Joining a Zone

Vaxxed, boosted and haven’t been to a gym in nearly two years. At a certain point, a 66-year-old has to gauge the odds.  What is the greater danger?  Exposure to COVID from the errant spray of fellow fitness freaks, or utter failure, for a seemingly unending time, to truly get aerobic and muscle toning workouts on a regular basis?

Sure, I hear you snicker. “Why doesn’t he just buy equipment for the home?” or “Can’t he jog to the park or follow those Sliver and Fit videos daily?”

Answer:  I’m a failure at such discipline.

There.  Got your pound of flesh?  Or in my case, about fifteen pounds of flesh.  Snicker away, but for me this question of sloth drags me down and out. 

Heckling, with all loving intentions, but heckling nonetheless, from my wife Jean – or should it be called “encouragement”? – had me finally check out a free (for Medicare recipients) gym in town.  It is West Olympia’s Planet Fitness, one of over 2000 sites where that company has located its outlets.

Initial impressions of the place are positive for COVID.  Wait. Cross that out.  I mean positive for its attention to COVID health protocols – mask-wearing, sanitation centers, distancing between members and equipment, and verbal reminders over the intercom to follow those protocols. So, I join, and make an orientation appointment with the site’s fitness pro.

Two days later we are facing each other across a table, developing my new regimen. As he talks, his mask sags below his nose. He does not readjust. Midway through development of my workout routine, he also mentions “You know, you don’t really have to wear your mask over your nose, just your mouth.” I am feeling disappointed and on edge about his statement, but I don’t say a word about it.

The Misfit Begins

The next day my “regular” workouts commence.  Getting dressed in the locker room, some men are wearing masks, others not.  Walking out onto the main workout room, everyone has a mask on in one way or the other.  Three formulations of “wearing” can be observed.  Most have properly fitted masks over both their mouths and nose.  Some go for the “mouth only” approach.  And still others find that protection of their chins is paramount and have decided that interfering with either of their breathing apparatuses would be harmful to the work out.

I take all this in, mulling and sorting, as I climb aboard the elliptical machine for 20 minutes.  I have not brought my cell phone and earbuds for an opportunity to focus on anything other than my surroundings.  Taking in the visual stimuli is all I’ll have to work with.

When one has little but one’s mind for companionship, well then, stuff gets telling quickly. Out flows your biases, predilections, and confused musings.  Here spills an example of both psychological mayhem and a semblance of who you are as a person.  Well, at least the inner life of your bored mind.

Pick the machine close to CNN.  Oh, FOX news is next to CNN.  And look, no MSNBC and there are twice as many FOX screens as CNN.  Got it. Political bias. Pisses me off.  Vast majority of customers completely ignoring screens.  But the corporate tilt is apparent.

Starting up machine, when will the “go” sign light up… there, it did it. Good. Now increase the resistance up and the incline. Yes. That’s good for a start.

Stream of Elliptical Conscious Nonsense

Improve your posture, Daniel.  Stretch back and lift neck… there.  That’s good.

Read signs on the wall. “Planet Fitness = No Criticism,” “You Belong,” and the most dominant one  of all “Judgement Free Zone.” Geez, “Judgement Free Zone” has been written on virtually every machine in the place.  Judgement Free Zone.  Judgement Free Zone.  They have misspelled judgment and the damn sign is the theme of this corporation:

Welcome to Planet Fitness. The Judgement Free Zone®

Spelling “judgment” with an extra “e” is wrong.  It feels right.  But it’s wrong.  I’ve looked it up before.  The extra “e” is appropriate sometimes in the UK, but not America.  What kind of corporate culture would permit the main theme to be misspelled?  Could you imagine someone – some big personality boss – coming up with the theme.  Doesn’t ANYONE in the echelons of a corporation with 2000 locations bother to do spell check?  And if they did, were they too chicken to mention it.  Or if they were not too chicken to mention it, would they have been batted down.  Ridiculed as nerdy. Had the judgement with an extra “e” already become the corporate theme?

But how many people would know that in America an extra “e” is “wrong?” 10%? 5%? And how many who know it, would care? At all?  What’s wrong with me that has me obsessing over this?

Look. Over there.  Those three young guys, with chin-straps for masks. They are laughing. They’ve got pretty good muscles. Don’t they frigging care – seemingly – about COVID?  Are they Trumpsters? Or just apolitical?  Do they read? Do they care about the frigging extra “e” in judgment?

Which is why, of course, we liberals are losing.  Egad! Who could stand the judgmentalism that I am displaying inside my brain as I’m doing this stupid elliptical?  Do those three guys – who can outvote me three to one if they bother to vote – know that an old man on an elliptical is thinking about them and being highly judgmental in front of a sign that says, “Judgement Free Zone?”

But COVID is real and real dangerous.  Do I have a duty to go over there and ask them to put on masks?  Do I go to the Planet Fitness staff and ask them to enforce proper mask-wearing? Even as I look at them, only half of the staff have masks over both orifices.

And then there was the stop at the health food shop before the workout to pick up some lactase.  As I go to the counter, other customers are wearing no masks at all.  This, even in a state which requires indoor masking while shopping and even in a frigging store whose purpose is to advance health.

CNN is talking about the omicron variant. Bummer. Why does the Fox News chyron say “Crime Up in Democrat Cities and they don’t Care?” Exhausting.

Why is that guy to my left talking on his cell phone with his mask down? A few feet away from the sign that says “cell phone calls only in the lobby.”

But ya know… I do seem to be sweating nicely. That’s good. Pretty far from other exercisers. Good too. I like the easy adjustability of the elliptical settings. The shopping channel next to FOX has a highly silly sweatshirt they are selling.  It’s so wonderful that my heart is sound, almost three years after the mitral valve surgery. I wish I brought a larger towel to wipe off my brow.

Judgement Free Zone indeed!

