Graduation day at Rhodes College had the Class of 2025 assemble in the amphitheater by 7:30 a.m., and it was a gently clouded 25°C when the ceremony began in Fisher Gardens. The sun broke out mid-ceremony, bathing the audience and graduates in light, and hit 31°C by noon, frying the Class of 2025 neatly in caps, gowns, and hoods. After a few hours of running around in the heat, my family and I departed from Rhodes (goodbye, alma mater!) around three, drove steadily north for the next two days, through downtown Nashville, and then Kentucky and Ohio, where we passed from Central into Eastern Time, jumping an hour forward and many degrees beneath in temperature. On our third morning, we saw the green highway sign for “Bridge to Canada.” We drove through border control (“Any alcohol or tobacco?” barked the officer. “No, sir.” “Good day to you.”) and we were beneath cold bright Canadian skies (a crisp ten degrees, in Celsius.)
Then came the Victoria Day long weekend, where everything became sprinkled with long sad sheets of gray rain. In Ontario, it was a record low since May of 2019. Compared to the high heels, humidity, champagne glasses, and sunglasses of graduation weekend, Hamilton feels overcast and sedate. It also has the odd effect of overlapping myself now with the middle-school and high-schooler Sue, with glasses, traipsing down Main Street West every morning for six years. It makes the last four bright years in the south seem like a dream. Such is the effect of a sudden removal from campus.
So then I holed up and read Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood for a few days. In it, the main character Elaine also expresses a depressing homecoming: returning to Toronto as a somewhat-successful painter in middle age, and once more seeing the city streets where she grew up, being bullied by her classmate Cordelia, with whom she eventually develops a toxic friendship. I’d read this in high school without fully grasping the sadness of the homecoming part. Toronto has changed, but Elaine still sees ghosts of Cordelia’s face in every green-eyed woman. In the same way I’m experiencing Hamilton again. It isn’t quite like Elaine’s disillusionment because Hamilton hasn’t changed that much. I have a feeling that it won’t change much in the next ten years, either, but we’ll see. I’m waiting, and reading, and observing. Everything is slow here.
