Off to a New Adventure

We are now a day into our third trial run at being empty nesters, what with various college enrollments and exchange programs and all, and so far it’s going pretty well though the place is rather more quiet than it used to be and that will take some getting used to.

It’s not like we hadn’t seen it coming.

Oliver has been living at home since he graduated college, working as an advisor in my office down at Home Campus. But his larger goal was to go to graduate school as a historian, and after a strange bureaucratic meltdown at his chosen school last year they finally admitted him for this year’s cohort.

He and I went out there a couple of months ago and found an apartment on the second floor of an old house, and as the move-in date approached this summer we’ve been getting ready for it. Oliver spent a good chunk of the last few weeks getting utilities set up, packing stuff, and generally preparing for the move. Last weekend we went down to the nearest IKEA and looted the place – say what you will about flat-pack furniture, but it does in fact pack flat which is a marvelous thing when you’re trying to stuff a studio apartment’s worth of belongings into a minivan and an old station wagon.

He chose the menu for dinners last week to make sure he had some favorites before heading off, and I spent Wednesday night Tetrising boxes and assorted other items into the cars. And on Thursday morning we headed out.

It’s a long drive but not an overwhelming one for anyone who has spent time in the midwest, though it does require you to go around Chicago which is never a good thing. Rush hour in Chicago starts at 5:45am, runs for 23 hours and 55 minutes, and extends as far out as Rockford IL and Michigan City IN. Also, every single highway in the broad expanse of Chicagoland is under construction and has been since 1958. They are not expected to be completed. But we made it to our destination in good order and even managed to pick up Dustin at O’Hare along the way, since he was coming to help.

Fortunately for all of us, Oliver’s landlord said he could move in on Thursday rather than waiting until Friday, which meant that we could unload the cars and not have to worry about all of Oliver’s worldly possessions sitting overnight in a hotel parking lot.

Unfortunately, even at 6pm it was 91F/33C and humid the entire time we were doing this, the apartment did not come with air conditioning, and in the weeks since Oliver and I had found this place we’d both forgotten just how steep the staircase to his apartment actually was. The word “Alpine” kept coming up in conversation. But between the four of us we got everything except the portable air conditioning unit into his apartment, headed back to the hotel for much-deserved showers, and then found our way back to the ramen place that we seem to gravitate toward whenever we are in that city – Oliver has now eaten there every single time he’s been there. What can we say? It’s good food.

Friday morning we went over and began the project of cleaning the apartment and converting the flat-pack furniture into actual three-dimensional furniture. Kim and I also figured out how to get the portable air conditioner unit up the front steps, which were much longer but significantly less steep than the more direct staircase, and after a few hours it was ready to go. We were all very grateful for that.

There was a break for lunch and a Costco run.

Then we were back at it, building and cleaning, setting up the internet and wifi, and eventually grocery shopping as well.

And then Kim and I left. You have to do that, as parents. You have to go. Dustin is going to stay for a few more days, though, which is lovely since it has been a while since they saw each other and they can get the place more set up while he’s there.

It was a much longer ride home than the ride there, even though we just retraced our steps. It always is when you drop off your child into the next stage of their life – a stage that they will travel through on their own. We’ll be here, of course, but here is not there. It’s our third time trying this, though, and we’ll be okay.

Oliver is off to a new adventure, and I wish him all good fortune and success. Go and do well, Oliver. I’m proud of you.

A Belgian Interlude

We didn’t actually go to Belgium, though we need to correct that in the very near future. It’s a lovely place, and we have friends there. This time our Belgian friends came here.

It was not the first time Fran was in Our Little Town, though. Way back in the pre-pandemic days she spent about seven months living with us as an exchange student and now of course she’s family. The summer after she returned to Belgium we went over there to visit her and her family, and it was always everyone’s intent that they would come back to visit us as well except that somewhere in there the world caught fire and it took a while to get things back to some semblance of normality.

Whether that applies to the US today is an open question whose obvious answer we try not to dwell on, and we did ask them several times if they were still going to travel here in these parlous times. But they are courageous people and in the end it turned out fine. They made it here and back without being assaulted by masked government thugs, and for that we are grateful.

Last year they asked if this summer would work for a visit and well of course it would work! We’d make it work! So they planned a grand US tour for this month. Fran, her brother Niels and sister Lien, and her parents Roeland and Veerle would fly to New York City to see the sights there, spend a day or two in Washington DC, then go to Chicago for a few days. At that point Niels and Lien would fly back to Belgium and I’d head down to O’Hare to pick up Fran, Roeland and Veerle and bring them back to Our Little Town.