Toward the end of her life, my mother partnered with a man named Max.  The intimate relationship only lasted about a year because Mom was cascading downhill with Alzheimer’s.  But our family liked Max a lot and even after Mom died, we stayed in touch with him. 

When Max died, his daughter asked me to perform the hosting function for his memorial service.  Max was an atheist, but also a proud Jew and active Yiddishist.  I agreed to do the hosting and led about 50 people in a principally secular service. But I did ask if it was ok to include the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer that is said when remembering the dead.  The family agreed to that.

After the memorial, an older woman came up to me and said, “thank you for leading this event, I haven’t been to anything like this in a long … long time.” 

I replied, “you are most welcome.”

But then she didn’t walk away.  She just kind of quietly, nervously, stayed next to me. It felt like she wanted to say something more, so I stayed quiet.

“Yes…. I hadn’t thought about…” her voice trailed off.  “Well, when you did that prayer… you know…. I was once….” 

She couldn’t finish her sentences.  I then asked, “are you Jewish?  Your accent sounds German.”

The woman was silent for a bit, but then replied, “when I was a girl, I was from a German Jewish family. During the war, we went to Amsterdam.”

“Oh,” I said, “that must have been an extraordinarily difficult time for you.”  Again, she paused for a moment in what seemed like she was preparing herself for something emotional to say. 

“I have never told anyone about this. Never.  But after the service today, I will tell you.”

I stood next to this older woman – later finding out she was 86 at the time – prepared to hear about the Holocaust.  I was not prepared to hear what came out of her mouth next. 

“I was best friends in Germany with Anne Frank. This was before her family went to Amsterdam and before mine did too.  We didn’t know each other in Amsterdam, but after the war and when her book became famous is when I found out about what happened to her.”

Upon hearing that, I was stunned.  And a little disbelieving.  That’s when I asked her age. She also told me that she didn’t want to admit to anyone after the war that she was Jewish. Her parents were killed.  She was raised by others – non-Jews. Eventually she came to America and didn’t want her past to define her future.  But finally, as an old woman, she felt safe enough in Seattle, at Max’s memorial, to tell someone, a stranger, about her childhood secret 80 years later.

I thanked her for sharing that information with me and we said goodbye.

For the last two years, I have been taking a writing class, and that class is now over as of last week. What a wonderful way to transition into retirement. I will miss it, yet there is not a cold turkey ending per se. We will continue in a “master class” mode for another 6 months or so, and there are quite specific writing projects I have in mind that will keep me busy for a couple of years more.

Meanwhile, I’m going to post below the results of a silly class assignment. We were told to write five poems quickly. Very quickly – about 5 minutes writing time for each one. The structure for the assignment was to pump out metaphors around the topic “I am….” And away we go!

Numero Uno

I am the beast unknown but curious

I am the shelter from falling branches

I am the potato in the soup

I am the salad on the side

I am the sir without the loin

I am the best amongst the fallen throng

I am the worst amongst the hopeless racers

I am the last dish in the buffet.

Numero Dos

I am solid like plasma

I am liquid like gold

I am frequently timid while deliberately bold

I am a racehorse for the masses

A disappointment to the rich

I am asparagus, ling cod…

Belgian endive?

Still searching for my niche.

Numero Tres

I am a louse, but lice would be nice.

I am a soldier, but an army would be bolder.

I am a ciggy, but a pack would be biggie.

I am a setter, but the pound would bark better.

I am a tour car, but a convoy would drive her more far

I am a setting sun, but a shining moon would give him more fun

I am a sluggish, roguish, selfish shaman

I am a salty, pungent, slippery bowl, of 40 cents a package, Sapporo Ichiban Original Ramen.

Numero Cuatro

I am like a hermit crab

I am like a sponge

I am like a snowy plover

I am Bach to Grunge

I am like a Solzhenitsyn before he got all nutty

I am like the Andrew Sisters before they got all slutty

I am like my dog, you see, before he learned to beg

I am like my mom or pop, just longer in the leg.

I am like myself it seems, more frequently than not

I am like myself, oh my, a slender, drunken sot.

Numero Cinco

I am Wonder Woman in a caftan

I am Wonder Bread with a crispy crust

I am a cedar forest on the Great Plains

I am a Sitka Spruce lost in lust

I am a soldier on a game show

I am a game show host at war

And if momma saw me, she would say

You are nothing like me at all.

Bill Russell regularly threw up from nervousness before playing Celtics basketball at the Boston Garden. He said he knew it was time to hang up his size-18 court shoes when he no longer barfed before games. Apparently, he needed that anxious “edge.”

Later, when coaching the Seattle Supersonics, Russell had a regular opinion column in The Seattle Times.  He once wrote about his writing process, describing the blank page affixed to his typewriter as the most frightening challenge of his life.

Writing can do that. For sure. Writing can be scary. Daunting. Mysterious.  Writing can flummox and disturb.

So why write?

When we acquire language, we expand our understanding of the world.  The more precise the usage, the greater the clarity.  It is intrinsically human, this yearning for language. Language brings meaning.  We use language to order our world. Writing advantages the civilization project.

We write to give life meaning. We also write to delight. We play, amuse, and inform ourselves by writing. We are often surprised, even amazed and awed by what emerges from our fingers.  Where did that come from, we ask ourselves? We are blind to our insights, until we write them down out of apparent nothingness.

So why share our writing with others?

Writing is, of course, an imperfect communication tool. Lots of reasons for that. Surely though, we share our writings on the lucky chance that, from time to time, we might feel a little less alone in this short, fabulous moment that we call our lives. No barfing required.

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I do not dwell in the irrational fears of childhood. With one exception.

Jerry, our virile, wild-eyed camp counselor paced menacingly around the evening’s pyre. We ten-year-old boys and girls, circled around, sat on logs, seduced by the flame’s intense heat and smokey smell. On that cold evening, we laughed and shook, as Jerry told the completely true story of… “The Red Aunts.”

He spread it out; 15 minutes that felt like 30. His voice at the end, a deafening screech.

Here, I’ll make it quick. 

