks, along the canal towpath, and on a trail in the woods.

Watching the rushing waters proved mesmerizing and temporarily calming, as did being in movement that long. At one of the overlooks, we watched kayakers paddle in a calm bend of the river and then venture briefly into the white water, going back and forth, occasionally overturning and then righting themselves. It didn’t seem like these forays were meant to go anywhere as they always returned to the same pool. I asked Beth what she thought they were doing, and she said they were practicing paddling in rough waters. My mind tried to make a metaphor about how that’s what we will need to do, rest in the calm waters, dart out into the turbulence, get knocked over and get back up. I told my mind to shut up. I wasn’t ready for motivational speeches, even from myself.

At one point along the trail, we saw a pay phone and as we got closer, I saw it was not operational. Most of the receiver was missing and wires protruded from it. That’s the metaphor, a sulky part of my brain tried to say, but I shushed it, too.

After a picnic lunch eaten on a fallen log, Beth suggested going out for ice cream, so we did. I got chocolate chip, because you don’t see plain chocolate chip very often anymore and it seemed retro in a comforting way. There was a neon sign in the shop that said, “Ice cream solves everything,” which Beth didn’t even notice until I pointed it out. I said I did not believe it. She said it may not, but it “gives you the fortitude” to go about solving things.

We got home and found Noah making a pear crumble. When the kitchen was free, I made eggplant parmesan. Comfort foods were on the menu all week. Beth made a cream of vegetable soup that tasted just like the inside of a pot pie. I made the eggplant for Beth because she loves it, mushroom stroganoff on mashed cauliflower for myself (it would have been on egg noodles if not for diabetes) and a vegetable-tofu stir-fry on soba for Noah (soba is a relatively safe pasta for me).

The Second Week After

Two days later, on the second Wednesday after the election, I woke and realized I had not been jolted from sleep in a panic between four and five in the morning for the first time in a week. I was aware I’d had bad dreams, but I could not remember what they were about, and it seemed like a hopeful sign to me that my brain had switched to a more symbolic form of processing, instead of sheer terror. My mind settled into the familiar early morning routine of remembering the early Trump months, or really the whole god-dammed presidency, and wondering how we could possibly do this again and probably worse this time. And then my mind said, rather firmly, we just will. And I had a flash of acceptance. It lasted about five minutes, but still…

Thursday morning, I remembered my bad dreams, which could be interpreted as another form of progress. There was one in which I was hiding in a kitchen cabinet with a bunch of mothers and children (we somehow all fit) while someone threatening, maybe soldiers, rummaged through the house looking for us. In another, I was shepherding several small children along a street that I used to walk along to get to and from my kids’ preschool and two of them ran away and I ran after them and caught them but then I realized I’d left a boy no older than two alone in the middle of the street a block away. I don’t think I need to analyze these dreams for you.

The second dream woke me up earlier than usual and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so before breakfast I completed my first set of post-election postcards. It was for a Congressional race in California that was too close to call. The postcards were directed to people whose ballots were spoiled and had not been counted, urging them to get in touch with election officials.

This might have been an inspiring end to this post, with me getting back in the saddle, but right after I finished, I looked at the newspaper on the dining room table, which I had not yet read, and discovered that after two races were settled the House had been called for the Republicans. Every branch of government—President, Senate, House, and Supreme Court—would now be in the hands of people with ill intent for at least two years and quite possibly longer.

The House race I’d been writing for did not seem so important now. I reached for the Wite-Out and covered up the optional line in the script about the whole nation waiting to see who would control the House on all fifteen cards. Then I went back to the paper and read further. Learning one of the two races that tipped the House was in California, I got a sinking feeling. I googled the postcard candidate and sure enough, it was his race. I wondered if I should even mail these postcards. I was running low on stamps, and I could probably peel them off. But I’d committed to send them and if my vote had not been counted, I think I’d want to know so I could correct it for the historical record, plus you never know when there could be a recount, so I went ahead and mailed them.

And over the weekend, I finished my book club book with the intention of going to the final meeting on Wednesday, and I completed a new set of postcards for a state Supreme Court runoff in Mississippi. I will hop to the next water hole, paddle into whitewater, try to find a phone that works, or whatever metaphor you prefer. I hope you can, too. Maybe there will be some ice cream along the way to fortify us.

Fall Break AF

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Steph

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Weekend 1

Friday

Beth and Noah and I were all in bed when North got home for fall break at eleven-thirty p.m. on Friday night. They were home earlier than we expected. They’d gotten a ride from someone they knew from their housing co-op and made surprisingly good time. I heard them come in and got up to greet them, when I discovered they had two of their fellow Obies with them. As I was only wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and underwear I retreated to the bedroom while their friends used the bathroom, played with the kittens a bit, and left. North came into our room to give us hugs and shortly afterward they went to bed, too. They said the friends admired our copious Halloween decorations, which were only about half up at the time.

Saturday

Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, but the kids and I hung around the house all day, except for my daily walk. North and I watched an episode of Emily in Paris, and we talked a lot.

I learned North is now thinking of a double major in Theater and Psychology with the possible career goal of becoming an intimacy coordinator. They received an invitation to register for Acting 1 for the spring semester, based on the audition they sent for the fall, and they are going to audition to be in a Winter Term play. Their favorite classes are Sociology and Psychology and while they were struggling in their Spanish class earlier in the semester, they’ve brought their grade up to a B.

They are still going to Quaker meetings and volunteering at the kitten shelter where they have learned to give vaccinations to cats. They’re also active in a group that fundraises for humanitarian relief in Gaza. And of course, being in a housing and dining co-op takes up a fair amount of time.

North made a batch of pumpkin-cream cheese muffins, which was the first of several baking projects over the course of break. When the kitchen was free, Noah and I made spinach manicotti for dinner. Although Keep was a mostly but not quite vegetarian co-op when I lived there, apparently now it’s a mostly but not quite vegan co-op and North was hungry for eggs and cheese, so we planned a lot of meals with those ingredients—omelets, grilled cheese sandwiches, tacos, ravioli with alfredo sauce, and broccoli-cheddar soup. (North even turned down my offer to make breaded tofu sticks with homemade applesauce, which is one of their favorite meals, in favor of cheesier options.)

That night we watched A Ghost Story. North was sorry to hear we’d watched I Saw the TV Glow and Summoning Sylvia earlier this month, saying it was “mean” for us to watch two queer horror/horror-comedy films without them, but we’d drawn the nominated movies out of a hat (well, a bike helmet). “Blame the helmet,” I told them.

I liked the movie, but afterward North said, “I think I like movies where people talk.” (It is not a silent movie, but it is remarkably sparse on dialogue. A minor character actually gets the longest speech in the whole thing.)

Sunday

North met up with several of their friends who are still in high school for lunch. They brought four of the muffins with them and then forgot to give them to their friends, so there were more for us. That afternoon we headed out to Northern Virginia for our annual pumpkin gathering expedition.

We set off at three-thirty, listening to a Halloween playlist Noah found, all of us singing along with “Ghostbusters” as we got underway, and offering our judgments about which songs belonged or didn’t on the playlist as we went along. (Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat”? The Eurhythmics “Sweet Dreams?” Why?)

While we were in the car, North asked about an unfamiliar WiFi network they’d noticed in the house—Last-Name AP (the kids’ real and rare hyphenated last name I’ve decided not to include here). Someone joked it could be Last-Name AF. And then we started to discuss what was Last-Name AF. This whole outing, we decided. Why?

We have been going to the same farm stand since before the kids were born because it’s owned by the family of a friend of ours from college. Over the years we’ve added required stops to the itinerary—we’ve been eating dinner at the same restaurant since 2016 and we added two different parks during covid when we were all looking for outdoor activities. One is for strolling before dinner and the other is for eating dinner at the picnic tables.

The stand is on the original location of the farm, which relocated to cheaper land further away from the city as development encroached on it. It’s now hidden behind a tall highway sound barrier wall. You really have to know it’s there to find it. It’s also unstaffed sometimes and operating on the honor system, as of last year. This year there was another surprise—there were no jack-o-lantern-sized pumpkins! We picked out some tiny ornamental pumpkins, a pie pumpkin to use for soup, and apple cider; paid for them; and then turned our minds to the problem of finding bigger pumpkins.

North searched on their phone and found a nearby garden center that was selling pumpkins. We picked out four, took pictures at the bower of hay bales and cornstalks that I think was designed for that purpose, and picked up apple cider doughnuts and pumpkin butter.

