For Corinne’s spring break at the end of March, we planned to travel to Washington state. Scheduled on Amtrak’s Empire Builder, we would depart Chicago on Saturday and arrive in Seattle on Monday. After a couple of days visiting the Space Needle and Pike Place Market (among other things), we planned to drive three hours to Yakima. My step-daughter Tenielle (Corinne’s sister) and her family live there, so we would spend a couple days with them, drive three hours to Spokane, and catch another Amtrak home.

Ahhhh…the best laid plans.

On Saturday at 11:55 a.m., literally minutes before we left the house to go to Union Station, I received a text message from Amtrak. Our train from Chicago had been cancelled. Apparently, Amtrak had some nationwide communication issues, and the earliest train out would be Monday. A 46-hour ride, our trip to Washington state was no longer a viable option.

Corinne and her best friend Aly, who was making the trip with us, asked what we were going to do. All of us had been looking forward to the trip. I told them we had a vacation planned. We were going somewhere. The question was where.

Canada was the first option that came to mind. It’s an eight-hour drive, and we have family there. Aly has never been, and Corinne and I haven’t been there in quite a few years. BUT…and it’s a big “but,” our passports had been chewed up by one of the dogs after our last cruise. Can a U.S. citizen still enter Canada with a driver’s license and a birth certificate? (No…the answer is no.)

We weren’t sure, and none of the sites we checked were crystal clear. So while I rushed to the bank before it closed at 1:00 to get my birth certificate out of the safe deposit box, my brother-in-law Rodolfo and his girlfriend were checking all the sites they could find with information about entry into Canada. Rodolfo also discovered that the wait times at the border were about four hours, so Canada was out.

Once we had been to the bank, I needed to go pick up a prescription and gas up the car. While we were doing all the running around, I was on the phone. I had to call Amtrak to cancel our return trip since they had only cancelled the outbound. We had a hotel in Seattle, a car rental, and an AirBnB in Yakima. For the AirBnB, I was a day late for a full refund, so then I had to connect with the host to see if she would give me a full refund considering the circumstances. (She did.)

I told the girls to pick somewhere within about a 10-hour drive. Corinne suggested Washington, D.C. My family took a vacation to D.C. when I was about 11 or 12, and I always remembered it. Google told me it’s about 10.5 hours, so I figured with stops, it would be about 12…plus we lose an hour with the time difference.

Now to secure a place to stay. I found an awesome AirBnB (with a Super Host) about 30 minutes outside of D.C. in the town of Silver Spring, MD (population 81,000). Nice and quiet, a residential area with parking, I had never heard of it, but the home looked beautiful, and each of us would have our own room (ideal for a week of 24/7 living together). I reached out to the host to ensure it was self check-in since we’d be arriving in the middle of the night, and she graciously invited me to book instead of having me request the reservation first.

We packed the car, and we were pulling out at 2:22 p.m., a mere two and a half hours after the text message. We slept in on Sunday and spent the afternoon watching television, relaxing, and planning the rest of the week:

• Monday – Arlington National Cemetery, where the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and we saw the grave of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
• Tuesday – Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute
• Wednesday – International Spy Museum, a daytime and a night time Big Bus Tour
• Thursday – Smithsonian National Museum of American History (with the newest Entertainment Nation exhibit), Library of Congress, and a visit to The Perch in Tysons, VA, where one of my cousins works
• Friday – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown (including a visit to Glossier and some photos at the stairs from The Exorcist) and a stop at Frankly Pizza in Kensington, MD, on the way home where they make their own hand-crafted sodas, sausage, bacon, and meatballs 😋

We crammed a LOT into five days and barely scratched the surface. We had a great time and came home exhausted, and I just knew this would make a great Story for the Week. But I needed a tie-in. There’s always a tie-in. And here is where I start to question how many things in the universe are truly random.

When we left for D.C., I had been reading the book reviewed below for two full weeks. Normally I plow through a book in a week or less, but not this one. I kept putting it down, picking it back up, and I fully expected to finish it on the train to Seattle. But instead I drove to D.C. And on Monday morning when I woke up, I had maybe two hours left in the book, both girls were still asleep, and I was determined to finish.

