Saturday to Wednesday: Before Oberlin
We arrived at the rental house late Wednesday afternoon. When I checked the weather app on my phone in different parts of the house over the next couple days sometimes it told me we were in Amherst, Ohio and sometimes it said Vermillion, so I guess we were somewhere in between (or the borderline runs through the house). The important part, as Beth pointed out, was that we were “near Oberlin.” Beth, her mom, and I were there to see North perform in Standing Strong, the play they’d been writing and rehearsing with a group of students since the beginning of January. They were in dress rehearsal that evening, so we wouldn’t see them until the next day.
Beth and I had driven from Takoma Park to Wheeling several days earlier. I worked from Beth’s mom’s house Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, while Beth and her mom went on expeditions, out to lunch a couple times, and to see the tulips in Oglebay Park. I walked every day, either around the neighborhood, in Wheeling Park or in a nearby cemetery (where I got a little lost). We visited several times with Beth’s aunt Carole, including one time when she came over for dinner. Beth and I cooked dinner most nights and her mom raved about each meal, even simple dishes like a stir-fry or spinach quesadillas. In the evenings we watched episodes of Ken Burns’ Baseball, which Beth and her mom had started back in early March while Beth had visited without me. It starts in the nineteenth century, and I came in in the 1920s, but it wasn’t hard to pick up the thread.
The rental unit was an apartment in a house on a working farm. There wasn’t any livestock, but there were tilled fields where wild turkeys roamed, beehives, a pond, and a dead tree where eagles occasionally perched. There was also a hot tub, where Beth and I soaked for a bit before our dinner of grilled cheese and soup and another episode of Baseball.
Thursday to Friday: In Oberlin (and Vermillion)
We picked North up at Keep the next morning and went to Slow Train for breakfast (or second breakfast for some of us). North has no classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays this semester and they’d cleared the day for us. They’d invited me to come to the pool with them and their friend Camille and because I’d lost my alumni id I needed to get a new one, which involved visits to three different offices in two buildings, but it was free and it also allowed me to swim for free, so I am not complaining.
When we walked out to the pool deck, I exclaimed, “It’s my pool,” which the young people found amusing. I did used to swim there a lot, especially in my sophomore and senior years. North and Camille hung out in the rec lane and chatted while I swam laps, but only for about thirty-five minutes because I didn’t want to make people wait for me.
While I was using a kickboard and had head my head out of the water, I inspected the records on the walls of the pool, as I did the last time I swam at Oberlin (when North was a prospective), looking for the oldest ones and I found some diving records dating back to the 80s I hadn’t noticed the last time. The very oldest one was from 1983, two years before my first year at Oberlin. I like to think of the woman who holds it, now in her sixties, checking every now and then to see if her forty-plus-year-old record stands, and being satisfied that it does. After we were finished, I showered and Camille headed off to the sauna, and North and I left to meet up with Beth and Yaya outside the gym.
We went into Vermillion for lunch, mainly because we wanted to go back to the old-fashioned ice cream parlor we’d discovered there in January. We had lunch at a pub, chosen because it has fried pickles on the menu and North likes those. Then we got ice cream. (North got a root beer float, another favorite of theirs.) We lingered inside because it was pouring rain, but then it cleared up and we took a stroll down to the shores of Lake Erie, where we admired the lighthouse and saw a heron in the water.
We took North to see the house where we were staying. They made themselves some mint tea and curled up with a sudoku book they found there, then they used the hot tub. I didn’t feel like showering again (I have to every time I’m in chlorinated water or my skin gets itchy) so I perched on the edge and soaked my feet and calves.
While we were at the house, I told North, who had just accepted a summer internship in Wyandotte, Michigan (near Detroit), that I was happy for them and proud of them, even though I was sad they weren’t coming home for the summer. I felt it needed to be said because I had accidently posted in the family group chat that I was sad, thinking I was texting just Noah. It’s true, I am happy for them and proud of them. The job is doing marketing and event coordinating for a housing co-operative for senior citizens. They wanted something a step up from canvassing or camp counseling and they showed a lot of hustle applying for jobs. I understand, too, because I didn’t come home the summer after my sophomore year of college either.