Our next stop was Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, where we traditionally take a pre-dinner walk. It was decorated for Halloween, which was a new, fun development. We walked among the changing leaves, along the path of ghosts and ghouls (and my favorite, a skeleton in a bathtub of dirt); watched ducks, geese, and koi in the pond; and wondered why there weren’t any kids dressed up in their Homecoming outfits getting photographed, because we’ve seen that every other year. No weddings, either, though there was mother, father, and toddler girl getting professionally photographed.

We ordered dinner from Sunflower while in the park and went to pick it up, then headed to Nottoway Park to eat at the picnic tables in a grove of trees. Our timing had been thrown off by needing to go out of our way to find a new pumpkin venue so it was almost completely dark by the time we got there, but we were near a lighted playing field, so we could see our dumplings, seaweed salad, miso soup, sushi, vegetarian shrimp and noodles well enough to eat them.

It turned out to be too dark for our customary walk in the community garden plots. We tried, but we couldn’t see what flowers and vegetables were still growing in mid-October, which I always find interesting. The last stop was Toby’s for ice cream. Beth and I, independently of each other, got the same thing—one scoop of pumpkin and one of cinnamon. I recommend that combination if you find yourself in Vienna, Virginia any time soon.

North said later it was a “very satisfying” outing.

Monday through Thursday

Beth, Noah, and I went back to work on Monday. Over the course of the week, North completed an online food safety training so they can sign up for a head cook slot next semester, and they had a video call with the other food buyer at Keep so they could confer on the food order for next week, but they had a lot of free time, too.

On Monday night I asked North to consider their “television goals” and they said, “that sentence is Last-Name AF.” But there were a lot of options because we are all watching different shows in different configurations and a lot of them include North, so we haven’t watched those since they left for school. While North was home, we watched the last five episodes of season 3 of Emily in Paris (North and me), one episode near the beginning of season 6 of Gilmore Girls (North, Beth, and me), the last few episodes of season 2 of Good Omens (North and Noah), and the first four episodes of season 3 of Grownish (everybody).

In other activities, near the beginning of the week, North filled out their Ohio ballot and put it in the mail (before they returned to school, they were notified it had been received). They had Maddie over for dinner and to watch Clue on Wednesday. They baked a lot. After the muffins, they made a batch of almond butter chocolate chip cookies and a loaf of pumpkin-chocolate chip bread from the same recipe I’d used when I sent them their second care package of the year. Sadly, between poor timing on my part (it was still in the mail over the three-day Columbus Day weekend) and the vagaries of the college mail system, it took six days to reach them, and it molded. They said it had smelled good, and they wanted to try it, so they recreated it at home.

North and I went on a couple little outings. On Tuesday morning we went to the co-op to get yet another pumpkin because I’d forgotten to get an extra one to cover with metal spiders. North helped me pick out an appropriately warty one and then applied the spiders to it later in the day. (Throughout the week they helped add Halloween decorations on the porch and yard.) On the way home from the co-op, we stopped at Spring Mill Bread Company and got coffee and a lemon bar. On Wednesday we went to the Langley Park farmers’ market and got pupusas and supplemented the meal with a pink drink and apple croissant (for North) and a pumpkin chai latte (for me) from Starbucks. In a less recreational but important errand, Beth, North, and I all got flu and covid shots on Thursday morning.

Weekend 2

Friday

Friday evening, Beth, North, and I went out for pizza at Roscoe’s, which is North’s favorite place to get pizza in Takoma. We ate outside and got the marinated olives appetizer, which is also their favorite. Noah was still at work, so we got an additional pizza to bring home for him. From Roscoe’s, we went to the newish Red Hound (where Beth and I have eaten a couple times, but North never has) for soft-serve. North was intrigued because we’d told them they have interesting flavors there, just one flavor at a time. That night it was maple ice cream with optional apple cider syrup. We all got our ice cream with the syrup, and it was very good. It was a pleasant evening, so at both establishments we ate outside.

When Noah came home, we watched the first hour of Beetlejuice, but not until a long discussion about whether to have the subtitles on (North’s preference) or off (Noah’s). It was starting to get heated when Beth pulled out some of the conflict resolution tools we learned when we were in family therapy, and we ended up setting a laptop on the floor under the tv playing the same movie with the subtitles turned on so there was one screen each way. Once the movie got started, we discovered why “Banana Boat” was on that Halloween playlist we’d been playing the weekend before. It features prominently in the movie, which the kids had never seen, and Beth and I hadn’t seen since it came out in 1988. Still, the song is not spooky in itself, so we still disallow it.

Saturday

On North’s last day at home, we tried to cram as much autumnal fun as we could into one day. It started with a trip to Doc Waters Cidery to pick apples. We’ve never done this before, but it’s not much different than picking berries and we do that every year at Butler’s, which is just down the road from the cidery. (Butler’s has their own apple trees, but you’ve got to pay the rather exorbitant pumpkin festival admission to get to them when the festival is happening, so we didn’t do that.)

The main difference is that you reach up rather than down to get apples and for the high ones there’s a tool you can use to shake them loose and catch them. It looks like a lacrosse stick. The rows of trees were labelled with the variety, and we picked a few different kinds and then of course they got all mixed together and we didn’t know which ones were which. Some of the varieties were almost finished and there were a lot of apples on the ground with bees buzzing around them. We filled our peck bag to overflowing and then visited the snack bar where we got a cup of warm cider we passed around and more apple cider doughnuts (bringing our total apple cider doughnut consumption for North’s break to a dozen). We stopped at a shopping center where we got Noodles and Company and Mexican for lunch.

We made a pit stop at home to unpack the apples and our lunch leftovers and then we headed to the Takoma Park Halloween parade and Monster Bash. None of us was participating in the parade (though North will dress up first as a package of Lorna Doone cookies to trick or treat at department offices at school on Halloween, and later as Fluttershy from My Little Pony in a group costume at a party).

Historically, we have often been critical of the costume contest judging, but I found after watching the parade go by that the only costume that I was really invested in was the kid in the five-to-eight-year-old group whose face was painted white and whose head was enclosed in a carboard picture frame painted with the background of The Scream. I thought he should win something, probably Most Original. Noah liked the costume but thought the painting was too famous to be original. I said I thought it was original for a Halloween costume, and we agreed to disagree. If I had been a judge, the preschooler in the Pennywise mask accompanied by a toddler brother in a yellow rain slicker with a red balloon would have presented me with a dilemma. It was inarguably the scariest costume on anyone in the four-and-under group, but it made me feel kind of icky, seeing a kid that young dressed as an evil, psychotic clown. Beth opined that maybe Scariest shouldn’t even be a prize for that age group (they do have different categories for different ages some years, but not this year).

Anyway, Pennywise did win Scariest in her age category and The Scream won Most Original in his. There was a nicely executed excavator made of painted yellow cardboard in the youngest age group. The kid in it wore a hard hat. One of the prizes for the nine-to-twelve-year-old group went to a monster with multiple tongues and long claws and among the teen and adult winners was an alien rock star. The group prize went to a family dressed as Super Mario characters. If there had been a category for dogs (and given how often dogs are in the parade maybe there should be), I think it should have gone to the one in the panda costume. There was no one I thought really should have won a prize who didn’t… so good job, parade judges.

Back at home, we started to carve our jack-o-lanterns. We’d held off until the weekend before Halloween so they wouldn’t rot. Beth made the cat, I did the Kamala pumpkin, Noah carved the bat, and North’s is the scarecrow. While we carved, we listened to the official family Halloween playlist, to which I added The Addams Family theme this year, at North’s request.

Noah and I made a broccoli and cheddar soup for dinner. After dinner, I did the dishes and started roasting pumpkin seeds (so North could take some to school) while Noah finished his pumpkin and then we finished Beetlejuice, and watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Beth and I went to bed, but the kids got in two episodes of Good Omens before calling our busy day a wrap.

Sunday

At 8:45 a.m., I watched from the porch as our car pulled out of the driveway and down the street. Beth was driving North back to Oberlin. They took most of the apples we picked to donate to the co-op with some reserved for Beth’s mom. When they got to Oberlin, they visited the college arboretum and had Chinese for dinner. Then Beth drove to Wheeling, where she’s staying for several days to visit her mom and brother who’s in town, too. I would have gone with them, but I thought someone should be here for the trick-or-treaters since the yard is all decorated and that seemed like a visual cue that we would be handing out candy. I was second guessing myself a little about staying home, though, as I watched the car disappear. It was a good break, and Last-Name AF, but it was hard to see it end.

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Steph

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Every half-birthday and birthday Noah was away at school I had cupcakes from a local bakery delivered to his dorm or apartment. The bakery was one we liked to patronize when we visited him, and it always went smoothly. If you’re ever in Ithaca, I recommend you drop by for bagels or pastry. It’s a lovely place. I liked being able to picture the store when I made the order. So of course, when he graduated, and we needed a cake for the family picnic that’s where I got it.