And it worked out pretty much exactly that way, though with the added excitement of their travel agent dropping the ball on hotel accommodations in Chicago during what must have been Every Event Ever Planned In The Windy City All Happening On The Same Weekend, but that got straightened out as well.

We arrived in good order, and Fran even got her old bedroom back!

The first order of business after we got home was dinner, since Americans (at least these Americans) tend to think from one meal to the next. We tried to do things that would be harder to find in Europe – red beans and rice, for example, and one night we went out for Mexican food since I can speak from experience that this is tricky to find across the Atlantic. One night we had a backyard barbecue – complete with sweet corn, since it is the season for that and there is nothing more American than corn on the cob. Sharon, Steve, and Laine came by for that – Sharon and her family were Fran’s first hosts during her exchange year and they hadn’t met Veerle and Roeland before. They were only supposed to keep Fran for a week or two as a Welcome Family but there was a shortage of host families that year and it was December before she found her way to us. It was lovely to get everyone together.

Another night we made homemade pizzas and set up the cornhole game in the driveway, and if the first part of that isn’t the usual Wisconsin thing the second part most definitely is. You can consider yourself a real midwesterner once you’ve eaten sweet corn you’ve shucked yourself and played cornhole in the driveway. There’s a certificate and everything.

After dinner on that first night, though, we walked over to the local soft-serve ice cream place because that’s just what you do in Our Little Town, even if the road in front of it is missing entirely (to be replaced by sometime in October, we are told). If you want to understand America, a soft-serve place on a warm summer night in a midwestern town is a good place to start.

My goal for this visit was to show our friends that the US is a good place even if our current government is a Fascist train wreck of cruelty and ignorance. I grew up in and around Philadelphia in the 1970s at a time when City Council meetings often featured fistfights and about half the City Council ended up in jail on bribery charges one summer, and one of the lessons of that time and place is that you should always draw a clear distinction between a place and its government. So we did our best to forget the larger issues facing this nation and focus on seeing some of the highlights of southern Wisconsin. You can’t get to them all, so Fran and her family will just have to come back for another visit someday.

Their first full day here we took them on a tour of Our Little Town, starting with Local Businessman High School where Fran went during her time here. I remember seeing the school where Lauren went in Germany during her exchange year and enjoying that connection, so I hoped Roeland and Veerle would like it too. We also went to Home Campus where they got to see the place and Roeland even managed to get in a shot or two on the pool table in the student lounge. The highlight of the morning was probably the big gardens in town, since a) they really are nice, and b) Roeland’s hobby is taking professional-quality photographs of insects and if there were going to be interesting insects anywhere in town it would be there.

There were a few interesting insects, though the ones that seemed to make the most impression on this visit were the monarch butterfly that landed in front of our living room window while Roeland was sitting by it (they don’t have monarchs in Belgium) and the fireflies that swarmed out once the sun got low enough in the sky. They have those in Belgium, but not as many of them. After the soft-serve place Oliver drove Roeland and Fran out to one of those big fields where the fireflies congregate in numbers and that was a lovely thing.

The big issue facing our local tour, though – and, indeed, the issue entire time they were here – was that it was weapons-grade hot outside, with all sorts of warnings and admonitions being floated about by Official People, so after the gardens we retreated to our air-conditioned home for lunch and then headed off for a similarly air-conditioned museum north of town. I used to run that museum – it’s a great place, really. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad once upon a time, and even now it serves as a reminder that there is often a stark difference between what is legal and what is moral.

That evening we went to the water-skiing show. Our Little Town has a very good water-skiing team and twice a week they put on a show for anyone who wants to come by and sit in the bleachers and watch them as they prepare for the state and national competitions. There’s always a bit of narrative framework around it, but the main reason people go is for the skiing.

But while Our Little Town is a lovely place to live there are more things to do further afield and so for the rest of their visit we introduced our friends to the American concept of “It’s only a 90-minute drive! That’s nothing!” which can be a bit of a culture shock for people who come from a country you can drive all the way across in about two hours. But they were game and the minivan has American-standard nuclear-powered air-conditioning, and off we went.

