We played a lot of music during this ride, though I didn’t play “My Old School.” But that’s where my younger one and I were heading. Route 84 east, into Connecticut, past all those familiar signs for Danbury, Watertown, Meriden and then over towards Middletown. We had an appointment for a 9:00AM school tour at Wesleyan, my alma mater. Last night around 4:45PM my daughter said she was still on a waiting list for the tour. I called them, mentioned my year and asked if we could get a confirm on a visit, which they kindly, now confirmed.
I’d been up with client calls since before 3:00AM and had drank plenty of coffee. I wore a long sleeved brown shirt on what would surely be another hot day, as I didn’t want anyone to have to stare at the horror-show that was my poisoned-ivy forearm. I shook my little one around 5:30AM, just before my last call. I wanted to leave by 6:00AM so we could have breakfast at O’Rourke’s the classic diner of yore, there in town. I’d checked. They were still there and would be open.
We’re heading to Spain next month and I’d been reading “The Sun Also Rises” to my little one and with all this driving before us, I’d downloaded it ahead of time and threw on the audio book as we were heading up the drive. My little one promptly rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep, so I paused it and decided we’d play it later, when she was actually awake. Overhead I marveled at an enormous cloud that looked like a continent and turned the radio up a little as the Pidge on WFMU’s Wake and Bake show had thrown on Iggy’s “Real Cool Time.” And with that, my daughter asked me if I’d remembered my Covid vaccine card. “Sure. It’s in my wallet.” She didn’t have hers though and our second destination, Connecticut College had requested it, so we returned, secured the card and I got to marvel at the cloud a second time.
Been fasting for a few days. We reached O’Rourke’s with a good forty-five minutes to spare. They were closed. We had a bagel somewhere else on main street that wasn’t here thirty-six years ago and headed up to the admissions office. A smart, personable, articulate young lady of vaguely Asian descent showed us around. I tried to see it all through my daughter’s eyes. And I tried to imagine why it was I didn’t do any of the remarkable things she was describing, when I had the chance a life time ago. There is an observatory on Foss Hill. Why, for example didn’t I take an astronomy class?
I did my best to keep quiet, but the strange environment worked its magic and sure enough my younger one decided she liked it. “It was cool.“ Good. She certainly has much better grades and much better work habits than I ever had. We’ll see. We’ll see. After the info session, during which another parent recognized mine and introduced herself. Our parents were friends. We hadn’t seen each other in forty years . . . we drove down to the coast and got a lunch in New London, at precisely the same place my older daughter and I had done, four years ago, before we’d visited Connecticut College. They have a lovely campus and I tried to master my late day tiredness, walking in to view what a real dorm room looked like. One thing I was looking at fresh, at this campus and back at Wesleyan was the trees. Though they both had stately trees, the variety on either campus was nothing to brag about. A place that was, remarkable in that regard was Middlebury in Vermont, which we’d visited last year. I did spot a Kentucky Coffee Tree, which I’d never seen before and I snatched a seen pod which I pocketed with the intention of planting back home. All the ride home she played power-pop, Japanese anime theme songs and the ride went fast, and I never tired, because every time her song ended I got to through on the most aggressive punk I could think off to complement the vibe. It wasn’t until after we’d crossed the Hudson and had ordered the evening’s family pizzas from Lombardi’s in Gardiner that we had a flat tire which we pulled over and replaced with the spare.
Friday 07/23/21
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