The boy had a headache. He scratched but nothing would relieve the itch.  Finally, he scratched so hard, that he ripped his head open and out swarmed hundreds of red ants. The end.

The girls mostly screamed. The boys mostly laughed. We were 10 and 11. That’s what you do.

Fast forward 55 years. Jean calls me into our brand-new living room. “Daniel, we have ants crawling all over. Do something!” So, I place a box of “Terro” ant and roach remover by the prime infestation. It works by appealing to ants’ appetites. They consume the poison, share it with their brethren, and presto, everyone dies in the walls of your home.

Result:  the next morning, no ants.  Only downside?  For some reason, my head feels itchy.

In our writing class, we were assigned the task of writing the same scene or story from different perspectives or writing styles. Higginson Hall’s game room became my primary source of desire, diversion and triumph during that first failure of a quarter, my freshman year at Western Washington State College. Here’s the same story… two approaches.

Unprepared: Wooing Geena and Confronting Big Rick

The object of my desire was my combatant Geena, the Elvis-loving, vision of languid sensuality, strolling with serene concentration around the billiards table.  Soon, her shoulder-blade length straight blonde locks fell softly upon the table’s verdant felt field of battle as she extended her right leg from the floor on tippy toes, raised her left leg horizontal to her lean torso, and stretched to make what I always relished, her deft cross-table touch shot. I was further rewarded with a brief smile as she dropped the right ball into the chosen hole.  Could I win by losing occasionally, keeping her spirits up and defenses down? This is what passed for my grand strategy!

Big Rick, the 22-yo African American Residence Hall Assistant, was almost as tall as I, but 100 pounds heavier. His studio apartment, adjacent to the game room, brought him in sight of my ping pong predations. 

“I bet you a six-pack I can beat you twenty games in row,” I bragged.

“You’re on, my boy.” Big Rick chuckled and bellowed vibrations of deep resonance.

I proceeded to beat Big Rick 20 games in a row.  “Time to pay up, Big Rick!”

“That’s not going to happen,” was his immediate and confident reply.

“What do you mean not going to happen? We had a bet. A deal.  You have to.”

We went back and forth a few times.  I was indignant.  Big Rick’s patience was wearing thin.

“Come with me to my apartment,” as he led me across the game room to his bedroom.  Big Rick lifted his mattress, pulled out a gun and aimed it at me.  “We’re done here, now, aren’t we?”

“Yes sir. We are.” I turned tail and left, never to speak of a six-pack at Higginson again.

Unprepared: College Life

Entering Western Washington State College directly from high school, I quit after one quarter. My 2.02 GPA belied a deeper reality.  I had no idea where I was going, who I was, and what I wanted.  And my D in French was undeserved. I should have flunked.

In the long march to maturity, Western was where reality forced confrontation with self.  Just how far did I still need to travel to arrive at a tentative sense of competent adulthood?

Higginson Hall, my first residence away from home, my first painful dabbling in independence, proved a great site for bubbling failure.

I, lusting after Geena around the billiards table, couldn’t pull the trigger and act upon that yearning.  Unasked, she was likely clueless to my fantasies.

I, underaged and supremely innocent, confidently wagered with Big Rick, our dorm residence assistant, for a six-pack of beer.  This 18-yo Jewish suburbanite handily beat that 22-yo African American from Seattle’s Central Area on our ping pong bet, only to find that he who has the gun, sets the rules.

And what does one need to settle down, focus, and accomplish anything in this glorious life of self-professed value?  All the stuff that I lacked at the time. Purpose. Discipline. A modicum of judgment earned from both experiences and some strange alchemy of interpretation of those experiences that produces proximations of wisdom.

Let’s call it preparation.

Adoration of place contains the seeds of catastrophe. Ben Gurion’s mind-experiment wish for the razing of Jerusalem’s Old City was based on his political insight that there would never be stability for Israel when the fight is about a place preternaturally sacred to warring tribes.  With “Land for Peace” at stake, peace never really has had a fighting chance.

Also, clear as Crater Lake, and rather deeper, is the abiding truth that total lack of connection to place, any place, leaves a soul barren. For attachment to place, along with people to love and purpose-filled service to others, are three keys to a centered soul. Those special places which stir our hearts provoke their affection based not solely on their intrinsic beauty, but from their association with one or both of those other two soul keys.

Losing my father at a young age, has put a memory-premium on those places that we inhabited together.

When I was eight years old, Dad and I built a small outbuilding in our large suburban backyard. It had four sturdy walls faced on the exterior with cedar lap siding and on the interior with unadorned plywood; a gutter-less shed roof structure of 2x4s, 2x6s and plywood, topped with tar paper and cedar shakes; and a wood-laminated latching door with a genuine metal door knob. It wasn’t insulated but it was watertight.

I wanted it to be a kind of fortress, where I could retreat with friends to plot the dissolution of our foes, the glorification of our friends, and the restoration of a universally acknowledged new world hegemony centered on our secret backyard lair.   To that end, I needed the ability to climb onto the roof and scout for possible intruders.  Or, on cloudless summer nights, give up the grand strategic war plans and just search the star-strewn heavens for signs of meteors or intelligent invading life.  A vertical ladder nailed to the backside of the shed roof did that trick.

The development of the building itself remains the core of my affection, for it was the only construction project I remember doing with Dad.

To start, we sat down together at the kitchen table to design the thing.  Growing up in New York City, Dad had been a Life-Scout, one step down from Eagle. Remarkable, in that he managed through scouting to develop a range of practical skills that his parents never possessed nor would he as an adult and academic seemingly ever need. But Dad was pretty much good at anything, so designing and building a backyard fort was done with competence and confidence.

I was awed by his assurance, as Dad asked me a series of questions about what I wanted, and then sketched out the design. What followed was like Little Red Hen offered bread – only this time I helped at every stage and earned my just rewards. 