There is a bakery in Oberlin that’s been there since the nineteenth century and whose orange juice doughnuts, whole-wheat doughnuts, and buckeyes were favorite treats of mine when I was in college. You’d think it would be a shoe-in for our business, but it’s become a controversial place to shop after this happened. It’s complicated, because while there was no question that the students were initially in the wrong, the bakery’s reaction was over the top and cost the school tens of millions of dollars. And the fact that many students of color have reported being racially profiled there puts a different light on it as well. I have made a couple small purchases there since this all happened, for sentimental reasons, but I didn’t feel right making it our go-to source for cupcakes for the next four years. There’s a new bakery in town and campus catering delivers treats to students as well, so I decided to try something new.

I called the new bakery first, thinking it would be nice to support a local business over a big food service corporation. In my first call (a couple weeks before North’s half-birthday) I learned they don’t deliver, so I decided to think it over and call them back. I resolved it wasn’t a big deal for North to pick the cupcakes up themselves because the place is very centrally located and close to buildings where they have class. So, I called back and tried to order three cupcakes (I wanted the numerals 1, 8, and ½ in the frosting) only to learn the minimum order for cupcakes was a dozen. That seemed excessive so I got off the phone again.

At this point, I decided to go with food service. They had what looked like a convenient online order form and their cupcake minimum was four cupcakes, which was closer to what I wanted. I selected a delivery date, a cake flavor (red velvet), a frosting flavor (cream cheese), and described the decoration I wanted: 1, 8, ½, and an exclamation point since I needed to come up with something for the extra cupcake. So far, so good.

However, there was a warning on the website that said it will seem when you order that the order has not gone through but go ahead because the orders are being received. But then there was an email to use if you didn’t hear back in two to three business days. This last bit made me think the orders weren’t all going through, but I decided to see what happened.

When I’d filled out all the boxes and submitted the order, there was no confirmation message from the website, which was not a surprise. What was surprising was there had been no boxes for payment information. I supposed if it worked, I’d hear back, and they’d ask for it then, but I didn’t hear back. Two business days later I tried the email provided. I waited a couple more days. No response. I found another form on the website for “communication” and as that was exactly what I wanted, and wasn’t getting, I wrote the order out again and noted that I had not paid because there was no way to give my payment information. And then without waiting to see if this would work, I also tried texting a number that was also provided in the same place on the website. I got an answer almost immediately (probably from a bot) saying I’d hear back in a few minutes. Reader, can you guess if I heard back? I did not.

By this point, North’s half-birthday was several days away, and I remembered the bakery required a week’s notice for special orders, so it was too late to go that route. So, I called them and purchased a gift certificate for North to pick up at the store. In our weekly family call, I told North the bakery would have something for them on Monday and added, “It wasn’t what I wanted,” and told them I’d explain later.

“Well, I thought it would be cupcakes,” they said, sounding intrigued. They’ve had half-birthday cupcakes every September since they were eighteen months old, and they knew I sent them to Noah at school, so it wasn’t exactly intended to be a surprise.

On Monday morning I got a text from North, who was at the bakery where the cashier was saying they didn’t have anything for them. I instructed them to specify it was a gift certificate and that cleared it up. They purchased two apple cider cupcakes with dried apple in the frosting and sent me photographic proof that I had fulfilled my maternal duty. I was relieved that it had all worked out.

But it wasn’t over… Tuesday, the day after North’s half-birthday, they got a text that said, “Someone has gotten you a sweet treat” and instructed them to go to a dining hall to pick it up. They went and lo and behold, there were four red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting with the numerals 1, 8, and ½ in the frosting. Instead of the exclamation point I asked for, there was a big purple circle on the fourth cupcake. But given that I never paid for them, I can’t really complain.

It’s been three days since the second set of cupcakes arrived, but the whole situation has been so bizarre I wouldn’t be at all surprised to get a bill at some point. I don’t know if I’d be inclined to pay it if I do, though, since I had no way of knowing the order had gone through and I made other arrangements. Plus, they came a day late. I did ask North which cupcakes they liked better, just to help me decide which difficult establishment to start with next September. They said they liked the red velvet ones better. I suppose food service had the advantage in this contest because I could select a flavor that’s a favorite of North’s, while at the bakery they had to select from what was in stock that day. Meanwhile, Beth told me that on the Oberlin parent’s Facebook page, people have been complaining about Sweet Treat orders not going through and apparently, the only thing that works is to call, rather than text, the number it says to text.

When I reported to Beth that North preferred the food service cupcakes, she said, “Free is good.” It is indeed. And I’m pretty sure this was a half-birthday North will remember.

Three Weekends

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Steph

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Three weeks have gone by since we took North to Oberlin and then came home without them. It feels odd to be a household of three, none of whom attends a Montgomery County public school, needs to go to a Back to School Night anywhere, or is starting any new extracurricular activities. But September has not been completely unrecognizable. Each of its first three weekends we did something familiar in the form of a picnic, a music festival, or a pie contest. And we tried something new, too.

First Weekend: Labor Day Picnic

I had gotten used to the rhythm of North coming home from camp on Friday evenings and staying until Sunday morning, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that when on the Friday before Labor Day weekend they didn’t come home, it felt strange and hard.

The weekend itself was low-key. Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, and I went swimming. Noah mowed the lawn, he and I made zucchini fritters for dinner, and we all watched a movie. The day before we’d all conducted a round of movie nominations and vetoes, which netted us six movies to watch in September and October. Saturday night we watched King of Hearts, a movie which North had vetoed in a previous round, and I threw back into the pool, suspecting it might survive the process this time. I loved this French 1960s anti-war movie as a teen and hadn’t seen it since then. It doesn’t completely hold up, but it has its charms.

Also over the weekend Noah and I finally finished reading Maskerade, which we’d been reading since mid-July and started a new book, which despite its title seems to be more fantasy than romance. Sunday night we went to Koma for soft serve. The flavor names there are kind of fanciful. Beth and I got Brigadeiro, which the menu described as “sort of like a Brazilian Fudge.” Without this helpful note, I would have thought it was chocolate. Noah got caramelized coconut (and a salad because he hadn’t eaten much at dinner).

Labor Day was barely a holiday, as two out of three of us worked. Noah went into the office for a shortened day and Beth was at her computer most of the day as well. AT&T was on strike and strikes and political campaigns don’t take holidays. Noah’s been working on ads for Democratic political candidates, but also issue ads, on topics such as abortion and redistricting. A lot of them are airing in Ohio.

While they were thus engaged, I made a plum torte (your recipe, Suzanne) and assembled a picnic dinner of vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, tomato slices, corn on the cob, and cole slaw to eat in the back yard. The torte was slightly burned on top, but independently of each other, Beth and Noah both declared it “pretty” and it was tasty, too.

Noah wasn’t initially sure he’d be home by dinner time. He has a long commute—two buses and a train—and generally gets home at seven-thirty or eight and eats a plate of whatever Beth and I have already eaten. But he got off early enough to eat dinner with us. I was glad about that because our three summer picnics (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day) are long-standing traditions and Beth and North had both been out of town this Fourth of July, and of course, I was missing North. It wasn’t like being all together, but it was still nice. The weather was pleasant, warm but not hot or humid, and it’s always relaxing to eat outside.

While we were eating Noah spotted a huge wasps’ nest high the branches of the silver maple in the back yard. We decided to leave it there, as it’s obviously been there a long time, and they haven’t bothered us yet. When I say we decided, I mean mostly me, as Beth and Noah initially assumed we’d be getting it professionally removed. But I offered to take over mowing the back yard for the rest of the mowing season (probably a month or so) since Noah is hesitant to do it now. It seems to me if we’re going to plant sunflowers and zinnias in the garden at least partly to attract pollinators to the cucumbers and tomatoes we shouldn’t object if they set up housekeeping near the garden.

Second Weekend: Takoma Folk Festival

On Saturday I went swimming, but Beth couldn’t go kayaking because of a small craft advisory so she did the grocery shopping a day early in hopes the warning would be lifted by Sunday, but it wasn’t. The silver lining was that we had more time for the Takoma Park folk festival that day.

We’ve been going to this music festival since Noah was a toddler, and we’ve been almost every year it’s been held since then, rain or shine. In fact, it was rainy the past two years (and cancelled for covid the two years before that) so we all appreciated that the weather was perfect—sunny, in the mid-seventies, and not a trace of humidity. We spent the whole afternoon there, arriving a little after noon and staying until it ended at six-thirty.

