Time Keeps on Slippin' Slippin' Slippin': Grad Weekend Part 1

I feel like I've lived many lifetimes since my last blog post. First, my dad is doing much better. His knee is a little sore still, but he's getting around as well as he was before (which is not great, but we'll take it). He came over this morning for his every-six-months nephrology appointment which was over Zoom today, thank fuck. He has idiopathic kidney disease, and has seen this doctor every six months for the last five years. Every year the doctor says much the same thing - kidney function is low but not dialysis-low, your kidneys will probably continue to be okay unless you get hit by a bus, in which case they will not do okay but many other things also would not. His last bloodwork actually showed a slight improvement in kidney function, so he doesn't have to see the doctor for a year. I like the nephrologist - he is genial and funny and watched Cougar Town. I especially like that there is no dialysis in our near future.

Last Thursday we headed to Hamilton for a string of events leading up to Eve's graduation. I had a doctor's appointment at 11:30 which had been for a couple of other issues, but the week before we had gotten some wildfire smoke blowing in from Saskatchewan, and it did a number on my airways. I was fairly apprehensive about the fact that I was supposed to see two productions in Stratford and sleep in a hotel room with Eve and Matt for five nights with a horrible hacking cough. Fortunately my wonderful doctor addressed the other issues AND gave me another vat of hydrocodone syrup, which is the only thing that stops the cycle. I picked it up as we were driving out of town, took a healthy slug and didn't cough for the whole drive, which was a massive relief. And then I developed a UTI and now I have a 102 degree fever while it's A Hundred And Are You Fucking Kidding Me degrees outside which is why it's taken me so long to blog this BUT ANYWAY.

Friday was a long day - Eve and I left the hotel at 11 a.m. and got back at 11:30 p.m for a day in Stratford with a group of arts and science students and profs. We saw Forgiveness, based on a book that was a Canada Reads contender a few years ago. As far as the book goes, the story was fascinating but the writer is a lawyer, not a writer, if you know what I mean. The play, on the other hand, was amazing. The full title is Forgiveness: A Gift from my Grandparents. Mark Sakamoto's grandparents are a Caucasian grandfather from the Magdalen Islands in Quebec, who is captured at the fall of Hong Kong and is a years-long war prisoner, and a Japanese-Canadian grandmother who spends the war in an internment camp (an extremely shitty chapter in Canadian history). The play was almost three hours long but didn't feel like it at all. 

After the play we had an hour or so of discussion with the actor who had adapted the book into a play as well as acting in it, and a woman who was also the composer. Jean Wilson, my tiny former professor who was also the department head until a couple of years ago, expressed her appreciation for the play and then said "I was thinking of the Iliad..." and the entire room burst out laughing because basically, Jean is nearly always thinking of the Iliad. I had thought that the actor looked like a tv actor I had seen many times, and when I saw him up close I realized that that was because he literally was that actor, and I had just watched him in season two of The Last of Us. Then we walked as a group to an insanely busy hotel restaurant and managed to eat and converse through the din. Eve talked to a girl who is starting the arts and science program in the fall and was considering combining with biology as well (this is not a common combination).

Then we walked back to the theatre but the next thing was in a much smaller room with just chairs. Cushiony chairs, but still. Just chairs. And the production was a sort of lecture/dramatic reading of nine cantos of Dante's Inferno. In Italian. With music and dramatic arm movements. Okay, I'm saying this to be goofy, but like Eve said at the beginning "this is cool, I feel cultured". And if it was the first thing we'd seen that day I would have been all in. But it was now eight o'clock, and we'd been on the go since ten a.m., and the chairs were not that comfortable and I had a UTI (but Eve was also counting down cantos with me by the end: "three more", "two more"). There were subtitles and the Italian recitation was cool. The arm movements were a little repetitive. The passion the professor and the actor had for the project was moving. They did happen to choose nine cantos that the kids had studied with Jean in her lit class. The music guy had long hair and kept dramatically flinging it around and moving weirdly and the spotlight wasn't even on him, and by the end of the whole thing I hated him.

My contacts had been in for way too long by this time, so Eve offered to drive at least half way back. On the way there, we had gone from pretty basic highway driving to lovely chill farm country, so this should have worked well. But you know how sometimes GPSs just dig sending you back a whole different way? And I was not smart enough or on the ball enough to actually check the route. So we ended up on the quite busy 401, which was a bit reminiscent of when I accidentally scarred Eve for life by making her drive onto a six-lane  highway while practicing for her driving test (also the GPS's fault). She handled it well, but we found an exit where she could pull over and I could take over driving.

It was good to have Stratford back on my radar. I hadn't been there in years (last time with Zarah for The Music Man, maybe?) and it's a really nice place. 

We got back to the hotel just before midnight where Matt was dozing but waiting for us to get home, gave a garbled account of the day, and collapsed. Matt had found out that the coach who took Angus's team to the Little League World Series was coaching his own son's team nearby, so had showed up to surprise him and watch the game. He got the ballpark hot dog he's been chasing all spring, so he had a good day too.