Then I found my tie-in. Page 375: “There was a D. Stanley Bloch in Silver Spring, Maryland.” A town I had never heard of, let alone been to, that I wasn’t supposed to be in at that particular moment. But there I was, reading a book based in New Hampshire that mentions the exact small town I was in.

I took it as a sign that we were meant to be where we were at that particular moment.

Just as randomly, fast forward two weeks, Corinne’s high school music department performed in front of Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. They left for Memphis on Thursday night and then headed to Nashville Saturday morning. My best friend Stephanie and I drove down Saturday morning with a plan to see the performance, spend the night, and have lunch with Corinne on Sunday before heading home.

Five hours before Corinne left on Thursday, I happened to see a Facebook post from my son-in-law Shawn about being in Nashville for a wedding, and they were staying into the following week. We didn’t spend spring break with them, but in the craziest turn of events, we were all in the same city at the same time just two weeks later. We all saw Corinne before and after the performance. There were lots of hugs. When Corinne went with her school to the performance at the Opry, the rest of us spent several hours together over dinner and exploring Broadway.

The universe is a crazy place. Sometimes you just have to take a moment to breathe and pay attention to the little things for it all to make sense.

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

448 pages
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication Date: February 21, 2023
The Creepy Book Club selection for March 2023, purchased on Amazon.

Publisher’s Description

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

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Main Characters:

• Bodie Kane – early 40s, lives in California, a professor of film studies and a well-known podcaster; former student at Granby, a boarding school in New Hampshire; separated from Jerome, an artist, with two kids; invited back to Granby to teach two-week courses about podcasting and film studies
• Fran Hoffbart – also early 40s; her parents had been teachers at Granby, and Fran became a teacher at Granby and has lived on campus since her childhood; married with two kids
• Britt and Alder – two of Bodie’s students at Granby who decide to cover Omar Evans in their podcast, the 25-year-old black athletic trainer convicted of killing Thalia Keith, a white student who also happened to be Bodie’s roommate their junior year
• Denny Bloch – the choir teacher at Granby when Bodie attended school there; doesn’t make an active appearance in the book, but the entire story is narrated to him by Bodie

My first Rebecca Makkai novel, I Have Some Questions for You, took me two full weeks to read. Probably longer and more complicated than it needed to be, the book moved slowly. I found myself constantly wanting to put it down, but I honestly gave it 3 stars because I also kept wanting to pick it up and finish. I wanted to figure out who killed Thalia (if it wasn’t Omar).

Here is the gist. Bodie Kane attended Granby for high school in the 1990s, during which time Thalia Keith was murdered. Omar Evans was convicted based on interviews with the students and his (potentially) coerced and then recanted confession. In 2016, someone sends a video to Bodie questioning the investigation, and it stays with her. The majority of the book is set in 2018 when she is invited to teach two-week courses on film studies and podcasting, and one of the students (Britt, and eventually Alder) decides to take on the topic of Omar’s conviction for her student podcast.

The book is written in Bodie’s first-person point of view to Denny Bloch, former teacher at Granby, who she used to idolize but is now suspicious of. I don’t know if the narration is supposed to be a book (she mentions a book deal multiple times) or a series of podcasts addressed to Denny, but it is definitely an unusual format. Interspersed within the narration to Denny are chapters with other possible suspects and how the crime might have been committed, but they are complete conjecture on Bodie’s part.

There are two distinct parts—Bodie’s two weeks back at Granby and four years later, post-pandemic. I don’t want to give too much away because I liked the way the story unfolded. Bodie gets herself so far down a rabbit hole that she gets in her own way, all the while believing and telling others that she isn’t influencing anything. It just feels like it took way too long to get to a resolution, and I wasn’t crazy about the resolution. There are also side stories with a sometime love interest and an attack on Jerome by a former fling that add to the chaos but don’t really add anything to the novel as a whole.

Fans of Makkai will likely enjoy this. For me, it is just ok.

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