We spent a day in Madison, where walked down State Street to the Capitol building, went up into the dome and climbed out onto the rooftop observation deck to look out over the city, and then went back to the Memorial Terrace before walking along the lake for a while.

We hit our favorite Peruvian restaurant for lunch while we were there. At one point I was thinking to myself that those would be hard to find in Europe but then I went to Florence and, well, the place is thick with them. But it’s good food and we enjoyed it.

Another day we took them to the House on the Rock, which is something you should do at least once in your life because you can always use it to justify whatever level of drinking you care to do. If you’ve not had the experience, the House on the Rock is what happens when way too much money meets not nearly enough medication, and it consists of two basic pieces.

First there is the House, which is – as advertised – on a rock. Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright had married Elvis Presley in 1974 and then set up house together, and you wouldn’t be that far off. It’s got a lot of shag carpeting (some of it on the ceiling), a small creek that runs through it, an unnatural abundance of desperately uncomfortable conversation spaces scattered here and there, very low ceilings throughout, and the occasional full-sized hydraulically powered orchestra that you can start up by inserting one of the coins they give you with your ticket. It also has the Infinity Room, which is legitimately cool.

You wind through the House on a set path, and afterward you think, “Well, that was weird but it was weird within spec and I have made it through unscathed,” and then you get to the Collections and that’s when you realize that the House was just teasing you and now the weird is really going to get rolling. There’s a room with a life-sized model of a whale in battle with a giant squid. There’s a room with the world’s most psychotic carousel, spinning rapidly under a ceiling full of mannequins dressed like angels. There’s a room with a hundred model circuses. There’s a room that looks like Tim Burton’s last therapy session. It just goes on and on, each room leading to something else that will require debriefing to move on with your life, and no trip to southern Wisconsin is complete without it. It’s a lot of fun, in an aggravated what-the-fuckery sort of way, and you should go.

To recover from that we went to Devil’s Lake State Park, which is a lovely and mostly quiet site full of natural beauty where you can sit and just let the day wash over you in peace, and you kind of need that after the House on the Rock.

We came home via the ferry that crosses the Wisconsin River.

The rest of the night was devoted to puzzles. Fran and her family are expert puzzle solvers – they compete in a puzzle competition in their hometown, in fact. That puzzle didn’t stand a chance.

We also spent a day at the RenFaire. It’s always a bit odd bringing people to a Renaissance Faire when they come from a country that actually experienced the Renaissance but the RenFaire is a particularly stylized version of the Renaissance that overlaps with the original approximately not at all, and thus a good time regardless of your historical background. We saw a lot of the performers that we try to see when we go there – the Mud Show, Moonie, Barely Balanced – and generally had a good time wandering around the place even though it was, as noted earlier, very hot.

And of course, if you’re going to show people the better side of America, particularly here in the midwest, there is no more appropriate place to do that than the local County Fair. It’s got farm animals! It’s got all sorts of tasty and moderately nonlethal food! It’s got art! What more could you ask for?

We also went to the Farmer’s Market, because Our Little Town actually has a pretty nice one even when it rains on everyone, which it insisted on doing that day. But it’s right downtown – the city has been doing a lot to make the downtown more lively and accessible and the Farmer’s Market is a big part of that – and we got to visit our friend Lois who runs the kettle corn stand.

Not all of their visit was spent running from place to place, though a lot of it was. There was also some quiet time, scrolling or reading or just hanging out and talking. It’s good to spend quiet time together.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually I had to drive them back to O’Hare so they could go home again. Though not before the World’s Worst Toy came back to us.

At some point during Fran’s initial stay with us – I believe during the Ukrainian Christmas celebration in January that year – we came into possession of a small cowboy figure, maybe an inch or two tall. He’s stretchy, odd, and tacky in every conceivable sense. It has become a game to pass it back and forth. We sent it home with Fran after her exchange year. She sent it back with us after our visit. We returned it to her when she came back in 2019. And now, all these years later, Fran has deposited it into Oliver’s keeping.

So now we really do need to go to Belgium.

News and Updates

1. So it’s been a while but it’s also been a busy while and that’s a lovely thing. This summer has been packed with things – most of them good things, at least in my hyperlocal spot in the universe – and I have quite a backlog of posts to make now. This will get done eventually.

2. We had houseguests last week from Belgium and spent a happy time showing them around southern Wisconsin and generally hanging out and enjoying their company as well. It’s been a while since we’ve seen Fran, Veerle, and Roeland, and now we owe them a visit! Look for details in the next post.