First, we established the structure’s dimensions, then proceeded to develop the materials list. Dad was teaching me a practical math. This was also when I learned about 2x4s and 2x6s and 4x4s and what each was good for and that, surprise surprise, a 2×4 isn’t actually 2” by 4” but no matter, is called it anyway.

Dad had a clarity, stream and precision in everything he did.  From slicing eggplants to bowling to chopping wood to ping pong there was a distinctive bounce, flow and meticulousness to his movements and his intellect.  The materials list was written up in ordered columns, and off we went to the lumber and hardware stores.

I loved how Dad knew exactly what to ask for at the stores and where to go.  He taught me how to shop for knotless lumber.  The difference between anodized and non-anodized nails.  Why cedar is such a cool wood, with its water-shedding properties and tribal heritage. 

Back from the stores, we went to the shop to measure and saw off the lumber.  More math, pencil snapped lines, and my first use of a skill saw.

We hauled all the materials and essential tools to the construction site and started nailing and hammering away. I was excited and delighted as the plans came to life through our labors.  It took two days.  From beginning to end. From the kitchen table design to the constructed fort. And it was just Dad and I doing it together.  

The fort actually never did protect humanity from invasion, nor result in world domination by me and my friends.  The roof of the fort did, however, serve as a frequent retreat for the act of gazing up and simultaneously delving inward to and through the perils of maturation. It felt a bit precarious and thus dangerous to climb up to the roof and I was proud of my courage.

Years later, when I was no longer using the building, I noticed its constant decay.  Dad wasn’t maintaining it, and the wood we used wasn’t treated for rot. Climbing to its roof became more than a little dangerous.  It flipped to downright foolish.

After Dad’s death, Mom lived in my childhood home for another half dozen years.  By then, my fort, my special place, was not fit for habitation, storage or much of anything.  The natural path to decay had won again, aided by indifference.  To prep the house for sale, I tore down the remnants of my fort and hauled it out to the dump.   There was, of course, a sweet sadness to yet another parting with the physical reminders of my time with Dad.  But by then, I knew that my fort, my special place, was not the object of my adoration.  It had become merely a symbol of a place I could take with me anywhere I dwelt. And that was both true and sweet enough.

The Prep

With Jean flying off to care for her 99-year-old mother in Chicago, and COVID levels at a dip in June when I booked the flights (Hah, weren’t we in for an unpleasant unvaccinated Delta variant surprise?!), I grabbed what I saw as a window of opportunity to see people I haven’t seen in a long time and visit places I’ve longed to see on the East Coast. And do it my way.

Minor problem though. I no longer knew what my way was.

Now, I did have a decent hunch as to what my way used to be.  I had always been extremely energized by travel and confident in my capacity to negotiate geographies and interact with a wide range of people. But this time around, I found myself unexpectedly dwelling in serious Trepidation City. Could I still do it “my way” at my advanced age? 

I needed Jean to calm me down and smooth out the jitters. I was nervous about solo driving in New York City. I was worried about whether I would be an annoyance to friends and family or a genuinely welcomed guest.  Trip preparations included knowing in advance where I would sleep each night, and key people I wanted to see and places I wanted to go.  No longer could I count on the easy hostel openings of my youth as a backup. So, I prepped to soften the risks, built in some flexibility, and this time, secured the necessities in advance for all my travels.

The People

Flying into JFK Airport, I was fully aware that, while born in New York when dozens of relatives swarmed our neighborhood, exactly no one remained from those childhood connections whom I could locate. They had either passed from this earth, moved away from the city, or otherwise were lost due to familial neglect or alienation.  Yet, with the emergence four years ago of the Antolept (mother’s side) reunion, I once again had people to visit in the city of my birth.

In the trip’s first 3 days, I met with my first cousin Michael’s family in Pelham, stayed two nights with my second cousin Elana’s family in New Rochelle, and received a Borough of Queens (“The World’s Borough!”) tour and shabbat dinner from my third cousin Andrea and her family. That was a delightful prelude to a fabulous dinner the next evening with my incoming machatonim https://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/machatonim-1.8109, Yon and Olivia, parents of my son Zac’s fiancé Vicky.  In the following two days after that, I hung with Olympia friends Howard and Angela who had just recently relocated to Manhattan and met for a long and productive conversation with the Executive Director of SAJ (https://saj.nyc/connect/history-of-saj/), as I explored the notion of leading a strategic planning process back home at my Olympia shul Temple Beth Hatfiloh.

It was a whirlwind drop-in tour onto people’s lives. It reminded me, not for the first time, of the tag line from the old police procedural television show, “The Naked City,” about New York: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.” As you drive by residential high rise after residential high rise, you wonder what each household’s life is like.  Certainly, each of the relatives and near relatives I visited had such wildly different realities established within their four walls.

After grabbing my car from cousin Michael, who kindly stored it in his Pelham garage, I headed north to Manchester.  There, I stayed with Uncle Ted and cousins Chris and Callee. Ted had set me up with a touring agenda, replete with his friends as companions.  So, in the next two days, I toured museums and shared meals with Joann and enjoyed a lovely dinner with Rona and George.

Off I drove south and west to Massachusetts to stay in Easthampton a couple of nights with my old college friend and roommate Martine, her husband Steve and their son Ethan.  Our agenda there was filled with people and events. Friends, relatives and colleagues came to a birthday celebration honoring Martine.  And I got to participate in a housing search with Ethan as he prepped for a job interview and the potential for a quick departure from his parent’s Western Massachusetts home to Boston.

On the last leg of my journey, after a long drive to Park Slope, Brooklyn, my first stop was a meet up with Peter, the professional urban planner brother of a close friend in Olympia.  He gave me a tour of his neighborhood and an insight into the politics of historic preservation in our nation’s largest city.  From there, it was off to Brooklyn Heights ( Where Patty could only see the sites from… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr8nJfD7sKE), which brought me to the home of my cousin Rhona. She introduced me to her new beau (who, small world stories never end, is close friends with an engineer I know of in Olympia) and informed me that they would soon be moving in together for the first time to her house in Pennsylvania. Her simple lovely apartment happened to be in a highly desirable neighborhood. From there we took a short walk to the Brooklyn Promenade to get a direct view of Manhattan, another short walk to a local bagelry, and I fell in love with the neighborhood.  Rhona suggested that Jean and I should consider spending some time in her flat in the future.  Now that she’ll spend most of her time in Pennsylvania, she advised we would have only two responsibilities: to water the plants and to have fun.

