Friday to Sunday: Pittsburgh and Wheeling
“Everyone’s flight was on time,” Beth said, sounding pleased. We were in the Pittsburgh airport, where her brother John’s flight from Savannah and mine from National had arrived within an hour of each other and, as she noted, both on time. Beth had been staying with her mom for two and a half weeks. I was joining her for a several-day road trip to pick North up from Oberlin and take them to their summer job in Michigan and then trek home to Maryland. John was taking Beth’s place at their mom’s house.
Aside from Mother’s Day and my birthday, the weeks Beth had been gone were uneventful. I went to the dentist twice (once for a checkup and once to replace a filling) and to book club twice. At first my work was slow and Noah was busy, working six days in a row. Then his work slowed down and mine picked up. I wrote a 3,000-word booklet on homeopathy for menstrual complaints in less than two weeks. We watched Snowpiercer, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and all the available episodes of The Testaments. There was a three-day heat wave with temperatures reaching the mid-nineties, which was kind of miserable because, having no idea it was going to get that hot while Beth was gone, she and Noah had not installed our window AC units before she left and that is a Beth-and-Noah job.
Our dinner plan for Friday was for me to pick up pizza and bring it out to the baggage claim area where Beth and her mom were waiting, but I couldn’t find any place that sold slices to go, just a sit-down Italian restaurant, and I was carrying a heavy, cumbersome duffel bag and didn’t want to schlep it around any further than necessary, so I gave up and went through the Gate of No Return pizzaless. There was a little café by the baggage claim, so Beth got pasta salad and I got hummus with crudités. When John arrived, we got into the car and drove to Wheeling. I’d slept poorly the night before and Beth was also tired, so we went to our hotel almost immediately and were in bed before 9:30 and asleep soon afterward.
Saturday, we passed a quiet day, mostly hanging around Beth’s mom’s house. In the morning Beth and I took a walk in Wheeling Park, where we saw chipmunks and turtles sunning by the edge of Good Lake. John drove me back to the hotel in the afternoon so I could nap because I’d woken in at five that morning and been unable to get back to sleep and that wasn’t enough to get me caught up on sleep. That night we had Chinese takeout for dinner and paid Beth’s aunt Carole a brief visit.
Sunday to Tuesday: Oberlin and Vermillion
We left for Oberlin straight from the hotel and discovered on trying to get a podcast set up that the car speakers were broken. This led to a trial-and-error process of figuring out which podcasts in my lineup have good enough audio to play directly out of my phone. The answer was most of them.
The drive to Oberlin took three and a half hours. We arrived shortly before noon. The OSCA alumni picnic was scheduled for 12:20 and because North was organizing it, they were a little harried when we got there. At one point someone came over to tell them she couldn’t find the paper plates, while it did seem to be true that they weren’t in the order, enough plates were discovered in the OSCA office and the crisis was averted. The turnout was big, several hundred people, and the meal was vegetarian ba minh sandwiches, a zucchini sauté, and pineapple upside down cake, all of which would have been hard to eat without plates, so that was a relief. All the food was all very good and the weather held, despite some ominous looking clouds.
We were sitting at a table with a couple women from the class of 2001, as it was Commencement and fifty-year and twenty-five-year reunions that weekend. They asked North if they’d been a cook on the meal and when they said, no but they’d budgeted the meal, ordered the food, and gone on emergency grocery runs for missing ingredients, they seemed impressed. Meanwhile, it was kind of blowing my mind that people who graduated in a year that starts with 2 are legitimately middle-aged now. How can that be when I graduated in 1989?
After the meal and a speech from the outgoing president of OSCA, North went around the crowd looking for friends so they could say goodbye and we went back to their room, and assessed the state of their packing, which could be described as in progress. Beth and I left them there and took a short stroll around campus and then we all went to Dollar General to get another storage bin. From there we drove to our hotel, which was closer to Cleveland than Oberlin because Commencement had made lodging scarce. We ordered the pizza we didn’t get Friday and ate it in the room while watching two episodes from the last season of Gilmore Girls. We’ve been watching this show since North was in eighth grade, and now they are halfway through college. Halfway through college, people! How did this happen?
Commencement was Monday morning and North wanted to go because some of their friends were graduating. Beth and I did not care to attend, because honestly, graduations are boring if no one important to you is graduating. We stayed at the hotel until 9:30 a.m. and then went to Keep where we did a load of their and our combined laundry. We took turns sitting on the porch, watching our belongings while the other walked around town. While I was walking, I stopped at Slow Train for coffee. I thought it wouldn’t be that crowded because everyone would be at Commencement, but it was jam-packed with people in academic regalia and at least one young person in graduation robes, who were skipping the speeches to caffeinate. I found this amusing.
