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.