The Poetry and the Prose of Places

Traveling “my way” apparently includes stopping at any interpretive sign along my path, and spending hours each day visiting museums, interpretive centers, historic sites, nature preserves, and botanical gardens.  In my 13 days on the East Coast, I visited 26 places meeting one of those descriptions.

A previous “Daniel’s Derekh” blog entry was titled “Phooey on Your Gorgeous Garden.” Immediately after posting it a couple of months ago I felt remorse. I know many wonderful people who love and spend many meaningful hours tending their garden and enjoying the fruits (and flowers) of their labors. I love visiting their homes and adjacent cultivated landscapes and did not intend to be so dismissive. So as penance (penance never met with such fun!) for that sarcastic entry, I spent a spectacular day at the New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx. The biodiversity and beauty of the place stunned. And I had an odd thought. I wonder what the crime rate is in the NYBG?  Could the criminal mind carry out a dastardly act in such a place of beauty?

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The wealth, variety and intensity of the trip’s intellectual and spiritual explorations put me on a permanent high. Here’s a quick chrono run down:

July 14: Willson’s Woods Park in Pelham:  Interpretive signs and a conversation outside a gorgeous public pool, talking with town staff about its history and operational challenges during COVID.

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July 15:  The aforementioned New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx, which also featured exhibits by the artist KUSAMA.

July 16: With cousin Andrea, touring the transformed urban neighborhood of Long Island City and the East River boardwalk. Andrea used to teach at an elementary school on the first floor of what would become one of the earliest high-rise structures in what has emerged as a kind of downtown Queens.  We then proceeded to the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows/Corona Park, where an enormous replica of the City of New York was exhibited, near its original location at the 1964 Worlds Fair. The replica was updated about 30 years ago.

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July 17: I walked the massively popular High Line in Manhattan, which is a pedestrian path converted from an old, elevated rail line. The linear park was verdant with diverse vegetation and plenty of interpretive signs, none of which I ignored.

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At the southern end of the line, one is deposited into a plethora of attractions, including “The Vessel”, which I viewed but didn’t enter (and which was marred only a few days after my presence by a suicide that caused the artist/architect to consider closing the whole thing down), the “Little Island” which was sold out and I couldn’t get into, and the Whitney Museum of Art, which was wildly expensive and I didn’t feel I had the time to warrant an adequate examination.  What I did find worthwhile, along the walk back to my hotel, was a visit to the Rubin Museum of Art which focused on ancient and modern Himalayan artworks. Turns out that the Rubin was also the site for a Jon Batiste performance and CD. Jean has been playing on a loop Batiste’s latest record this last month.

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July 18:  One does not adequately see the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in a half a day.  Or for that matter, a week of half days.  But along with my friends Howard and Angela, I got a bit of an MMA forschpice which makes me hungry for much more. Speaking of hunger and culture and a bisl of Yiddish, we also went to Zabars to pick up cookware, a little deli, and soak in the ambiance.

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July 19: After my meeting with the Executive Director of SAJ, Mordechai Kaplan’s shul, mentioned above, I walked through Central Park, reading interpretive signs along the way, stopping by Penny Lane, the memorial to John Lennon, and listening to mediocre guitar players doing their best emulations of The Beatle, and making my way to the Guggenheim Museum.  Like other NYC cultural attractions, I took advantage of the half-price entrance fee for us old folks, and saw another collection of mostly modern American art.

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For dinner, a hot pastrami sandwich, potato salad, a half-sour, and some rugelach set me back $42 at the renown (but not as renown as Katz’s) 2^nd Avenue Deli (which is actually on 3^rd Ave).  Like other delis I’ve been to in the city, the ownership is Jewish and the staff Puerto Rican.

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July 20: While this travel day to Manchester limited my interpretive signage opportunities, an extra few minutes to peruse the walls of train stations whetted my palate for more culture to come.

July 21: The Millyard Museum in Manchester may be the finest medium-sized city history museum I’ve ever been to. Uncle Ted pointed me in that direction, and I was glad he did. The city housed the Amoskeag Millyard, a world-class textile powerhouse for more than a century. The museum told rich and deep stories of a place that consistently aimed high and often succeeded.  And even when left for dead, city leaders took great risks to survive through reinvention.

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July 22:  There are two small city parks of equal size within a block of each other. Oak Park is nothing short of decrepit, with unirrigated lawns, cracked and partially paved walkways and sad, damaged play equipment.  Then there is Wagner Park, utterly fancy schmancy, with neatly pruned vegetation, pergolas and water features. I asked Ted and others why the discrepancy.  No one knew.

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Manchester is the only city in the country that contains on the same two distinctive single-family homes both designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The homes have been purchased by the local art house, the Currier Museum of Art.  I went on a tour of the two homes and then met Joann for a long and wonderful exploration of the Currier. Here’s the thing.  I am repulsed by FLW.  I am appalled by his ego and production of “look at me” buildings that absolutely do not fit into their neighborhood.  His lack of attention to the practical is legendary.  To quote the LA Times:

The occupants of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most celebrated houses have been obliged to drag out buckets, bowls and soup cans in many a rainstorm. Or as a colleague of mine once put it: “They don’t call it ‘falling water’ for nothing. Wright once received a call from an irate client who complained that the roof was leaking all over her dinner guests. “Tell him to move his chair,” he responded.

