back to ohio: a ramble

Yesterday, the drive from Detroit to Oxford. I move my stuff into the residence hall where I'm staying for the month. Like most college towns, Oxford is quiet during the summertime but still the markers of upper-middle-class youth. The frisbee golf course that sprawls across campus. For the guys, backward baseball caps and polo shirts in pinks and greens with the collars up, Kanye style. Maybe an Abercrombie&Fitch shirt...don't skin-tight t-shirts sort of negate the comfort that's supposed to go along with wearing a t-shirt? When I was a new faculty member here, admin. told us at orientation that more A&F catalogues are delivered to this area code than to any other in the nation. For the young women, layered tank tops and the perpetual arm cross of the extremely thin, as if they're chilly, even in the humidity and 90-plus heat.

Nicole and I cruise Hamilton, where we lived for three years, ten miles east of Oxford, en route to Saigon Dragon along Route 4. We eat bowls of pho, served with heaping plates of mint and basil that the family grows behind the place, and summer rolls, Vietnamese style, with the boss dipping sauce (equal parts hoisin and peanut butter with a dab of HOT chili sauce and a sprinkle of peanuts). As usual we're the only two in the restauarant. All the times we ate there during our three years in these parts, we saw maybe two other parties there. We drive down Route 4 to Jungle Jim's, the gynormous, 300,000 square foot grocery store in Fairfield where I stock up on supplies: tofu, fresh vegetables, and soy sauce for making scrambles; lots of yogurt; dark chocolate; bread; lots of garlic; some blueberries and bananas; onions, stock, and stew meat for making beef stew; cereal and milk; couple different cheeses (JJ's carries over 1,600 kinds of cheese!); case of water. Back to Oxford, finish getting settled in Havighurst. I haven't been in a dorm since I graduated from U of D ten years ago and moved out of 4th West Quad (the Peace & Justice community service floor)...the digs down here are more spacious and don't have that stale beer smell I remember from UD (maybe cuz it's summer).

This a.m., Nicole heads back to Michigan--she'll be back next weekend. I read for most of the afternoon (more Joyce Carol Oates: the beginning of Rape: A Love Story, and much of an anthology of her early stories) then hike Western College Woods, which surround my dorm. I cross the foot bridges watching the squirrels--brown, black and all points in between--camoflauged on the trunks and branches of downed trees. I make it down to the 4-Mile Creek. More squirrels, birds too, and when I'm almost to Route 73, two white-tailed deer. It's cooler than yesterday, but still pushing 90, yet the shade of the woods blocks out most of the sun and none of the clean Ohio air.