I enjoyed every act we picked—a mix of country, singer-songwriter, and rock– but later I wished we’d seen some music from another country, as I often like to do that. Most of the international music was on one of the three indoor stages, though, and the day was too beautiful to go inside. Here’s who we saw and what the program had to say about them.

Karen Collins and the Backroads Band: Classic country with vintage sounds and rockabilly flair
Amoreena: Blending baroque pop and piano folk with introspective lyrics
Acacia Sears: Poetic indie rock with metaphor-rich lyrics and unique melodies
Ammonite: Songs of queer joy and heartache, wrapped in a fusion of country, punk, folk, rock, blues, and roots music
Blank Page: Vibrant Americana rising stars sharing joyful original songs
iylAIMY: The most welcome jolt in folk, featuring rapid-fire lyricism, lush harmonies, and even beatboxing
Samiah: Enchanting and powerful female-fronted original modern rock songwriting

The two country acts had the greatest diversity of age. If I had to guess I’d say Karen Collins is in her seventies and the two youngsters that make up Blank Page are still in high school, though I learned from their Instagram that they have a busy performance schedule, with about a half dozen gigs a month. Overall, it was a fun day listening to music from young and old.

When we got home, we watched our second movie of the half dozen we’d picked— Whisper of the Heart. This was one of Noah’s picks. He wants to watch the whole oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki and by now we’ve watched so many of his films it feels familiar and comforting to enter these bizarre but recognizable worlds.

Third Weekend: Long Branch Festival and Takoma Park Farmers’ Market Pie Contest

On Saturday, Beth went kayaking and I went swimming, which as you are by now gathering, are our normal weekend routines. But we did do something a little out of the ordinary. We’ve never been to the Long Branch festival before, and we decided to try it out.

There was one stage and when we arrived around five-twenty, the Cuban band Beth had most wanted to see was just finishing up. We listened to their last song and then walked around the playground where the festival was held, looking at vendors and food booths. Dinner options were less extensive than we anticipated— quesadillas and pizza were the only vegetarian choices. After mulling over our options, we decided to eat at El Golfo, which is right across the street. I got my usual—spinach enchiladas and Noah and I spilt an order of flan and a slice of tres leches cake. (I thought the almost an hour round trip of walking to the festival and back would prevent a blood sugar spike and it did.) We ate outside and while we were eating the band came back from a break, so we got to hear them after all.

When we got home, we watched movie number three—Las Niñas, so between the Cuban music, Mexican food, and Spanish film it ended up being quite the Hispanic evening.

The pie contest was the next day. Long-time readers probably remember that North entered this contest every year it was held from the age of seven or eight and they won twice—with a cantaloupe pie when they were ten and a mushroom pie when they were thirteen.. They also entered several apple pies (it was originally an apple pie contest), a lavender-mint pie, a corn custard pie with an Earl Grey-infused crust, a plum pie, and most recently a Dutch pear pie, all delicious.

Unlike the Labor Day picnic and the folk festival, this wasn’t just something we did with North, it was something we did because of North. It was their thing. In fact, if they gone to school at Saint Mary’s, which is a two-hour drive away, they may have even come home for it. (We talked about that when they were still deciding.) So… I wavered a little about whether I wanted to go, but it’s a fun event and you get to eat pie, so in the end I did. I went alone because Noah had plans (he goes to a board game event at a Panera in Rockville most Sunday afternoons) and Beth had to work because the strike at AT&T finally ended that day, after a month, and she had to write a statement.

I got there about a half hour after pie slices had gone on sale, swinging by the farmers’ market first for tomatoes and a raspberry-yogurt smoothie. The line was long, so it took me twenty minutes to get to the tent. I perused the list of winners at the entrance. I decided if there were any slices left of the winner for Kid’s Pie (raspberry) or Other Sweet Pie—this means non-apple, non-peach– honey-fig was the winner, I would get one of those. The raspberry pie had sold out. There was one slice of fig pie left and I wasn’t sure it was the winning fig pie as there are often a couple fig pies and I’d forgotten the number associated with the winner, but I bought it anyway. It was quite good—the crust was crispy and tasted of molasses. I picked up one of the slices of apple pie for Noah. It was very pretty, with intricate leaves in the crust.

I sent North a picture of the pie slices and gave them the lowdown on the winners in various categories. I figured they’d be interested in Most Unusual because that’s a category they’ve won in the past. It was called ABC Medley, which we both assumed meant it had ingredients that start with those letters. I did see a pie with cucumber in it and I thought that would certainly be unusual (more unusual than cherries for instance) so that could have been the ABC pie, but I don’t know what else was in it or if it was even the winner for sure.

Meanwhile, in Oberlin

We’ve been texting a lot with North, and we’ve had three all-family calls. They’ve been busy. Classes have been in session for two and a half weeks. They say Spanish is their most challenging class. They were elected one of the food buyers for their dining co-op, they’ve been to interest meetings for a couple different theater groups, they auditioned for a part in a play (which they didn’t get), they’re volunteering at a cat rescue, and they attended a Quaker meeting in town to see what it was like. They’ve been to the movies in town (seeing Reagan) and went to a party at which people pretended to be rushing a non-existent sorority (Kappa Epsilon Epsilon Rho, which spells KEEP, the name of their co-op).

We sent them their first care package. I made almond butter chocolate chip cookies, Beth bought Jolly Ranchers for North’s candy bowl, and then I filled up the box with things I found in the pantry I thought they’d like to have (a box of Annie’s mac-n-cheese, Pop Tarts, Honey Vanilla chamomile tea). Beth said the theme was “random things North likes.” I had no idea where the Pop Tarts had come from, but it turned out Noah bought them for himself, so I replaced them.

Things seem to be going well. We miss North, but we’re all settling into our grooves, running on separate tracks until they cross briefly when they come home for fall break in a little over a month.

Welcome Home, Obie

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Steph

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Friday evening to Sunday morning: Wheeling

We arrived in Wheeling around seven, after a six-hour drive and let ourselves into Beth’s mom’s house. YaYa arrived shortly after we did, bearing takeout pizza. We ate and then Beth, North, and I went for a stroll in Wheeling Park. There was a festival going on, with live music, food stalls, multiple bouncy castles, and a clown. The band was playing covers of the Romantics and Dire Straits (and during their break a recording of Elton John). “We’re the demographic,” I told Beth, and she agreed. It was a pleasant night, not too humid and with a lovely sunset. We walked on paths through tall trees and around the swimming pool and the pond.

The next day we went out for lunch with YaYa at the garden bistro in Oglebay Park (where we just spent a week at the reunion). It’s on a terrace with a nice view of the hills of the park. We shared a cheese plate, and everyone got soup or a salad. (Mine was a tomato-burrata stew.) From there we went shopping for decorative items for North’s room at the artisans’ center. When we’d surveyed their room at home looking for knickknacks to take, they felt dissatisfied and said there was nothing they wanted to bring, except for a glass pumpkin they were afraid to break, and so left at home.

And then on the drive to Wheeling, a metal frog sculpture at a market spoke to them. They texted its picture to their roommate and between them they decided its name was Vert, but rather than pronouncing it like the French word, North is going to pronounce it to rhyme with Bert. At the artisan center, to complement Vert, North picked out a red glass candy dish. I said if they kept it filled, they’d become known as the kid with candy on offer in their room and this would make them popular.

When got back to YaYa’s house we had a little surprise going-away party for North. Beth’s aunt Carole, Carole’s son Sean, and her granddaughter Holly came over and we had red velvet cake and ice cream, and Sean told us stories about his college days including one about his journey to college, which involved Carole seeing a cow that seemed to be dead but wasn’t after she dropped Sean off at to catch his bus to school. We managed to surprise North, and they seemed pleased. Later that afternoon, we went swimming in the condo pool and Beth’s aunt Jenny dropped by the pool deck to chat and had a gift for North (and one to take home to Noah, too). We had Chinese that night and then North and YaYa watched Unfrosted.

Sunday morning to Monday afternoon: Oberlin

We left Wheeling early the next morning and drove to Oberlin, arriving around 10:30, and moved North into their room. North is living in Keep Cottage, a student-run housing and dining co-op where I lived for three semesters (my sophomore year and the second half of my senior year). It houses about fifty-five students and feeds about seventy-five.

