Everybody Celebrated

Last night I drove up to Yellow Springs after work, and arrived at The Winds Café just before six. Alex and Justin and his parents, Jim and Cheryl, arrived a few minutes later.  Alex opened the gifts I had brought her, and then we settled in to the meal.

Dinner was a table filled with plates of grilled duck with cider sauce, Alsatian chicken, roasted (“naked”) garlic, squash and pumpkin lasagna, beet terrine, Catalan fish and Sicilian lamb meatballs. It was wonderful.

Yellow Springs is such an incredible village. There are wine shops, restaurants, beds and breakfasts and guesthouses, art galleries, bookshops, craft shops – you name it. It’s little place of only about 4,000 people, but it is incredibly cosmopolitan. After dinner, we walked up the street to The Emporium, a wine store with sandwiches, where the band was just tuning up and things were starting to hum. There were street musicians playing on the sidewalk as the skies darkened, and the streets were crowded with strollers.

We then drove back to Jim and Cheryl’s house. Jim had gone home earlier, because he had to pack for the next morning’s trip to Amsterdam, where he’ll be for the next month. (Cheryl will join him in two weeks) At the house I was introduced to more people than I can remember – there are always a group of people living there and the place had a lot of guests because it was Antioch reunion weekend.

On the way to house, Cheryl rode with me and told me about Justin’s efforts to wrap Alex’s birthday presents. “He’s so in love,” she said. “He’s spent 25 years never wrapping anything, but now he’s taken great pains to wrap everything just so.”

The gifts were piled up on the dining room table when we arrived. Each was wrapped in a different blue and white paper, and there was a single word written in beautiful calligraphy somewhere on each package: “Celebrate”, “Style,” etc. Those words represented the contents of the package. Justin also made a brownie cake with nutella frosting.

Then it was time to head to Antioch College, where the reunion was going on in full swing. There were two huge white tents on the lawn in front of Antioch Hall, the first campus building, erected in 1852. As we arrived, the dinner was over, and the auction was wrapping up – it raised $30,000.

The Antioch Logo was projected on the front of Antioch Hall projected on it. Over the logo a graph of a  heartbeat moved across the face of the logo, and we could hear that heartbeat’s rhythm. People began to exit the tent and gather around the building’s front steps, as a group of people entered the darkened building.

Suddenly lights glowed as the building was illuminated and the bell in the tower, long silent, rang out with peals that expressed the joy of all those present. There was applause, and a few misty eyes in the crowd.

It is a great feeling to know that Antioch College is back in the hands of people that love and value it. I told Alex and Justin that my grandchildren have to attend Antioch when their time comes.

I’ll be back in Yellow Springs next weekend for its semi-annual street fair. I will drive up on Saturday morning to go to the fair with Cheryl, and then I’ll bring her back with me to attend opening night of Boom, the first show of Know Theatre’s 2009-2010 season. She’ll spend the night with Alex and Justin and then Justin will drive her back on Sunday when he goes back, ready to start the new week at grad school.