It’s been a while since we’d seen Oliver in person. Yes, there are a myriad of ways to communicate with people these days, ways that would have had our immigrant ancestors agog at how easily they could have kept in touch with all of the people they fled across oceans to get away from, but they’re not the same as actually spending time with someone in person. We’d visited Oliver back in May and he’d had plans to come home over the summer but 10 credits of intensive German classes plus adopting a cat made that impractical.
So rather than wait until Thanksgiving, we packed up the minivan on Friday and headed off into the sunrise.
Not the actual sunrise, mind you. Just in the general direction of where the sunrise would be, had we gotten up at that hour. Which of course we don’t do if we can help it, because that’s what beds are for.
It was a lovely visit.
Oliver told us up front that he had a lot of work to do this weekend – graduate school being like that, as both Kim and I well remember – so he’d see us when he’d see us, and it worked out pretty well. It was a very low-key sort of visit, and this suited everyone.
We got there Friday evening somewhat later than we’d planned thanks to the fact that rush hour in Chicago starts at 5:45am, runs for 24 hours and 35 minutes, creating temporal anomalies that make scheduling events a nightmare anywhere in the 312 area code, and extends out from the Loop as far as Rockford Illinois and Gary Indiana. Nevertheless we persisted, and we checked into our hotel and headed over to hang out at his apartment for a while.
This gave us a chance to drop off all of the various things that we’d collected to drop off. Some of it was for him and some of it was for the cat and that’s just how we roll.
The next morning bright and early (still not sunrise) we headed over to the Farmer’s Market, which was an experience. It’s a permanent installation in that city, with a long roofed-over area for booths and steel tables bolted into the concrete for the vendors to use. There is even a dedicated building for restrooms that is surrounded by a children’s play area. It’s quite a setup.
We love farmer’s markets in general, and we did our best to support the local economy.
I found someone selling homemade hot sauce, which is always a yes from me. We didn’t buy anything from the booth selling fresh chicken because by the time we got to the market, an hour or so after it opened, the line was about forty people deep and it didn’t clear out until they had no chicken left. But there were other booths selling breads, meats, cheeses, pasta, and of course produce of many kinds. I was particularly happy to discover the booth selling Nardello peppers, as they are very hard to find in the US. They were developed in Ruoti, the little hilltop town in Basilicata where my great-grandparents were born, and they are long, bright red, and without any heat whatsoever – a really nice variety of sweet pepper, for those who like such things. If you see them, give them a try!
We liked the market so much that after we dropped Oliver off to get his work done we went back for some homemade hot dogs (seriously – made from scratch, starting with the raw meat) and buckets of fresh-made lemonade that the yellowjacks kept trying to steal from us. Breakfast of champions!
Oliver called us around lunchtime and we hit one of the local brewpubs, where we dined like royalty. We’re kind of food-oriented, for which I make no apologies.
He spent the afternoon working while Kim and I spent the afternoon hanging out at the hotel doing pretty much nothing, which is a fine way to spend an afternoon really. Sometimes it is good to relax and not do much of anything at all.
Afterward we hit one of the parks where they had local bands playing, which was also a lovely thing to do. The band we saw was clearly having a very good time despite the fact that they’re not going to be a band anyone outside of that town has ever heard of, and that kind of enthusiasm is contagious.
We had dinner at an Italian place where the food was good and the conversations were better, and the evening flowed on by at a leisurely pace. All in all a good day.
This morning Kim and I found a little coffee shop for breakfast where we hung out and watched the rain fall until it was time to meet up with Oliver again. There followed two separate grocery runs to stock him up for a while – a small one at an Asian market and a larger one at the usual supermarket – before we lived up to our tradition of finding the ramen place for lunch. We’ve never not been to that place when we’ve visited.
As a side note, a cheer to the manufacturer of the little tire pump that we keep in the back of the minivan! The tire light came on this morning and once Oliver and I figured out the connections it pumped up the tire quickly and easily. I like when things do what they say they’ll do on the tin. The instructions were also correct in warning us that the pump would get Very Hot and we should let it cool before putting it away.
We said our goodbyes and drove home by a circuitous route known only to the programmers at Waze, but eventually arrived safe and sound. The preliminary meetings down at Home Campus are over and this week the semester begins in earnest so we’ll be back to the grind starting tomorrow.
But it was nice to get away for a quick visit.
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