There was a moment early on where I got all excited about it. My mother was reading the program before everything started when she exclaimed, "Oh, look! The keynote speaker is Patch Adams!" "Really?!" I replied. "Cool!" Because, see, I thought she was talking about J.P. Patches. Seriously. For those of you who don't know, J.P. Patches is a Seattle icon. He's a clown who had a local children's show from the about the late 1950s, until the early 80s. Sort of a Captain Kangaroo (only better!) for Seattle kids. Ask anyone of my generation who grew up in the Seattle area and they will invariably LOVE J.P. Patches. I only caught the tail-end of the J.P. Patches era when my family moved to Seattle, so I don't even have the depth of love that many of my peers do, but still, I was stoked!
So, imagine my disappointment when I figured out a couple of minutes later that I wasn't going to be listening to J.P. Patches at all, but instead to Hunter "Patch" Adams, M.D. Talk about a let down. My mother couldn't understand my disappointment. Hmmm. Let's see. Beloved iconic clown of my youth vs. "clown" doctor made famous in (what I imagine to be, as I will NEVER watch it) a suck movie staring Robin Williams (exactly the kind of movie, by the way, that my mother LOVES, which is how I know I should avoid it at all costs. My mother's two favorite movies ever, and I'm not kidding? Jumping Jack Flash and Sister Act. I rest my case.). His speech was everything I thought it would be - self-righteous and long-winded. He started off with a whole anti-capitalist thing, which I can totally get behind, and went on to talk about how schools don't teach people to love and that's the most important thing for healers, and really everybody, and on and on. Fine. He even goaded everyone into standing up and hugging the people on either side of them. Anyone who knows me knows this is the part where I really started to look unamused. That kind of shit makes me crazy. I'm not against hugging. I hug people all the time. But I'm not going to hug complete strangers in some bullshit attempt to make a point about how if we all just loved each other we'd all be happy and healthy, or some such crap. Fortunately, I was out in the lobby, with all the other parents and toddlers, watching it all on closed-circuit TV. Gah!
Then, he talked about how he's never accepted any money for any work he's ever done as a doctor. He talked about this more than once, in fact, about how he doesn't accept money, or have any savings, or insurance, or a 401k, and all said in a way to make you feel creepy about getting paid for what you do. What. ever. I'm sorry, but my sister is a single mother with student loans to pay off. She damn well better charge for her services, 'cause I can't afford to support her, and she's been leaching off my parents long enough.
Bah! Enough about it.
When we got home last night, Linus had a melt-down. Like, the second he got out of the car in our driveway. A full-on, sobbing, meltdown. I think he'd just been holding it together through all of the travel, and events, and new places, and new people, and more travel of the previous 3 days, that when he saw familiar territory, he just let it all out. He wanted me to carry him around while he sobbed and pointed at different things. When I'd take him over to those things, he'd scream, "NO!" and point at something else, blubbering all the while. Poor kid. It really was a lot. I felt like melting down and I had the benefit of experience and alcohol to get me through it all. It seems like we've been traveling, or people have been visiting us, every weekend for about a month and a half now. We were supposed to go up to my cousin's again next weekend, but not any more. Orion's going to go up and build them a deck, but the baby and I are going to stay. home.
Oh, that sounds good! We'll lay around in our pjs all weekend eating waffles. I'll show him clips from the J.P. Patches Show and we'll talk about the commencement speech that could've been.
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