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July 23: I left Manchester in the morning and only had to make it to Easthampton by dinner time. Driving across the Massachusetts border I saw a sign for Walden Pond. With the spontaneity that only an extra four hours to kill brings, I left the highway and was off to Thoreau’s hideaway. Besides a number of interpretive signs on the loop trail around the pond, there was a wonderful visitor/interpretive center with knowledgeable staff.

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Now realizing that I was only a few minutes from Concord, I took in parts of Minute Man National Historical Park. First stop, The Robbins House, which was originally owned by a “free” Black family. The historic house, with seasonal interpreters from the non-profit that ran and preserved the site, told the story of the lives of those African Americans during the Revolutionary War period who were not officially slaves.  That said, these “free” Blacks, were in constant danger from unscrupulous white folks who could steal them and sell them illegally into slavery.

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Across the street from The Robbins House was The Old Manse and The Old North Bridge (where the “shot heard round the world” was fired).  I took in the North Bridge Visitor’s Center, with the help of an insistent volunteer interpreter telling me details of gun loading techniques which went slightly askew from my passions.

July 24:  Steve and Martine took me on an e-bike tour of Easthampton and surroundings. We explored a sculpture garden down the road from Steve’s pea patch. Later we drove to Mr. Sugarloaf State Reservation, laden with interpretive signs and vistas.

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July 25: Steve is a volunteer at the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History and Underground Railroad Studies. As he attended a meeting in the historic house’s living room, I toured the museum dedicated to a friend and accomplice with Sojourner Truth and other abolitionists.

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Then we took off for Fenway Park. Sure, the Sox won, and that was a thrill.  But there was also plenty of time – there’s always plenty of time at a baseball game – to take in the historic panels of great Red Sox in history.

July 26: The fast drive down to Brooklyn left time for historic tours of Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. No museums, but one can always find interpretive signs worth reading.

July 27: On my last day of the trip, there were few opportunities for educational signage or great art.  My birthplace, Horace Harding Hospital, had been remodeled into a mixed-use commercial/residential complex.  The apartment I spend my first months in Arverne had no educational or interpretive signage in sight. The last cultural event prior to handing in my rental car at the airport, was stopping by one more deli for pastrami sandwich fixings for Jean.

The Post-Amble

So that’s it.  Bit of a travelogue. Few keen observations except that as the trip progressed, and signs of COVID’s re-emergence began to grow, I couldn’t help feeling that I was sneaking one in.  That we all are not out of the woods yet with this pandemic.  That there are ups and downs still to come.  And that given those uncertainties, I was glad to have taken advantage of the opportunity to travel, while the risks were relatively low and the rewards all the sweeter for their temporality.

When you are retired, and have time on your hands, you are almost obliged to look back on your life and try to find the narrative. Of course, that is the heart of this blog I started in Israel two and a half years ago. But on my recent trip to the US East Coast, visiting family and friends, I decided to go all the way back to my beginning; where I was born and where I lived in infancy.

Our family left New York City when I was six months old, only to return for a couple of brief vacations at my grandparent’s apartment on Northern Boulevard in Flushing, Queens. Adjoining and in front of the apartment, they operated a Hallmark card shop with the slightly misleading name of the “Mayfair Book Store.” Sure, Grandpa sold some books, but really, the books were more for his reading enjoyment as he sat behind the cash register.  He was a lousy businessman, but an avid reader. The shop mostly took pennies from the few customers who managed to show up prior to birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays to buy greeting cards.

The Flushing neighborhood back then was Jewish and other non-Hispanic whites.  Later, in the 1970’s, Taiwanese natives started to immigrate along with some South Koreans. Over the coming decades, Flushing became the center for Mandarin-speaking immigrants in the city. Prior to this, almost all ethnic Chinese in New York spoke Cantonese. Flushing’s “Chinatown” is now the most populated such place outside of Asia.

After picking up the rental car at JFK at the start of my two-week East Coast road trip, I drove immediately to Flushing to see the only place where I really have any NYC childhood association. The building that housed the Mayfair Book Store still stood but was unrecognizable from the front.

But from the rear, the red brick façade and paved parking lot was still intact.

I ran into an older lady walking in front of what would have been the Mayfair store and asked her if she knew a good place to get a sandwich.  She suggested up the block was a Burger King.  We started talking, and of course I mentioned that my grandparents had a store here, 50 years previously.  She said that she had moved here about 45 years ago. I said I noticed a lot of Korean signage, and she assured me that the place was mostly Chinese. “Are you Chinese?” I asked.  “Oh no… I’m Malaysian. Not many of us around here.” I decided to walk up and down Northern Boulevard taking in the ambiance and bought a turkey and provolone sandwich and soda at a local shop.

What a marvel is the power of time in an urban setting! “Flushing down” the history of Flushing indeed!  So, while this visit was the beginning of my two-week trip, it was also the site of the end of my childhood connections to New York. 

After the sandwich that afternoon I quickly left Flushing, visited with Westchester County relatives, and then went on to visits with other people and locales in three states (more on that in another blog entry).  It was not until the last day of the trip, the last half-day really, that I returned to exploring my earliest NYC roots. I visited the only two locations that were significant in my first 6-months of my life – where I was born and where our family lived.

Horace Harding Hospital

J. Horace Harding was a financier and road-building enthusiast in the first half of the 20^th Century.[1]  No relation to President Harding, he was an affluent, influential and self-aggrandizing friend of Robert Moses[2] and Mayor Walker, and from many accounts, a bit of an opulent elitist.

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Nevertheless, he got a park, expressway and hospital in Queens named after him.  The hospital where I was born.

Up until research for this blog entry, I never looked into the personage of Horace Harding.  My sole attention was to delight in the imagined pronunciation by a New Yorker of the hospital name.  The alliteration always amused!