North has a third-floor corner room with sloping ceilings, windows on two sides and deep closets. It’s right next door to the room where I lived my last semester of college. Keep was the place I lived longest at Oberlin and the building is just seeped in memory for me. After I helped carry their things up to their room, I peeled off to explore. I found my sophomore year room with the door propped open and no one inside, so of course I stepped in for a moment. I visited the second-floor bathroom I cleaned twice a week for a year and stood outside the door of my sophomore year boyfriend’s room. Then I walked by other friends’ rooms and wandered through the lounge and the kitchen. (The next day I tried to go down into the basement, but the door was locked.) Keep has changed very little. It was like stepping back into 1986. Even the smell was familiar.

North’s roommate Sarah and her parents arrived soon after we did, and the kids seemed to hit it off and began to sort out the room arrangement. I think I may have scandalized Sarah just a little when I told her that when I lived in Keep my roommate had an illicit cat whose litterbox was in one of those roomy closets.

Beth and I left North to unpack while we went to visit Noah Hall, where I lived my first year and Beth lived her first two years at Oberlin. Surely by now you all know we met there on my first day of college, when she was sophomore dorm staff and checked me into the building, and that we named Noah after this dorm. Every time we’ve visited Oberlin in recent years, Beth has wanted to get inside Noah, but the doors are always locked. We thought it would be open for move-in and it was, so we got to poke around there.

It was fun but not quite as satisfying as walking around Keep because there weren’t as many rooms and common spaces we could get into, but we did find our rooms and stood outside the doors. We both lived on the second floor the year we met and there used to be three lounges there. The carpet that depicted hunting scenes in the north and south lounges has been replaced with something more generic. The center lounge is gone, converted into two bedrooms, but a door to one of these was open, and we could see they left the pretty wooden paneling on the walls.

I mentioned that my high school boyfriend with whom I’d come to Oberlin broke up with me in that now departed center lounge. (It happened during orientation. Because I had the luck to start dating my wife at the tender age of twenty, it ended up being the worst break up of my life.) Beth knew about this of course, but not exactly where it happened. “Well, good riddance,” she said, even though it was a cozy lounge.

I learned later that Noah is a substance-free dorm now. In the eighties… well, let’s just say it wasn’t.

We met up with North and Sarah at Keep and walked to Tank Hall. It’s the only co-op open during orientation and all OSCA members are eating there until the rest of them open. I ate in Tank as a dining-only member the year I lived in Noah, so this was a familiar space as well. I popped into the kitchen, where I first learned to cook in an industrial kitchen. Lunch—rice, breaded baked tofu, sauteed cabbage and carrots, homemade pickles, and granola—was served buffet style. There was nutritional yeast in the breading, which I don’t mind but Beth and North don’t care for, and it caused me to reflect that my recipe for breaded tofu also has nutritional yeast (that I just don’t put in, subbing extra wheat germ) and I wondered if it could be the same recipe. (It’s from the Zen Monastery Cookbook.) Nutritional yeast aside, I wondered if the fact that I learned a lot of what I know about cooking in OSCA and that as a result its hippie-style of cuisine made it into a lot of the food North ate as a child will make the food at Keep seem homey.

Most of the students were eating on the lawn, but Beth and I ate on the porch, to give North some space and a chance to socialize without their parents hovering. The spacious, wraparound porch took me back, too. Many nights after dinner at Tank my first year I used to sit there and have long talks with the young man who would be my boyfriend the next year.

North and Sarah went off with other OSCA members after lunch. Among other things, North changed their voter registration from Maryland to Ohio. Beth and I went to the campus bookstore to look for Oberlin pencils only to discover they were sold out. I was disappointed because I already have a lot of Oberlin swag (a hoodie, two t-shirts, and a couple stickers on my laptop) but of all the Ithaca merch I bought when Noah started college, I found the pencils and the mug most comforting, because I used them in my daily routine. I did get a mug, even though we have a great quantity of mugs at home. Beth knew better than to say anything about that.

Next, we took a sentimental journey walking to and photographing every dorm, co-op, and apartment building where either of us ever lived (not all pictured here—I moved around a lot). The selfie is in front of the house where I was living the summer of 1987, when we started dating. Beth is standing in front of the apartment building where she lived her junior and senior year, plus the year after she graduated.

We hadn’t taken pictures at Noah (the big brick dorm) the first time we went so we returned. We noticed someone had painted “Noah Bench” on a bench outside it in fat purple letters, so I texted a picture of it to Noah and wrote, “They named a bench after you.”

The day was hot, and we’d walked a lot so we went to the student union to rest until it was time to meet North in Finney Chapel for the welcoming ceremony. They weren’t calling it a convocation, but that’s what it was. Various administrators spoke, the speeches interspersed with musical performances. The acoustics are good in there, so it would seem like a waste not to have music.

There was a picnic dinner afterward—we had barbequed tofu, corn on the cob, corn and bean salad, potato salad, cole slaw, and fruit salad. We had dessert plans, but there were cupcakes, so Beth and North each got one and gave me a sliver of each. We drove to the Dairy Twist, which is just outside town and got the second ceremonial end-of-summer-break ice cream. North got a root beer float, which has been their frozen treat of the summer. Beth got a cherry-dipped chocolate cone, and I got a mint-chocolate flurry. This establishment was another place we used to go. Because it was the eighties, and a lot of my friends were humanities majors we used to call it the Dairy-Da. (Get it? Derrida.)

From there we returned to Finney for a concert of performances by conservatory students and faculty. We could only stay for half of it—a mix of classical, jazz, and compositions by conservatory students. The highlight was probably watching a student play the enormous organ. It was impressive how he twisted around to use both hands and both feet at once.

North had a house meeting at eight-thirty, so we slipped out of the concert, said goodbye until the next day and drove to the house of Beth’s retired colleague Jeff and his wife Karen. They live outside Cleveland and graciously hosted us for the night. Jeff even made homemade almond croissants for us in the morning.

We returned to Oberlin the next day and met North back at Finney. They had two morning sessions, one on adapting to college life, which I attended with them while Beth took a walk, and a second one with their PAL group. These peer advising groups seems to have taken the place of impact groups, which were more loosely organized, dorm-based, group therapy-type sessions we had when I was in college. (Beth was my impact group leader.) While they were there, Beth and I attended a session about the transition to college for parents. We didn’t learn much as this isn’t our first rodeo, but we did learn that starting next year Thanksgiving break will be one day longer than the four-day weekend it is now, which was welcome news as the short break has already posed challenges for our travel plans this fall.

When we were all finished, we met up and wandered through the student activities fair, but we didn’t linger because North had a few places they wanted to go before lunch. We browsed in the campus bookstore where we bought them a sweatshirt, Ben Franklin where we got them a water bottle sticker and a candle, and Gibson’s Bakery where we bought some treats.

And then it was time to say goodbye. Parents were encouraged to be off campus by two. There was an event with cookies called Sweet Goodbyes to send parents off, but North had a crew shift at Tank right after lunch (learning how to clean a co-op kitchen) that conflicted with that, so we were leaving early. We dropped them off at Tank for lunch, stood on the lawn outside the car, and said our teary goodbyes.

Monday Afternoon to Wednesday: Oberlin, Takoma, and the Road in Between

We had a long drive ahead of us, so we just picked up some food at Sheetz for an a la carte lunch to eat in the car, but by dinnertime we had made pretty good time, so we stopped at a diner in western Maryland. It turned out that a grilled cheese sandwich (American on white bread) with fries was exactly the comfort food I needed after leaving my youngest child at college. We followed it up with ice cream, just to be safe.

North has been keeping busy. Monday after their crew shift, they had another PAL meeting, and they played cards and attended a tea party with some people in Keep. Tuesday, they met with their academic advisor, went to a meeting on campus safety, and there was a picnic dinner for new OSCA members. Today was a day of service and they participated in a beach cleanup at Lake Erie (where they met another kid named North!) and toured some museums in Cleveland. Classes start tomorrow. They have sociology, psychology, and a class about college life.

Back at home, we miss them, of course. I defrosted two quarts of soup they made earlier this month (lentil and black bean), and we had it for dinner Tuesday and Wednesday, which I found consoling. I washed their sheets on Tuesday and when I realized I couldn’t just toss the fitted sheet on the bed for them to put on the mattress themselves because they weren’t here to do it, it hit me hard. But despite these moments, we are glad for them. They came a long way to get where they are.

All day Sunday and Monday almost everyone who gave a speech said something along the lines of, “Welcome to Oberlin,” “Welcome Obies,” “Welcome home, Obies,” or assured any nervous first-year students in the audience “You belong here,” and each time both Beth and I felt a little jolt of emotion. It certainly feels like coming home to us and we trust that with time, it will be home and a place of belonging for North too.

This is what Beth wrote on Facebook:

Forty years ago I walked through the door of the Oberlin dorm on the left and into my future. Thirty-nine years ago Steph walked through the same door. I was living there a second year and checked her in.

