Philly Part 5, Graduation Day and Return to Oregon

This is the final post in my story of going to visit my daughters Lillie and Ellie in Philadelphia and to attend Lillie's graduation from Sidney Kimmel Medical School.

Lillie's graduation in Philly was on Wednesday. I arrived late Monday night and we spent the day Tuesday seeing the sights in Center City kind of freeform, wandering here and there as we pleased, from 20th Street in the west to the Delaware river in the east.

By contrast, Wednesday was nearly totally scripted: graduation starting at 9:30, a reception at the medical school after that, then lunch, followed by a cocktail party that Lillie and some of her classmates were throwing, and finally, dinner with two of her classmates and their families.

That's a lot, especially on no sleep. Tuesday night, my body still being on Pacific Daylight Time, I didn't fall asleep until 2am Eastern. And the same drill happened Wednesday morning as Tuesday. The garbage trucks started banging lots of dumpsters right outside my hotel at 4:45am. What the hell: I can make it on 2 hours and 45 minutes of sleep, can't I?

At 9:15, I went down to the lobby of the hotel to get a cup of coffee at the little coffee shop there. When I asked for dark roast drip, the barista assured me that their medium roast had plenty of flavor. Boy did it! In the same way that hot water has lots of flavor, so did this awful coffee.

Kimmel Center

And Again at Night

In my not totally broken-in dress shoes, I walked the few blocks to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, arriving at 9:30, the time we were told to arrive to be seated for the 10am ceremony. In a sign of things to come, the doors were closed and there was a massive herd of people on the sidewalk. Apparently Ellie and my ex had already gotten in prior to the doors being shut for some unknown reason, but I wasn't so fortunate. Finally, somebody reopened the doors and we were allowed to enter, but only after masking up and showing proof of vaccination against COVID.

Inside, it was a total fustercluck with ushers scurrying about with nary a clue. Once again, they made everyone get on line outside the doors to the auditorium. Finally, at 10:00am when the ceremony was supposed to have started, the ushers finally started seating people. We had the unfortunate luck to have drawn a snappy usher who was clearly having a bad day.

Inside the auditorium, the ceremony was held up for at least 20 minutes because the ushers were getting in the way of everyone being seated. And that was one of the better parts of the morning. More on that soon, I promise.

After being seated and while waiting for the ushers to stop impeding traffic, I had the chance to look around. The interior of the Kimmel Center is quite spectacular with three levels of balconies around the auditorium. The curved wood of the balconies reminded me of the curves of a violin body. Whether or not that was the intent, I cannot say, but the effect is stunning.

At the center of the stage rise the pipes for a spectacular organ. You can see the pipes in the photo below of Lillie walking across the stage. After I was seated, the organist started playing and I was really impressed with the rich tone of the instrument. Philly has a first class music venue for certain.

The Curved Balconies Remind Me of a Violin Body

Thanks to the inefficient ushers, the 10:00am ceremony started about 10:20. As if that were not bad enough, it was not until about 11:45 before the graduates started to walk across the stage to get their fake diplomas, the real ones being handed out after the ceremony, the thing that we all came to see. I have to say that this was the longest and worst graduation that I have ever attended.

First, they gave out three honorary degrees, at least two of which seemed to be deserved. The third, as the kids snarked at the reception later in the afternoon, went to a guy who had done nothing more than be "a rich white guy who gave a lot of money to the school." What took the cake was the provost who droned on and on and on, clearly loving hearing his own words. What little I heard bordered on nonsensical, what one student termed "word soup."

The entire audience was tuned out, buried in their phones. I was intermittently playing games on my phone and texting Lillie, who was busily involved in a group chat with her classmates. At the reception later, one of the students read some of the highlights of the chat, Wow! The kids were harsh!

Lillie Graduates Med School

Right after the ceremony, while Lillie went backstage to get her actual diploma, I left for the hotel to change, especially my dress shoes, which are not made for walking on city streets. I wasn't alone; pretty much the entire audience decided to change before heading to the reception several blocks away. I finally met back up with Lillie, Ellie, and their mother about a half an hour later, where after a few photos, we set forth for the reception down at the medical school.

The reception turned out to be lame and understaffed with long lines and not very good looking food. Since we had plans to have noodle soup at a restaurant in Chinatown, we bailed and walked the few blocks north to the restaurant.

I am a sucker for hand-pulled noodles and do not get the opportunity to eat them often. These were not all that great, I am afraid, and the girls, who all had the shaved noodles, fared better than I did. Still, in lovely Bend, Oregon, I have zero chance to eat Chinese noodle soup, so even mediocre noodles were a treat.

Post restaurant, we walked back to the apartment building where Lillie was couch surfing with two of her classmates, Thomas and Noah, the guys who came with her to the airport to pick me up. They were holding a small cocktail reception in the party room at the very top of the building. Not having had any sleep to speak of in the past few days, I didn't dare have anything to drink, not with dinner coming up. It would have put me to sleep. The graduate had no such compunction!

From the apartment building, we walked to a nearby Italian restaurant where we were having dinner with Thomas and Noah and their families.

