Back home again

I made it!

And I am very grateful I did have the foresight to change my ticket - apparently neither the Monday nor the Tuesday train ran, and Wednesday's was very late. (And I ate dinner last night with a couple who had come in on coach from Denver, and who said "You really don't want to be traveling in coach right now" - they had managed to get a roommette out of Chicago and said they were very grateful. Apparently coach was packed, loud, and full of people who couldn't quite remember that public behavior is different from how you behave sitting at home on the sofa in your old sweats)

The train was a bit late picking me up, but things got more late as we went - we sat a long time in St. Louis because of some unspecified "mechanical problem with a coach car." I finally decided that the worst they could do was pull the coach off and send us along, so I went to bed. We were three hours late as of Little Rock this morning, but we recovered some time after that.

(Coming up, we were also quite late, but that was because we had to pick up a coach which had its brakes go out - the northbound Eagle just dropped it at like Bismarck or somewhere, and what our crew had to do was (a) break the train up (A coach without brakes cannot go on the very end), (b) insert the coach (it wound up between my sleeper and the second sleeper) and (c) restore power and get back underway. This took about 2 hours all told)


Also, there was an Amtrak train - one of the ones from San Francisco, I think - that got stuck in a snowdrift and was stranded west of Chicago for a number of hours. Made me think of the trains getting stuck in the "cut near Tracy" in "The Long Winter." 

***

Break was good, but as often is the case, I feel like I didn't do enough. Or enjoy the holiday enough. Break felt long while I was on it, but now that I'm back in my office, it seems short.

I didn't enjoy the "bonus days" as much as I might, because it was too cold and snowy to really DO anything (I think I only left the house on Monday to feed the birds) and I was also concerned, as Thursday drew closer, whether Amtrak would be able to get things back together in time. (The guy at the station, who was helping shepherd us onto the train, said that the big problem was frozen equipment - that everything froze up and they couldn't thaw it. At the time I assumed he meant the cars (perhaps the mechanical problem with the coach was a result of that) but maybe he meant the switches; I know the Chicago stations said the Metra was really messed up because of frozen switches).

That said, I am ready to start actually WORKING again. As I said once before, too much idle time gets to me a little bit. Oh, I did knit a lot, and read a lot, but I need to be doing other things.

***

I also noticed something: you can still get homesick after being away from a place for a long time. I have lived here longer than I ever lived in Illinois (just shy of 15 years vs. 9 years), but still, I found as my mom was driving me to the station last night to catch the train, I felt a lot of homesickness....homesickness for Illinois State University, where I was a grad student

And kind of homesick for being a grad student - those were some of the happiest times of my life, because there was a sort of camaraderie among the grad students that, as much as I like my colleagues now, we don't quite have. I'm sure a big part of it is the difference between being 24 and either single or just you and your significant other, vs. being 40+ and having spouses and kids and in-laws and in some cases, grandkids. We used to do stuff together - I remember we all went and saw "The Lion King" as a group when it came out, and we'd have cookouts, and for people who were less claustrophobic than I (and who had the equipment) there was a caving club. (NOT a spelunking club - in fact, I think their motto was "Don't call us spelunkers" for some reason.)

And I think part of it was that there were authority figures we could kind of gently mock (our advisors - I know of someone who had  a bingo card of their advisor's "infamous" sayings and they would check it off when he said one). And also, I realize now, I didn't have the level of responsibility I have now. I find that having "power" (such as mine is) isn't much fun because it carries a load of responsibility with it, and I spend an excessive amount of time worrying if I'm doing the "right" thing, or if I'm being too harsh, etc., etc.

I remember a time, for example, when I was TA for a basic-level lab. We had certain rules which we enforced, but the nice thing was if a student didn't want to believe US, the faculty member in charge had our backs. (That was one big reason why I asked, every semester, to teach his class). Once, one of my students came in with a lab that was three weeks late. I told him I could not accept a late lab. (For very good reason: the labs had already been handed back, and what was to say he hadn't just copied someone else's? And in fact, this was someone who was later busted in a plagiarism ring that I helped catch....)

He said, "No. You're going to grade my lab." I said, "No, the rules are you hand it in on the due date or you don't hand it in." He said, "I'm going to go to the professor in charge and he will MAKE you grade the lab."

I said, "Be my guest."

The professor in charge had his office on the other side of my lab. (On the north side. On the south side was my advisor's office). Anyway, the student stormed over there, and went in, and about 20 seconds later I heard Dr. R. yell "HELL NO" and I just sat there at my desk and laughed.


But I also found myself thinking about other things - going down to Babbitt's Books after either a trying day of wrestling data, or after a day of small successes (either of which case seemed like I needed a treat, either of a new-to-me used book, or at least the chance to look at his fascinating stock of used books). Babbitt's still lives, despite the psuedo-gentrification that has been happening in my parents' town's downtown (I refuse to call it "Uptown," as they now insist we all should. Question: Is there an underlying implication in discarding "downtown" for "uptown"? It feels like there is to me)

And even places that don't exist any more. A favorite restaurant of my family was one called Golden West. This was apparently the last hanger-on of a shortlived steakhouse chain. But the food was quite good, the menu was such that even picky eaters could generally find something, they made their own salad dressings....and they had a wonderful decor. Or, I thought it was wonderful: one part straight-from-the-1970s "family restaurant" (those pebbled plastic drinking glasses - red, even. And harvest gold glass dividers between the tops of the booths) and one part historical exhibit (one of the owners was a patent geek, and he had copies of paperwork for well-known patents, especially things like barbed wire and wagon wheels, that loosely related to the steakhouse theme). I loved the place in large part because it reminded me of the L and K restaurant, or the Big Boy restaurants, or the others whose names I have forgotten, that we ate at when I was a kid - they weren't fancy, maybe the food wasn't all that great (but as a picky kid, I could always count on getting a grilled cheese sandwich, and a "real" one, not some weird duded-up thing with spinach or mayonnaise or stinky cheese in place of the good old orange American).

That place is now student townhouses. (As is much of the rest of the town. I don't know how long before they run out of students to rent to, but I think they must be close).

And I still sometimes think of the old College Hills Mall - which was once a typical shopping mall, but after a number of the stores closed up, the owners decided to change it into the new type of shopping "experience" - detached buildings that you either have to walk a goodly distance between (outside) or drive from place to place (and the layout of the drives is not at all intuitive; there are blind corners and funny places where one drive stops but the other drivers do not). The main anchor stores (Target and Von Maur, and I guess you could say Hobby Lobby, because it came into College Hills while it was still an enclosed mall, after the Montgomery Ward's closed) are still there, but the rest are boutique chains. They do have a Coldwater Creek, which I like, but besides them and the Von Maur, there really aren't many places to attract me there any more. (And the outdoor concept makes little sense in Central Illinois: it's too hot for much of the summer to want to walk the quarter mile or so between the anchor stores, and it's too cold and slushy in the winter).


***

I will say that I have seen quite enough snow for a good long time. I like well-behaved snow: the kind of snow that starts falling on December 24 after everyone's back from evening services, and continues with slow big pretty flakes through the 25th, and then goes away shortly after the kids have had a day or so's fun sledding.

I had forgotten what a mess 6" or more of snow can cause. And I had forgotten how ugly and slushy and dirty parking lots get after a couple days of cars driving through the snow. And I had forgotten about how it gets tracked all over the house if you don't take your shoes off immediately you enter the door. And how my mom would just shrug when I said, "Ma, I think the milk's turning...." on the worst day after a snowstorm.