Yesterday our youngest child walked through the door of the Oberlin dorm on the right. I know that their journey will be unique to them, but I hope they find what I found there: a bunch of brilliant, passionate oddballs who became beloved friends. And if they also find the love of their life, well, that would be OK too.

Welcome home, Obie. You’ve got this. You belong here.

The Grad Who’s Going Places

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Steph

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Friday: Senior Splash and Arrival

Okay, settle in. This is a long one.

We hit the road for Ithaca on Friday morning. It had been another busy week, with our first session with a new family therapist (on Tuesday) and an appointment to have North measured for orthotics for their feet, knee braces, and a compression suit for their torso (on Thursday). The most interesting part of that appointment for me was watching the technician scan North’s feet with a camera and create a 3-D image of them on his computer screen. Everything should be ready for North to try on for adjustments the last week in June.

At 1:30 p.m., a little after we passed Harrisburg, Noah and the rest of the class of ’23 waded into the Dillingham Fountains for Senior Splash, an Ithaca tradition. It was live streamed for about an hour, but when I tried to watch it on my phone, I couldn’t get the video to start. Asked about it later, Noah said 1) yes, the water was cold (the event had been postponed two days because on Wednesday the high was 50 degrees—on Friday it was in the low 70s); 2) no, you did not have to prove you were a senior to get in the water, it was on the honor system; and 3) yes, it was fun. He received a t-shirt and a towel as mementos.

At four p.m., as we were driving through the Tioga mountains near the Pennsylvania-New York border, I was concentrating on sending Noah good thoughts because he had another interview for a video editing internship for a production company. Or I thought he did. Turns out it was postponed until Tuesday.

We got to our Airbnb around six and were delighted to find a pair of geese and their five fuzzy goslings in a little pond behind it. (Later a heron would join them.) We ordered pizza, and then went to pick Noah up from his apartment and the pizza up from Franco’s. When Noah came out of his building, I launched myself at him and gave him such an enthusiastic hug that he laughed. We went upstairs briefly so I could see his place, which I knew looked almost exactly like his junior year apartment—it was in the same complex—but I wanted to see it anyway.

I have two strong memories of Franco’s that washed over me when we walked inside the pizzeria. We ate there in April of 2019 when we visited Ithaca for Admitted Students’ Day and Noah was trying to decide between Ithaca, RIT, and Boston University. North was in Colombia on foreign exchange trip, and I remember messaging with their host mom while we waited for the pizza. The second memory was in July 2020 when we came to collect Noah’s belongings from the dorm room he couldn’t return to after spring break, because covid cut that school year short. Back then, Franco’s was operating on a takeout-only basis, and there was a crowd on the sidewalk, waiting, trying to stay as distanced from each other as possible. As we waited, a passerby yelled to all those assembled, “Best pizza in Ithaca!”

I don’t know if it is, as I haven’t tried all the options (and Noah did not offer an opinion when asked), but it’s good, and we enjoyed it before settling in to watch a couple episodes of Blackish, having decided it was kind of late to start a movie (me) and the screen of the Airbnb’s television was too small to do justice to a movie (Noah).

Saturday: Iconic Ithaca

On Saturday we tried to hit as many of our favorite places in Ithaca as we could. We had breakfast at Ithaca Bakery (second breakfast for me and Beth as we were up hours before the kids). While we were there, we picked up Noah’s graduation cake, and I thought nostalgically about the fact that I’ve ordered cupcakes from this bakery every semester he’s been on campus for his half-birthdays and birthdays. Beth bought some of the rosemary-salt bagels she likes there. I got a latte and an almond croissant, and they were both very good.

Next, we went grocery shopping at Wegman’s, where we’ve often bought groceries to stock his apartment kitchens. This time we were getting supplies for his post-graduation picnic.

Lunch was at Moosewood, at Noah’s request. We ate outside, under the famous striped awning. We’ve eaten at Moosewood a couple times before, starting with his first prospective visit in August 2018, though the last time we tried to go (when we were dropping him off for his junior year) it closed suddenly due to a staff member getting covid and our reservations were cancelled. North hadn’t been with us on either of our previous visits, so it was their first time, and they were happy to finally visit the iconic restaurant associated with several cookbooks I’ve been cooking from their whole life. They got a black bean burger and said it was really good. We all shared a cheese board, and I had a bowl of cream of pea soup and an iced ginger tea. At lunch, Noah opened his graduation present from us, a new camera lens.

We walked partway down the Taughannock trail after lunch, but we didn’t make it all the way to the main falls. It was pleasant to walk in the woods and along the dry half of the pocked stone riverbed. Noah took the opportunity to try out his new lens. It was drizzling when we started the walk and raining a little harder by the end. We had two umbrellas between us and shared them.

We went to Purity Ice Cream (another favorite place) after our hike and then Beth left me and North at the house so she and Noah could take a chair from his apartment (the only furniture in the place that was his and which was too big to bring home) to drop it off for donation. North and I both went to bed, as they had a headache, and I was sleepy because I hadn’t slept well for two nights in a row. When Beth and Noah got home, he made baked ziti for dinner because he’d bought the ingredients and never got around to making it for himself. We were expecting Beth’s mom, her aunt Carole, and Carole’s granddaughter Holly to arrive late that evening and Noah said it was nice to make a full recipe and not have to scale it down for solo dining.

After dinner Beth, Noah, and I went to the Commencement Eve concert and fireworks show. It was in the arena where Commencement would be held the next day and where we’d seen presentations and eaten catered meals when Noah was a prospective and checked him in during orientation his freshman year. Everywhere we turned all weekend, we were awash in memories.

The concert featured a choir, a wind ensemble, a jazz ensemble, a trumpet troupe, and a dance group. The groups were on different parts of the stage and the lights would go on the left, center, or right, depending which band was playing, leaving the rest of the stage dark. This meant there was no moving on and off stage, which streamlined the event considerably. The musicians also performed the songs seamlessly, with no breaks. This gave the event a very propulsive feel. The audience was instructed to hold its applause until the end and for the first few songs it did, as there really was no time to applaud. But eventually people started applauding over the beginning of each new song, because that’s how people are. Anyway, the musicians (all music majors) were very talented. It was a great concert and I say this as someone who has been to a lot of band concerts. The fireworks display was fun, too, even though it was damp and chilly out.

We dropped Noah off at his apartment and when we got back to the house, YaYa, Carole, and Holly had just arrived, after a long drive from West Virginia. They tucked into the baked ziti and after some conversation, we went to bed.

Sunday: Commencement

Commencement was the next morning, or I should say the next morning and afternoon, because it lasted three and half hours. It was nice, but probably very much like any commencement you’ve been to before. Before it started, quotes from students and their photos flashed by on a screen. (We never saw Noah’s and found out later he had not submitted either.)

The keynote speaker, an alumnus from the class of 1980 who works as a theater producer, was reasonably entertaining and gave pretty good advice that boiled down to—take risks, be kind, and enjoy the ride. Another alum, a civil rights activist, received an honorary degree. The student speaker was bubbly. The last hour and a half consisted of the reading of the names, almost one thousand two hundred of them. The graduates were called to the stage in the order they had taken their seats, not alphabetically or by school, so there was no way to know when your kid’s name was going to come up unless you could see the graduates’ seating area and I could not. Noah was near the end and eventually he started texting Beth to let her know how far he was from going onstage.

And then it was over, the graduates moved their tassels from one side to the other, confetti came streaming down from the ceiling, and mortarboards flew into the air. (That was when I cried a little.) Noah kept his mortarboard, and I was glad he did because I wanted to get pictures of him in full regalia afterward. He had cords for graduating summa cum laude, for the Communications honor society, and for working for ICTV. We walked around campus and took pictures in front of the Park School of Communications and the fountain where just two days before, he’d taken a dip.

By the time we got back to the house and reconnected with Carole and Holly, who had been exploring Ithaca while the rest of us were at graduation, it was mid-afternoon. We had a picnic lunch at a little park by a pond nearby. North had made pasta salad, Beth made a tofu salad, and we had cheese and crackers and chips, berries, watermelon, and mango. It was a feast. There was also cake. I’d been torn between surprising Noah with it or letting him choose the flavors and I let him choose. It was chocolate with cream cheese frosting and chocolate ganache between the four layers and it was excellent. Holly, who works at a bakery, raved about it.

After the picnic, we all drove around to see Taughannock Falls from the upper overlook and Buttermilk Falls. Everyone but YaYa and Carole walked along a short bit of the wooded trail there.

