Evanston weekend

It's a long, long way to Chicago, my friends, and it's a heck of a lot longer in the back of a rented Envoy.

Not that I have anything against the Envoy, aside from my mother's claims that the thing pulled left (I wouldn't know, personally, as I was ineligible to drive it), but 13 hours of anything gets old after a while. Fortunately, I had Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to sustain me - all 850 or so pages of it - for which I'm exceedingly grateful. I can't believe it's taken me this long to read the darn thing, but I'm so glad I did. (Hey, something good came out of our Unclaimed Baggage Center trip after all!)

Why Chicago? Well, Evanston, actually - Northwestern's main campus is north of the city in a (mostly) charming suburb of ridiculous mansions. Jen got her first post-name letters this weekend, and so the three of us, plus some close family friends, made the trek from Birmingham to watch her walk.

I've got to hand it to my sister and her class - their patience knows no bounds. The first part of commencement happened Friday night at the stadium, when the undergrads and postgrads were officially graduated by the president, who wore Richard Levin-esque bling. This took roughly two hours, including a speech by Richard Daley that read more like a re-election bid (ass that he is, he still got a hood from Northwestern this weekend), and was followed by what can only be described as a reenactment of the Fall of Saigon as thousands of tired, damp graduates and their families tried to cram onto buses. It took us an hour to get seats, but we wrapped up the evening with a deep-dish dinner.

What made the day better, at least for my father, was his brief elevator conversation with Stacy London of What Not to Wear fame. Her sister graduated this weekend as well. In any case, Stacy had nothing to say about Dad's attire.

Saturday, we climbed aboard the buses yet again for Part Deux, the Weinberg graduation ceremony, in which Jen would actually walk and receive her diploma. As it turned out, what the graduates received was only a Northwestern-stamped box - their diplomas were held hostage until they turned their robes in, and even then, everyone who had received honors was informed that the modified diplomas would be in the mail. Sheesh.

As exciting as it was to see my sister and her friends walk - well, what I saw through the viewfinder was pretty exciting - the rest of the ceremony was just this side of torturous. Oh, their speaker was lovely - she's an English professor, and I'm sorry I couldn't have had a class with her - but Weinberg is the largest college at Northwestern, and better than 1,000 names were read during the ceremony. Three hours later, we collected Jen, her to-be-modified diploma, and her Stole of Gratitude, and boarded the buses, this time without the nagging suspicion that there was supposed to be a helicopter present.

Having recovered from graduation, we took Jen out to dinner, and everyone felt much better. I just pitied the poor graduates - at least I had a book to read during the second hour, and the lady in front of me had a crossword. The kids in purple had nothing to do but sit there and listen to their classmates' names get butchered in novel ways.

(All gripes aside, congratulations, Jen, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Mwah!)

Driving home today, I realized that the very sight of distant mountains in Kentucky lifted my spirits. Odd as it sounds, I find the wide, flat expanses of Illinois and Indiana depressing. Give me something to look at besides corn, please. Just a hint that the landscape varies will do.

And for the record, tea at the Ritz makes everything better, especially when taken with a glass of champagne.