The Graduate is Lit

The small Italian restaurant was swamped with students and their families. Our party of 14 was only one of many large tables and not the largest either. Our poor server had the entire room of all the big tops and he did his best to cope with being swamped. Because the restaurant was BYOB, we all brought bottles of wine, which the server opened for us. By the time we got menus 45 minutes later (all the menus were in use at tables seated before us), we had put a pretty good dent in the wine. None of us were disappointed in the delay because we had just had big bowls of noodle soup in the mid-afternoon.

The food wasn't awesome but it was priced accordingly, so whatever. We weren't there for the food anyway. Ellie fared the worst with her leaden and raw flour-tasting gnocchi. I believe that my being a chef may have done my kids a disservice in that Ellie took one look at my bucatini and said, "Well, that's overcooked!" For an appetizer, I tried their version of squid and white beans with arugula, a dish that is very near to my heart, because, what is not to like? I've had many better renditions.

After dinner, we all said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. While on Broad Street, I took the opportunity to photograph the Union League of Philadelphia Building in the dark. I had admired the beautiful brick and brownstone building during the day, but the shadows really added a lot of interest at night. I continued back to my hotel to get packed for my 8:30am flight back home, but I was pretty wired from my walk. To unwind a bit before calling it a night, I stopped at the bar in the high-end Mexican restaurant attached to the hotel lobby and sipped a shot of Mezcal, an unusual pechuga flavored with toasted corn.

The Union League of Philadelphia Building

The Nightscape from my Room

Travel Back to Oregon

I set my alarm for 5:30am local time (2:30am by my body clock) and was rudely ripped from sleep, it seems just moments after finishing packing, showering, and laying my head on the pillow. Going back to the airport was a fairly simple matter of catching the commuter rail at Suburban Station, just a few short blocks from my hotel.

I did not plan, however, on the subway entrance nearest my hotel being closed and barricaded and it took me a few minutes to find another entrance. I am unused to searching for the very small subway signs in the urban landscape, unlike when I was a regular Metro rider in the DC area. But I did plan for something to go wrong, leaving myself lots of spare time to get to the airport on the 6:25. Not trusting my sleep-deprived brain to find the correct train, I asked directions from several SEPTA employees who were very kind to point me to the correct track. And my wife says that I never ask for directions.

Waiting for My Train to Airport

My train, a local and not an airport express, arrived three minutes early and I boarded the fairly packed car. We left downtown headed west under the Schuylkill River to UPenn, where just about the entire train, all dressed in scrubs, got off at the Pennsylvania Medical Station. There were very few passengers left for the trip south down to PHL, in stark contrast to the madhouse scene at the airport that I found on arrival.

I got off at Terminal C and same drill as coming in. Security at Terminal C entrance was closed, so I had to hike down to Terminal B, the reverse of what I did coming off the plane to find Terminal C exit closed. At this point, just before 7am, it was pure chaos at the airport. I finally got on line for security about 250 yards from the screening area where people were slowly snaking through the TSA lines.

After minutes of standing on an unmoving line and hearing people around me grumble about missing their flights, suddenly things started moving. It seems to me that TSA opened more screening lines and started having some passengers bypass the body scanners. After walking through a carefully roped off corridor where a beautiful female German Shorthaired Pointer was sniffing everyone down, I was one of the fortunate ones who got to bypass the body scan. Points to TSA for getting me to coffee sooner!

We started boarding our plane, another new A321 just like on the inbound flight, about 15 minutes after I arrived at the gate. As I was sitting in the terminal waiting to board, I got a notification on my phone that I had been moved from my original center seat to a window seat closer to the front of the plane. This plane wasn't quite full and there was nobody in the center seat, leaving me plenty of room to stretch out. Thank you American!

When it came time to push off from the gate so that the airline could claim the all important "on time" departure, it being rush hour at the airport, there was too much traffic in the alley for us to back out. We finally got out and joined a line of American jets positioned head-to-tail on the taxiway like elephants in a circus parade. I counted at least nine jets ahead of us. Ultimately thirty minutes later, we got our turn on the active runway. Within a minute, we were over the Delaware River headed north with a bird's eye view of the USS New Jersey docked in Camden. We rolled west and headed up into the clouds, the remainder of the flight into Phoenix going without incident.

As we approached Phoenix, the layer of smoke along the ground from recent fires was obvious. After deplaning, I faced a 9.5-hour layover before my late departure for RDM and my bed in Bend. This gave me ample opportunity to wander the massive Terminal 4 at PHX and have really shitty airport food for both breakfast and dinner. As I was wandering, I wanted to get a shot or two of the Phoenix Mountains just north of the airport, so I snapped the photos below which show to some extent how busy this airport has become.

Our flight into Bend boarded about 20 minutes late. "Mechanical problem," they said, but having been seated at the gate for hours, I'd say that one of the pilot or first officer was delayed for I only saw one get on the plane. In any case, I hunchbacked it down the aisle of the CRJ and poured myself into my window seat where I proceeded to fade in and out all the way to RDM. Ann, who I missed so terribly on this solo trip, was waiting for me at the airport and we got home close to midnight, some 21.5 hours after this miserable travel day started. I slept like a dead thing.