People ate various leftovers for dinner and YaYa, Carole, and Holly gave Noah cards, money, and a class of ’23 mug. Then Beth, and Holly, and the kids went out for ice cream again. I stayed home and while they were gone, I started to feel ill with a stomachache and dizziness. I’m still not sure what was wrong but based on the graph on my glucose monitor app, I think I might have been having a blood sugar crash. I am not particularly sensitive to my spikes and drops—I usually have no idea they’re happening until I see them later on the graph—but if that’s what it was, I now know two pieces of cake in one day might not be a good idea, even if the second one is very small.

Even though I didn’t feel well, I stayed up because I knew we were all going to watch Noah’s senior project when everyone got back. It’s a film about suicide, called It’s Not Your Fault, based on the experiences of one of the other filmmakers. Julius was the co-director, editor, and screenwriter, and also acted in it. His close friend from high school killed himself during their sophomore year of college. Noah was the other director, lead editor, producer, and the software developer. It’s an interactive movie, sort of like a choose-your-own adventure book. There are two places where you decide what action the characters will take, so there are various paths through it, but they all lead to the same ending. When Noah and I were discussing this earlier in the semester and I said that sounded kind of nihilistic, but he said the point of that was to stress that the character who did not prevent his friend’s death was not to blame, and then I understood.

Monday: Departure #1

In the morning I packed up the rental house kitchen while Noah and Beth packed up his apartment. The house’s checkout time was an hour earlier than his apartment checkout time, so when we were ready to leave, the rest of us headed out to his building so the West Virginia contingent could say their goodbyes and Beth and I could help Noah carry things down from his third-floor apartment and pack them into the car. Despite the fact that Beth had been to Ithaca the previous weekend to take home some of his belongings, he still had a lot of stuff and when it was all spread out on the sidewalk behind the nearly full car it looked kind of hopeless. We considered our options: should buy some packing materials and mail things home, find a place to donate things, throw things away?

Beth and Noah set to work opening bins that weren’t completely full and packing things into them and into the little crevices between boxes, performing some minor miracles and nearly eliminating the pile. I filled up half the legroom in the passenger seat and Noah and I put things on our seats to carry in our laps. He took his wastebasket to the lobby of the building where other people were leaving abandoned items. In the end all we had to throw out was a pair of worn-out sneakers and food, a couple grocery bags worth. I felt acutely guilty for the waste, but there didn’t seem to be any other option.

Beth and I had packed lunches with food from the rental house and we got Chipotle for the kids. We picnicked at Buttermilk Falls. Noah took some final pictures of the falls, and we got in the stuffed car and left Ithaca. I remarked that considering I never lived in Ithaca, only visited a half dozen times over the course of five years, I was surprisingly sad not to have a reason to return. Beth said she was, too. The only one of us who has lived in Ithaca did not comment, but he did seem a little wistful at the falls. It’s a really fun place to visit, full of natural beauty and good food. But perhaps I will be falling in love with another college town soon.

It was nine-thirty when we got home, after another picnic meal of Indian takeout eaten near a lake in York, PA. We did only the most necessary unpacking (perishable food), glanced at the mail, and fell into bed.

Tuesday: Home

Noah had not quite two days at home, and the first one was busy. He had two interviews, one in the early afternoon and one in the evening. Beth, North, and I went to family therapy in the morning before he was up, and we returned right before the first one started.

After the first interview, Noah and I read Serpentine, a short story by Phillip Pullman that takes place in between the His Dark Materials trilogy and the Books of Dust trilogy. I bought it for his birthday, thinking it would be good for a couple days, which might be all the time we had if we didn’t have time to read in Ithaca (and we didn’t), but it was even shorter than I realized. It only took about a half hour to read. It was enjoyable, though.

Also that afternoon, the kids and I cleaned the porch. This is an annual tradition involving a hose, buckets of soapy water, a push broom, and rags. We do it in May or June around the time the pollen has stopped falling and mixing with a year’s worth of dirt into a grimy mess on the floors and walls of the porch. This activity tends to end in some kind of water play, so we all wear bathing suits to do it. Before North got home from school, Noah and I carried all the furniture and ladders and everything else we store on the porch to the front yard, and I started to wipe them down with damp rags.

When North got home Noah stationed himself next to the porch with a hose and buckets that he kept refilling with clean and soapy water, while North used the broom to push water over the floor and I scrubbed the porch walls with rags. The kids did a really good job. The porch looks great. When Noah sprayed North with the hose, I realized I didn’t have my phone to document this and I went back inside to get it and then had them recreate the scene, telling them, “Make it look spontaneous.”

That night we had tofu-vegetable bowls with chow mein noodles for dinner because it’s a family favorite. At dinner Noah thought to mention that he thought the internship from his first interview of the day was his if he wanted it. It’s unpaid, but he’s willing to do that for the experience, especially now with jobs in film so scarce.

After Noah’s second interview he said even if he got that one, he thought he’d prefer the first one, so he’s going to accept it. It’s not all nailed down yet, but even so, it’s a relief that he (probably) has a position. Later that evening Beth, Noah, and I watched one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because it wouldn’t be a proper visit from Noah without that. (Just thirty-eight episodes to go.)

Wednesday-Thursday: Departure #2

I took Tuesday and Wednesday off work because Noah’s visit was so short, but he spent most of Wednesday unpacking and repacking his things, so I actually ended up working a little that day. While Beth was driving North to school in the morning, he got a robocall asking if he’d like to be switched to a direct flight because his was overbooked, but he wanted to check with Beth to see if she could get him to the airport earlier than planned and by the time he found out, the airline had given the direct flight to some other lucky traveler.

We left for the airport at three. He wanted to get there really early and it ended up being a good idea because we ran into several snags: there was unexpected traffic on the way to the airport; one of his suitcases was overweight and he had to get out of line and shift things from the heavier to the lighter bag to get them both under fifty-two pounds, saving $100 in the process; and he forgot to take his iPad out of his backpack while he was going through security and got called aside for a long time. Beth and I were watching from the other side of the cordon and wondering what on Earth was happening.

Finally, he got on his plane and while he was in the air, he was informed his connecting flight from Detroit to Los Angeles had been cancelled. So, with some coaching from Beth, he learned some high-level flying skills, like how to get one’s luggage back mid-itinerary when it’s not on the carousel. The airline put him up in hotel, so he didn’t have to sleep in the airport. It was more than twenty-four hours from the time he left DCA until he got to LAX.

But he arrived and Friday and Saturday he got settled into his apartment, which he’s sharing with three other Ithaca students. He’s been shopping for food, shoes, and housewares. He’s going to attend a watch party for the series finale of Succession with some other Ithaca folks tonight. He was supposed to attend an orientation for Ithaca students and grads in Los Angeles on Thursday, but he got switched to another one that will meet next Tuesday.

While he was flying, Noah took a picture of the ad on his seatback suggesting that an airline gift card would be a good gift for “The Grad Who’s Going Places,” and texted it to Beth. She texted back “That’s you!” and it is. In less than nine months he’s gone to Australia for a semester, then home for a month, back to New York for his final semester, and now he’s in California to begin seeking his fortune. He doesn’t have a return ticket because we don’t know where he’s going next or when, but I can’t wait to find out.

Investigations and Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Steph

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During the first two weeks of May we kept ourselves busy following up with a university we recently visited, touring another one, and having two celebrations.

Investigation #1: JWU Meeting

The first week of May was exhausting. I had more work than usual and North had a bunch of appointments, mostly medical. On Tuesday we were out of the house for six hours straight. It didn’t help that all three of us were sick with a cold that passed from Beth to me to North.

On the first Friday in May, we had a Zoom meeting with two professors and an administrator at Johnson and Wales to discuss the physical requirements of the baking and pastry arts program and what kind of accommodations North might receive if accepted into it. The meeting wasn’t definitive—the professors didn’t say North’s chronic pain and mobility issues wouldn’t be an issue, but they also didn’t say they couldn’t succeed in the program. It was more of an exploratory discussion on both sides.

The JWU folks seemed open to rest breaks at scheduled intervals but concerned that a cane or crutch might be in the way in a busy kitchen. We mentioned we are pursuing the possibility getting orthotics for North’s shoes, knee braces, and/or a compression suit for their torso that might allow them to stand and walk for longer periods without mobility aids. Finally, we said we were thinking of enrolling North in JWU’s two-day summer program for high school students at the Charlotte campus so they could get a real-world taste of what it’s like to work in a culinary lab. Everyone seemed to think this was an excellent idea, so we signed them up. They’ll be headed to North Carolina the last week in June.