I was born in Horace Harding Hospital on May 13, 1955. Why my parents picked Elmhurst’s Horace Harding for my birth I’ll never know.  They were living in Arverne, in the Far Rockaways, about 40 minutes away by car. There were no subways serving Arverne in 1955.  Both my sisters had been born in Manhattan at Doctor’s Hospital.  But like most urban origin stories, 66 years tells many tales of change and the hospital site on Queens Boulevard is no exception. In 1961, Horace Harding, a proprietary hospital (a term describing private-for-profit institutions), was bought by St. John’s Hospital, a Catholic non-profit. St. John’s had been housed at a smaller, less technologically equipped site and wanted to expand.  And expand it did. From a hospital history:

“The 1980s saw complete renovation of St. John’s. Every room in the hospital was modernized. A new wing was added… The old part of the building received a new façade that not only altered its appearance completely but also provided space for a modern lobby and new patient rooms.”

In 2000, St. John’s merged with other Catholic Hospitals in the city to become part of St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers. This was soon to prove a disaster, as by 2005 the whole kit and caboodle filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  It was sold to another hospital chain which in turn filed for bankruptcy itself.  In 2009, the Queens Boulevard property was sold to private developers and was turned into a mixed-use housing and retail site.

This last alteration – which was part of the elimination of several hospitals in Queens and the New York outer boroughs – had a most modern and deleterious epilogue. Elmhurst, Queens, was the epicenter of the world’s first and worst outbreak of COVID-19 outside of China. Bet having old J. Horace’s hospital still in the area couldn’t have hurt.

The Projects

The Rockaways in New York were called the Far Rockaways for a reason.  They were a beachfront peninsula distant from the center of the city. In the still more distant northeastern stretch of the Rockaways, in 1951, the New York City Housing Authority completed a massive public housing project called Arverne Houses.  The area wouldn’t be connected into the NYC subway system until 1956, but perhaps the land was cheap, and the density the development brought would validate the mass transit investment.

It was at Arverne houses – called by our family “The Projects” – that Mom, Dad and my two sisters, Ann and Laurie, moved sometime between 1951 and 52.  I have, of course, no memories of living in The Projects, being whisked away across the country at age 6 months to another housing development – this time the Shorewood Apartments in Mercer Island, Washington.

Below is a picture of our apartment in Arverne with our unit circled in green. I’m all but certain that that is the exact address and floor, because I have Google maps, my sister’s memory of placement in relationship to neighbors, and my birth certificate to prove it.

According to my sister Laurie, who was 6 years old at the time of our departure to Seattle, our family lived in modest circumstances.  Mom stayed home with the kids, while Dad worked at a social services agency.  His social work professional focus was on resettlement of immigrants and gerontology.

Across the hall from us and to the left lived the Dubrow family. Because they had an actual TV before we did, my two older sisters tried to snooker their way there as often as they could.  Irving Dubrow held two jobs – plumber by day and truck driver by night.  Laurie remembered that Irving looked like Bart Simpson, wore a wife-beater shirt (yes… that’s what they came to be called), had no neck to speak of, and had a gruff personality.  My sisters were scared of Irving and tried hard not to wake him up. Because of his long work schedule, when they did interrupt his sleep, he could get grumpy. But Laurie also remembered that perhaps that was an unfair characterization, that anyone could get grumpy if you wake them up, and that Irving could be a stand-up guy.  He may even have watched the girls when Mom and Dad sprinted to the hospital to get me out of the womb.

Irving’s wife Sybil was a traffic cop.  Together, the two adult Dubrows made considerably more money than was allowed in subsidized public housing, so they hid some of their earnings. Laurie and Ann thought Sybil was very nice and enjoyed spending time with the two children in the unit; Linda, who was close to Ann’s age, and little Barry.

Laurie had a few pleasant memories of The Projects and one frightening tale.  First the scary story. 

Arverne by the Sea had a long boardwalk and broad, extensive ocean beach.  One day Dad and Ann were wading out a bit too far and a rogue wave came and knocked Ann out of Dad’s arms. As Laurie described it “He grabbed and grabbed and found an arm and pulled her in. He lost his wedding ring, glasses and Annie.  But he got Annie back.  And he called it the most frightening moment of his life.”

Laurie’s happy memories include making chopped chicken liver with Mom using a mechanical aluminum grinder contraption.  I too remember using that grinder years later in our Bellevue home.  Laurie also recalled getting a box of oranges delivered from Florida.  It was such a delight to make home squeezed orange juice. The two girls had a grand and tasty time.

And that’s it.  A family’s beginning. A few scattered childhood memories.  And questions that can never now be answered. 

Why Arverne?  It wasn’t close to work, or was it?  Why The Projects at all? Did Mom work during that period, or was she solely a stay-at-home mom?  What was life for five Farbers really like there in The Projects? Laurie and Ann needed to go over to the Dubrows for TV for a while but then the Farbers got a scratchy, marginal TV that one had to tune in like a radio dial to get a station.  Family lore states that Mom saw Arlene Francis on The Today Show talking about Seattle and told Dad that “we need to move there.” Laurie’s recent research found that Arlene Francis wasn’t a regular on The Today Show. Sis discovered that, according to Google, “Arlene Francis, from 1954 – 1957, was the host of Home, NBC’s hour-long daytime magazine program oriented toward women, which was meant to compliment the network’s Today and Tonight programs.” So, Mom might have seen the Seattle piece on her show or a taped segment on The Today Show. Now THERE’S a mystery!  And of course, then, there’s a mystery #2:  Why is this Arlene Francis thing so important to me!?

If every writing needs a purpose and conclusion, here’s mine:  Before it’s too late, ask your loved ones about their lives.  And document it.  It’s so rich and warming to patch together at least some fragments from your beginning.  Even if you do this at the end of a heartfelt trip.

[1] The New York City parks department provides this biographical sketch: He served as a director for a multitude of companies; among them are the New York Municipal Railways System, American Exchange Irving Trust, Bronx Gas and Electric, American Express, Continental Can Company, Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, Southern Pacific Company, United States Industrial Alcohol, American Beet Sugar Company, and the Wabash Railway. Harding was also an avid art collector and he served on the Board of Trustees for the Frick Collection.

