On Friday morning Sam and I flew to Ohio, landing just after 6 EST. We went to dinner with my parents, my brother, two aunts and one cousin. Afterwards we went to my aunt’s house for a while to discuss family mythology. Apparently my grandmother was a prolific teddy bear knitter, making 100 (although the veracity of this number is in dispute) bears while she was in a nursing home. I vaguely remember one of them, which my brother informed us was mine while he never received one. I’m not sure about the veracity of that claim either, but one of my aunts was making the same one. I don’t know I can say any one thing or another with certainty about what happened to me in 1986, but maybe my brother’s neurons from that period haven’t been overwritten yet. Days later my mother would look for these bears in her basement to settle the dispute – and could find none.
Regardless, everyone who received a knit (or is it crochet?) blanket knows that for sure because we still have them and treasure them.
Eventually it started getting late, even for California folks, and we (Sam and my immediate relatives) headed to our AirBnb.
The host was very accommodating with my parents and their changing schedule, and didn’t mind when my brother wanted to stay as well. She even bought a pack of oreos for my mom. (I told her my mom likes oreos so much she’ll bring packs to California with her in her luggage – true story – ) However, it turns out that this niceness stemmed from a special love of jesus, as was evident from the abundance of church materials throughout the home – but especially in the bedroom that Sam and I used. Now that might have been okay, but it also turned out that this was one of those airBnB’s where the host is renting it out because they’re just out of town – so it was a little creepy spending the night in this jesusfreak’s house, essentially unaltered, and potentially uncleaned. When I looked at the pillow under the pillowcase that I was to lay my head on for eight hours I found copious black and gray mold spots. Woah.
I went back and read the listing again and the host noted that there was “no cleaning fee.” Now I know why this was such a great deal (it was a third of the price of a hotel room and would fit five). The bathroom tub similarly looked like it hadn’t received a bleach scrub down in quite a while. There was also a train going by the whole night blaring its horn – unmentioned in the listing, of course.
Because of this I’m not sure any of us slept that well, although I may have had an allergic reaction to the mold on the pillow.
The next morning we went down to the campus area to eat and walk around before the game. Unfortunately I was feeling ill and trapped my family in the Main Library so I could have easy access to a reasonably clean bathroom for a while before we went to the game.
The day only seemed to get colder and rainier and windier as it barreled on towards gametime. By 3:30 kickoff there was a slight sprinkling to accompany the brisk winds up in the high C-deck. We were also disappointing to discover that we had some of the few seats in the entire stadium (seats over 100,000) that were “partially obstructed” by a huge steel beam holding up the well to does in the press box.
Despite all this we tried our best to have fun and enjoy the game, which was a blowout against Rutgers. In the first half we got to watch more than a few touchdowns at our end (the visible end) of the field. Eventually in the second half so many “fans” had left that we came all the way down to the edge of the first balcony and had a much better view.
After the game we reconvened at Cracker Barrel in Pickerington, only so Sam could get a real taste of Midwestern cheesy eating. Literally – I ordered the cheesy grits and the cheesy hash browns.