Investigation #2: Towson University Open House

Towson University, which is located just north of Baltimore, about an hour from our house, had an Open House the next day. We left the house at 7:45 a.m., which is early for us to be out and about on a Saturday, or it is for me and North. Beth was up in time to eat breakfast and go for an abbreviated version of her usual morning walk, but North and I are not early birds. To ensure I’d eat breakfast, I made myself overnight oats, two boiled eggs, two vegetarian sausage links, and a thermos of red zinger tea to consume in the passenger seat of the car. I don’t think North had breakfast at all.

Towson is a large state school. We were visiting because I asked North to add another state school to the mix. The event started with an overview presentation in a ballroom. Then we went on a campus tour. North had requested a slower tour when they registered, but unlike at Saint Mary’s, nothing came of that request. Fortunately, North was able to keep up with the tour guide, but they complained a bit about the hilliness of campus. (I counted it as a point in St. Mary’s favor that they were more responsive to answers given on their own online form.)

Towson has a pretty campus, leafy, with plentiful green space and a lot of red brick buildings in different architectural styles. Their mascot is the tiger, and they are serious about it. Tiger statues abound. We didn’t go inside many buildings—no dorm room, dining hall or classroom, though we did go into a science building where we saw an anatomy lab full of plastic body parts, and a lot of spiders in glass cages and fish in aquariums. (We were not taken to the cadaver lab, but we learned there is one.) Beth and I both feel that campus tours don’t show you the inside of the facilities as extensively they did five years ago. She speculated it was a covid-era change that was never reversed.

After the tour we attended presentations on the College of Liberal Arts and the Honors College. We also visited tables to pick up literature about Accessibility and Disability Services and the school’s impressive selection of study-abroad programs. By twelve-thirty, we were finished. North said it seemed like “a nice school,” but they’re not sure they want to go somewhere so big (21,000 students). I made a plug for the Honors College, because if they got in, they’d be part of a smaller community (about 700 students), who take some of their classes together and live in the same dorm their first year.

Celebration #1: Birthday

I turned fifty-six the following Thursday. Until evening it was a normal weekday. Deciding I had time for one chore in the morning and deliberating whether to sweep and mop the kitchen floor, mow the lawn, or replant my sunflower seedlings into bigger pots, I went with the easiest and most pleasant option. When I went out to the patio table where the seedlings are currently living, I was surprised to see two of the six of the cucumbers, which I’d planted two and a half weeks earlier and which I’d about given up on, were poking up through the dirt. That felt like my first present. (Two more sprouts have since joined them.)

In the afternoon I worked on a blog post about astragalus for heart health in Traditional Chinese Medicine, but I knocked off early to meet North at their bus stop because we’d arranged to walk from there to Starbucks so I could claim my birthday reward. North got some kind of tea-juice concoction. They like to invent new drinks there, by customizing existing drinks on the app, often trying to maximize their stars. I got an iced latte and the new bee cake pop. I didn’t want anything too extravagant because there would be cupcakes after dinner.

North made both my birthday dinner and the cupcakes. We had vegetarian chicken cutlets with gravy and roast asparagus. (North had peas instead because they don’t like asparagus, but they roasted it perfectly nonetheless.) The cupcakes were chocolate with my favorite frosting—fresh strawberry buttercream. I request it more often than not on my birthday.

I opened presents next. From the kids I got three books: Circe, Parable of the Talents, and Don’t Fear the Reaper. I later learned one of those last two was my Mother’s Day present from Noah and I shouldn’t have opened it then. Oh well. For further reading when I finish those, mom got me a gift certificate for a bookstore that opened recently in Silver Spring. My sister got me two jars of fancy nut butters (I’ve tried the chai spiced peanut-almond butter and it’s good). Beth’s mom had a tree planted for me in a national forest and Beth got a new cushion with an abstract leafy pattern for the wicker chair on the porch and a promise of a new hanging basket for the big philodendron that spends the summer and early fall on the porch. So now while I’m reading my new books and eating toast with nut butter out there, it will be even prettier.

I had to rush through the cupcakes and present opening a little because I had book club that night. In fact, I realized later that in my haste, when I blew out the candles, I forgot to make a wish. Because I knew time was tight, I’d asked ahead of time for someone else to do the dinner dishes, as an additional birthday present. I left it to Beth and North to decide who would do it and North stepped up. It was nice to eat dinner and leave to discuss So Long, See You Tomorrow, without having to squeeze in this chore or come home to sink full of dishes. (Thanks, kiddo.)

Interlude: Before Mother’s Day

Beth was out of town for most of Mother’s Day weekend. She went up to Ithaca to help Noah pack up some of his belongings and to bring them (but not him) home so when we travel back there next weekend for his graduation and then back home, there will be room in the car for the four of us. She left Friday morning and returned Sunday afternoon.

I was feeling kind of sad about not seeing Noah on Mother’s Day, but then late Friday morning Noah texted me during the last fifteen minutes of his final IT work shift, which was slow apparently, because we chatted for the next half hour, which felt like a nice, long time, and just what I needed. (I’m not sure if he stayed at work or texted while he walked home.) Right before work he’d turned in his last assignment, for Machine Learning, so the first and fourth texts read: “I’ve finished college” and “In 15 minutes I’ll be unemployed too.”

He didn’t get the internship he interviewed for on his birthday. What with the writers’ strike, it’s not a good time to be looking for a video editing internship in Los Angeles, but he’s going to keep looking. We talked about that, and I gave him some updates from home.

Over the weekend I got a lot of one-on-one time with North, who fortunately didn’t get a headache on Friday or Saturday. Friday night, we ordered pizza and watched the first movie in the Fear Street trilogy, which is not great art, but fun, and not the sort of film Beth would enjoy. On Saturday morning North had therapy in Silver Spring. They took the bus there and I swept and mopped the kitchen floor, then got on another bus and met them there. We went to the farmers’ market, where we bought some excellent strawberries, the very last two boxes for sale, as the market was closing soon. As I approached the stand, I saw a young woman grab the third-to-last last box and take off without paying for it. I’ve never seen anyone do that at a farmers’ market and it made me wonder how often it happens.

Next, we headed to the movie theater. We saw Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. North asked me afterward if it was faithful to the book, as they haven’t read it. I hesitated to answer because I haven’t read the book since the 1970s and my recall of it is not perfect. But I said it’s faithful to the way I remember it, both the plot and tone, plus the acting was good and the portrayals of Margaret’s relationships with her parents and grandmother are warm and endearing and wholesome. And as someone only eight years younger than Margaret, there’s some good 70s nostalgia there. North liked it, too—two thumbs up from us.

We got home and I made some applesauce because we had a couple apples with soft spots, and we each cobbled together a dinner out of leftovers and said applesauce. Not satisfied with two movies in one weekend, we watched the second installment of the Fear Street trilogy that evening.

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

On Sunday morning I went to the Takoma Park farmers’ market in hopes of finding a few vegetables I couldn’t find in Silver Spring, but I couldn’t find them there either. To keep it from being a wasted outing, I bought myself a strawberry-yogurt smoothie and walked to the co-op where I bought a few items. Then I came home and mowed the lawn, finally finishing the chores I’d contemplated two days earlier. North had to go to school for a Cappies’ meeting to vote on year-end awards for the plays they’ve been reviewing all year. I took them there in a Lyft and waited in a nearby Starbucks where I wrote a lot of this.

Beth got home while we were out, bearing brownies Noah made for her Mother’s Day present. When North and I got back I helped her unload Noah’s things from the car, including a very large television he bought for himself several months ago. Then we ordered Mexican/Salvadoran takeout so no one would have to cook on Mother’s Day. Beth and I split an order of spinach enchiladas and North got bean pupusas.

Before we ate, we opened our presents from North. They got Beth some gourmet salt and a bunch of dark chocolate bars and they got me a jar of macadamia-coconut butter and this original painting from a photo of Rehoboth Beach, which I love. After dinner, we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls (we’re near the beginning of season 5) and then North and I talked to my mom on the phone and Mother’s Day was a wrap.

On Sunday afternoon when Noah finished at the Cappies meeting and let me know they were ready to go, I accidentally sent Noah a text meant for them that said “Okay. I’ll head over,” then told him to disregard it because I was not in fact heading over to Ithaca and he responded, “In less than a week you are,” which is a cheering thought. All the early-to-mid-May family celebrations—his birthday, mine, Mother’s Day—feel a little off without him. It will be good to see him for several days and celebrate his graduation before he flies off to investigate what Los Angeles holds for him.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: College

Waiting for Joy

To Be Grateful

Get the Party Started

Before Breakfast: A Long Hop

Fall Break AF

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Three Weekends

Welcome Home, Obie

The Grad Who’s Going Places

Investigations and Celebrations