While I was on the porch, I wrote a lot of this and listened to Patsy Cline. Keep is an old building, one hundred and thirteen years old to be exact, and I liked the idea of some long before-my-time Oberlin student on this same porch, listening to Patsy Cline, on a radio or a turntable rather than a laptop, but still… It made me feel part of a long line of Keepers, as if I needed any extra reinforcement.
When North got back from Commencement, having cut out after the last person who they wanted to see cross the stage had done so, we drove to Vermillion. North has become quite enchanted with this little town on the shore of Lake Erie. They have a fantasy about moving there after graduation and opening a marriage and family therapy practice.
We had lunch at a hot dog stand that serves vegetarian hot dogs and then went down to the beach. North and I waded into the water while Beth stayed on a bench by the lighthouse. The water was a little cold, but not too bad, considering it was still May. While we were in town, they said they could live in a little white clapboard house we saw but while we were in the water, they pointed to a brick mansion right on the shore of the lake and said they’d like that one instead. I pointed out they had not made much progress on their oft-stated goal to marry rich, preferably to someone they meet in college. “And you’re halfway through,” I said.
When I got out of the water, I saw some of the 250-year flags on the beach and I realized that while this branded semiquincentennial has been annoying me because the President is tying himself so closely to it, it doesn’t have to be partisan. It could just be a celebration of our country’s history, like the 4th of July, in which I participate without crankiness, despite some of its problematic features. I concluded being in the water had made me mellow.
We got ice cream at the Ice Creamatorium. A few of the businesses in Vermillion have macabre names, based on the history of the buildings. This one is in a former funeral parlor. There’s a B&B in a former jailhouse called The Old Vermillion Jailhouse B&B. There’s also a tattoo parlor called Asylum Ink, so I checked to see if it was on the site of an asylum, but it’s not.
We went back to the hotel where we ordered Indian and ate that, plus leftover pizza for dinner, and watched three more episodes of The Gilmore Girls.
North had to be out of their room by nine a.m. We arrived to help them move out at eight and without any discussion all got to work in different roles. Beth and I carried items to the car until there was enough for her to get started loading the car while I carried the rest out and North swept their rapidly emptying room. By 8:45 we were finished and drove the heavily loaded car to Slow Train for coffee and pastries. The line was as long as it had been the day before and even slower. It took over a half hour to get our food and drinks. Luckily, we weren’t in a hurry, and we got to meet and hang out with North’s friend Eden (who had previously expressed interest in meeting “your lesbians”) and their mother. We talked about Eden’s post-graduation plans (they are going to student teach in Chicago), which made me wonder what a conversation like this with North will look like in two years.
Tuesday to Wednesday: Near Detroit
Then we drove to Wyandotte, Michigan, where North is going to be working this summer doing marketing and event planning at group of a housing co-operatives for senior citizens. Before they start the job, though, they have a few days training at headquarters in a different suburb of Detroit. The organization was putting them up in hotel in that town, so we couldn’t see or help them move into their apartment. (Several people from the office are going to help them do that on Friday.)
We’d gotten a room in their hotel for one night, but we wanted to have a look at the area where they’d be spending the summer. It’s a nice neighborhood right on the Detroit River. The housing co-ops, both high rises, are on a wide tree-line boulevard with a lot of Victorian houses, mixed with buildings in other styles. We had lunch at a restaurant with a river view and took a stroll by the river and to both the co-ops. North will live in one, but they didn’t know yet which one (they’re only a block or two apart) so I took a picture of them outside each one. (I’ve included the correct one here.)
We picked up some groceries for North to eat while they are in the hotel and some prepared food for dinner and ate at the hotel, watching still more Gilmore Girls. On this trip, we got from about a third of the way through the last season to almost two-thirds. Before we knew North wouldn’t come home this summer, we’d intended to finish the show, which was the reason for the binge.
Wednesday was North’s first day of job training. We dropped them off at their office and began our two-day drive back to Maryland. That wasn’t easy, but I am in no position to complain about them spending the summer away from home because I didn’t come home the summer that I was twenty either. While we were walking by the river I asked them if they were nervous or excited and they said, “Both.” It’s quite the grown-up adventure and just the right time of life for it. They are right on time.