We had an early (but not early enough) dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Oberlin. North had bubble tea and some vegetable dumplings but had to leave before the entrees arrived to get to the theater by their call time. We packed up their food for them to eat after the show. When the fortune cookies came, mine said I would soon learn to appreciate the little things in life and Beth’s mom said she thought I already did, based on my Facebook posts. That made me feel seen because that’s one of the main ways I try to use Facebook. We left the restaurant and walked to the theater.
When we entered the theater, we saw four huge banners, each with the face of three cast members. Of course, we chose seats with the best view of North’s face.
Here’s the official Theater Department description of the show:
Standing Strong is inspired by the courage, complex points of views and identities of a group of diverse and multi-talented students, utilizing dance, music, acting, personal stories and original writing. The piece is designed to immerse performers and audiences in reflections, triumphs, and challenges facing young people today.
It was a series of songs, dances, and vignettes, some based on personal experience, some fictional (and in many cases satirical). Topics included race, gender expression, disability, and the current political situation. The actors were in their own pieces and each other’s. North had to play the racist in three different sketches. I speculated later that the director wanted to have one actor do them all to signal to the audience what was coming. Still, North found that challenging.
During the months of rehearsal, North had found it tiring and painful to stand for so long, so they decided to perform the whole show in a wheelchair. The first piece they wrote was about wheelchair accessibility, they had another that recreated a group therapy session from their high school years and dealt mainly with their eating disorder, and there was another segment in which they recited quotes from my blog, all from 2025. The posts described a Free DC protest, a birthright citizenship rally, my reactions to people being seized from our neighborhood by ICE, and my appreciation for the bravery of immigrant communities in these times.
I knew this was going to happen ahead of time, but it was even more emotional than I thought it would be, magical really, to see my words come to life on the stage. In one of the protest scenes, the crew had recreated all the signs I described. The whole show was very good, better than I expected, only because over the past couple months, North kept trying to lower our expectations, saying they didn’t think there was a strong enough throughline. (This was one of the reasons Noah didn’t make the trip with us.)
We didn’t have room in the car for the wheelchair, so North wheeled back to Keep, and I waited for them on the porch with the bouquet we bought for them and their dinner. I was sitting on the wide concrete ledge atop the brick wall that lines the porch stairs, nostalgically thinking of all the times I’d sat there when I was twenty, often talking for hours with friends, when I spotted my own twenty-year-old child, flanked by two friends coming down the sidewalk. It was a full circle kind of moment, even before another friend of North’s who was sitting on a couch on the porch saw me greet North and after North introduced us said to them, “It’s like your face on another person!”
The next morning, we had another (second) breakfast at Slow Train and then we took a short stroll around campus and back to Keep, where North showed YaYa their room. They had an exam in the Psychology research methods class that afternoon and another show that evening, so we left around eleven-thirty and drove back to Wheeling.
Friday to Monday: After Oberlin
We stayed in Wheeling a few more days. I spent a lot of time reading. We’re reading Charterhouse of Parma for book club (which honestly is kind of a slog), and I was also re-reading 1984 in preparation for Julia, which we’ll read in May. It’s my third time reading 1984 and this time around I am really admiring the tight construction of the plot.
We went to Carole’s again and visited with Beth’s aunt Susan’s daughter Carissa and her daughter Lacey. As we were telling them about North’s summer job and the fact that they won’t be coming to the beach, which I thought was relaying in a neutral tone, Carole said to the room at large, “Steph is heartbroken” in her characteristic matter-of-fact tone.
Later Beth and her mom went to the Fiestaware outlet and got some bowls, ramekins, mugs, and plates, including a cool little black plate with a Mexican sugar skull on it for me.
Beth’s brother John and his wife Abby were arriving for their own visit to Beth’s mom on Monday afternoon, so we stayed long enough to see them for a little while before hitting the road, laden with Heath bar cookies Abby made plus Snickerdoodles Susan made.
We’re home now, but always in our hearts, near Oberlin.