Off to the big Ott

This afternoon I will be traveling with my family to our nation’s capital for a couple of overnights. Buddy Boy was asked way back when to deliver a talk on the Remembrance Day weekend at the Canadian aviation museum about his great-great-uncle Roddy, the WWI flying ace who died over France and who was his ticket into the Great War production two summers ago. So he’ll be doing that tomorrow morning. But we will pick him up from the bus station tonight and take him to the hotel where I’ve booked a large room (two double beds and a pull-out couch) for all of us, and we’ll party down family-style.

I’m looking forward to seeing my son. On the phone the other day he confessed that he really missed us and our little town, that during the summer he had been chomping at the bit and couldn’t wait to get out of here and to the big city. Now, he says, he lies awake at night and wishes he were home. Part of it is that he’s not really enjoying the residence experience, the rules and regulations involved (I must admit, he had it pretty good living at home), even though he’s now made a lot of friends there. In fact, he will likely be sharing accommodations with one of them next year, a house or apartment, which will be less expensive and he will feel more autonomous.

I think the other aspect is that the city in which he finds himself, the city of my birth in fact, is huge and the only part he ever really sees is the university campus, which is a concrete jungle. The surrounding area is what I would call a “wasteland”; it basically wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the university, which is like a small town itself of 60,000 people. It’s just not very nice. If he were at the other university in town, the one downtown, he might think differently, since it is in the thick of things right downtown. But then, it is extremely expensive to do anything there.

All that aside, I am looking forward to spending time with my son, and he is happy to be seeing us for a couple of days. All this is by way of explanation that I won’t be around to update, not that I’ve been doing that faithfully lately anyway. But hopefully I’ll have something interesting to talk about when I do.

Adios.

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