[2] I read a biography of Robert Moses called The Power Broker authored by Robert Caro. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and was the most influential tome of my professional and intellectual life. Moses was arguably the most powerful public servant in America who never held elected office. He manipulated the “public authority” form of governance to change the face of New York City and State for close to 50 years.  Parks, parkways, bridges, tunnels, public housing, power dams, expressways, the UN Building, and a couple of world’s fairs were all financed and constructed and maintained by a panoply of contractors, labor unions, insurance brokers, and of course, politicians, all bending to his will and whim. No doubt, my first residence in Arverne was constructed on his say so.

It’s 8 am in Manchester, New Hampshire, and my 95-year-old Uncle Ted is saying his goodbyes.  I’d flown across the country to stay with him for a couple of days. Both of us had the reasonable expectation that it might be the last time we’d see each other in person. But… ya neva know. Ted’s a preternaturally energetic, determined and obstinate soul, and the Landsman might very well outlive me. He’s off to work at the medical supply distribution center and doesn’t have time for our previously planned last breakfast together. That’s right. He still works 5 days a week because to his center, he needs to feel useful. 

This surprisingly early parting gives me a mostly unplanned day on my own, as I head for Easthampton, MA to visit with my old college housemate Martine and her husband Steve.  I decide to just drive in that direction and see what comes up on the highway that might draw my interest.

“Walden Pond: 15 miles” said the road sign, and my day instantly swerved in that direction. 

I’d read “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience” and like just about every person who contemplated Thoreau’s teachings, I was profoundly influenced. “The great mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he wrote while having far too much time on his hands for 2 years, 2 months and 2 days in the little cabin he built on Emerson’s property, mere feet from the shores of Walden Pond.  Upon watching the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enforce the slavery contracts on those Blacks who managed to escape their oppressors, he refused to pay his taxes.  A guy who is the lodestar 200 years later for a global environmental movement as well as the inspiration for Gandhi, M.L. King and a broad array of social justice movements, led a rather consequential life, don’t you think?

The Walden Pond State Reservation itself is instructive as well.  Not at all what I expected. A highly popular swimming area, stocked fishery, and jogging loop, I spent $30 for an out-of-state day use parking pass and got one of the last parking spaces on an early and muggy-warm Friday morning.  As I left, I saw lines of cars circling the parking lot looking for a space.  Quiet desperation indeed.

A one-mile drive to the south brought me to Concord, and the Minute Man National Historical Park. The “shot heard round the world” was fired from the Old North Bridge. Here was the site where the first colonial militia shot live ammo at good King George’s troops. Walking across the bridge and up toward the NPS Visitor Center, I stopped to chat with a couple of elderly women.  

“Beautiful garden,” I remarked.  Just then, a small, thin older man in a green vest approached us. 

“I can provide you with a greeting in any of 40 languages.” One of the ladies said, “How about Armenian?” The man proceeded to delight the lady with a snappy and familiar tune. 

I asked him for Hebrew and he sang a recognizable prayer. “How about South African?”  He had memorized the national anthem.

His name was John Muresiahnu, and he told us of his volunteer-initiated program at Harvard: the “Adams House What Matters Table.”  He also told us about his web site that contained various solutions to the world’s problems in education and political philosophy (http://www.thinkingcitizen.com/p/about-author.html).  He self-described as wealthy beyond measure, and would spend many days at the park coming up to visitors and striking up conversations and singing in foreign languages.  I told him about my experience with “The Soap Girls” in Cape Town’s Hout Bay.  They were 11- and 13-years old sisters at the time doing a similar shtick of greeting visitors in different languages.  Bright, sweet and enthusiastic, “The Soap Girls” continued to perform as they got older, turning into quite a hard rock soft porn kind of group. (http://thesoapgirls.band/).  Mr. Muresiahnu, of course, hadn’t heard of them, but if he pursued my reference, he might have experienced the “shock heard round the world.” Or perhaps the schlock depending on your perspective.

I have been visiting with various friends and family for the last 12 days. Sometimes, my hosts have offered me activities throughout the day and night. Other times, things have been less planned. All have been generous with their time and attention. After historic Concord, I drove to meet Martine for dinner in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Over the next couple of days, experiences with Martine and Steve were jam-packed.  Delicious meals, a 15-mile e-bike tour of the Connecticut River Valley of Western MA, and a drive up to the top of Mt. Sugarloaf State Reservation for a magnificent expansive view.

Unbeknownst to me, a birthday dinner party for Martine was on tap with 4 couples talking about their multi-decade histories together and getting into a rip-roaring debate about landlord-tenant, labor, and free speech constitutional and statutory rights.  Sure, I was an instigator, but when you have at your table genuine legal experts and labor organizers who happen to be neighbors, how could I resist?

What next?  The Red Sox v. Yankees at Fenway, of course, during a Sunday day game.   The Sox were down 4 to 0 in the bottom of the 8th.  “Sweet Caroline” had just played during the half inning switch, and the Sox were hitless. Things were looking bleak.  I said to Steve “well, at least we may be seeing history.” 

But then the Sox batter hit a double. And the next batter hit another double after that. And a single after that with more to come.  They scored 5 runs that half inning on 5 hits and went on to close out the Yankee’s 9th with a 5-4 win. 33 thousand Boston fans had plenty of reason for uproarious – and deafening – exultation.  We only hope that those around us were properly vaxxed up and the exultant exaltations contained only pre-pandemic viral loads. Doubtful.  But then again, the cheering multitude were probably only thinking of Thoreau in their release from the shackles of Covid by screaming at the top of their lungs “In wildness is the preservation of the world!”***

*** On a side note, there is a term for it which I forget, but have you ever noticed that the world occasionally appears to be organized precisely for your entertainment? On my drive to Easthampton, one radio weather forecaster remarked “it’s a beautiful day to swim at Walden Pond.” On my drive away from Easthampton on the road to New York City, the radio sports reporter claimed that the Sox-Yankee’s match was “the best game of the year.”