3. Of course there is nothing like the prospect of houseguests to make every mechanical system in your life fail completely. In the last two weeks we have: 1) gotten a flat tire on my car, had to call AAA to get the damn thing off the wheel, and then had to replace all four tires because they were mostly working on the memory of treads, 2) replaced two miniblinds moments before they died, thus removing the last of the blinds that had actual strings on them, 3) snapped the outside garage light trying to tie a string of overhead lights onto it (I have a replacement that I won’t put up until we take the string of lights down in the fall), 4) repaired both toilets, 5) fixed the dehumidifier, 6) fixed the lawnmower, 7) flushed the hot water heater only to discover that the sediment blocking the upstairs bathroom sink and shower wasn’t coming from that, and 8) cleaned and replaced the showerhead to no avail so I will have to put up a new one, and if the plumber I spoke with over the phone yesterday is correct in his assessment of the situation we will likely need to replace the pipes to that bathroom which can only happen by removing everything between those pipes and the open air and that sounds both expensive and shower-free so I think this process can stop now.

4. On the plus side, Lauren is still traveling, Oliver is gearing up to go to grad school this coming week, Kim and I are about 80% certain we still have jobs in the fall (the joys of working in higher education in a nation governed by idiots who see education as a threat to their power), and the cat is now getting monthly shots for arthritis and feels much better, apparently. I need to see if they’ll do that for me as well. Every day we’re closer to November and civilized weather. There are still good things in this world.

5. We spent today at IKEA getting stuff for Oliver as he sets out into his first real apartment and while IKEA is Kim’s favorite store and we love Sweden in general, it is always an experience at IKEA. At some point I was just standing by the cart while Kim and Oliver were off doing something else and a woman walking past exclaimed to nobody in particular, “Somehow my very quick upgrade has turned into an epic situation” and I think we all felt that, down there at the IKEA.

6. Every time I look at anything to do with the news it’s like somebody turned up the Stupid to catastrophic levels. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have defunded PBS (the only really reliable source of news in the US, because a well-informed citizenry asks too many pointed questions), seriously proposed a Versailles-level palace addition to the White House (remind me, how did it end for the last residents of Versailles when they were this actively cruel to the people they ruled over?), waffled on tariffs for the umpteenth time while inflation sets in anyway, forced a major network to cancel one of its most popular shows because the host dared to criticize Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump directly, and continued to have their ICE goons kidnap people off the streets and traffic them to foreign nations, and really all you can say is that they should have released the fucking Epstein files by now, unedited and unchanged. Also, the Israeli genocide against Gaza seems to be gaining speed and far too few people in the US seem bothered by this grotesque evil. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

7. The late and much-lamented Molly Ivins once said that “Some days you open the paper and it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator, smoking a cigar. Hard to know what to think.” I feel that more and more every day.

8. Every once in a while I log into my Reddit account to see if I still want to keep it. I haven’t deleted it yet, so I suppose that’s a good sign. I recently stumbled across a forum whose only purpose is to ask people to read things written in cursive. The thing is, though, that these are not 17th-century manuscripts that even historians would have trouble reading because clearly everyone in the 1600s was severely malnourished to the point of not being too weak to hold a pen correctly. No, these are recent documents, clearly legible to anyone of my generation, but they stopped teaching cursive in schools about a decade or two ago and now there is an entire cohort of Americans that can’t read any handwritten documents older than the Obama presidency and it makes me I feel even older than I did before I knew this.

9. The air is hazy again right now because of the Canadian wildfires and if there are people reading this ten or twenty years from now I just want to point out that there was a time when that wasn’t a normal part of the summer. Us old folks (see Item 8, above) can remember when it was possible to go outside in the summer months without protective gear or SPF3K sunscreen (available in matte or glossy) and it is a shame what they stole from you. Honestly, I spent most of Tuesday night walking around the house looking for what was burning, since a minor fire would fit in well with Item 3 above, only to discover that it was Canada. You could actually taste the air if you went outside. You’d think it would taste of maple syrup, but you’d be so, so wrong.

10. Yes, we saw the South Park episode. I hadn’t watched South Park since Chef was still on it, but many people insisted we see this episode and so we did. The South Park people have clearly run out of fucks to give and I wish them well because somebody has to take Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves down a notch. Might as well be poorly animated, gleefully foul-mouthed cartoon characters.