Ice Cream and Apples

I bought a GPS device for the trip, since the last time I ventured into parts unknown I found Google Maps to be crap. A technophobe, with a quantum state that interferes with the correct operation of electronic devices (in the future they will be able to measure our quantum compatibility and either filter, or alter, divergent quantum states so that they don’t interfere with electronic devices and, just possibly, our quantum state will be the energy source for all devices, transmitting via our naturally generated energy clouds information over spaces), I was hesitant, diffident, oscillating between hope and hostility. That’s my quantum state! Anyway, after following the online directions for updating the device I set off at 7am for Indiana, through frigid, colourless air, a visual and spiritual vacuum of intense winter negation. It was only then that I discovered that the device could only speak one language, Quebecois. Not even real French! Fortunately Adroit and Gauche are directions even I can follow. My limited French has come in handy twice now, in Paris, and on the way to Louisville, Kentucky.

The purpose of this road trip was to visit my Aunt Betty, who was turning 90. She is my father’s sister and looks exactly like my grandmother, whom I loved beyond all measure. I last saw Aunt Betty 1982, at my fist wedding. Growing up we saw them all the time, Aunt Betty, Uncle Alvin (a realtor), and their 4 children, Bobby, Peggy, Sally, and John. Bobby and Peggy, like my brother and me, are adopted. I loved my cousins (who were older), and attended 3 of their weddings. They came to bar mitzvahs, we had Passover together sometimes, and otherwise visited regularly as all families do. My father has about as much use for family as he does for poverty. So as adults we were all out of touch, for decades. But I wanted to see Aunt Betty. Alvin died in 2011, a day or two after my mother. You get haunted by these absences.

John lives alone in a pre-civil war farmhouse built of brick. It is totally unrenovated. Lath is exposed in some ceilings and walls, while others are intact. The windows and doors have thick layers of paint, and are tall, and narrow. He has the labyrinthine stairways of old farmhouses, leading to two bedrooms and a warren of offices with jerry-rigged bookcases and collections of ancient electronic equipment, dial phones, dot matrix printers, tube televisions, handbuilt computers, as well as the newest equipment, all united by tangles of wires, routers, modems, keyboards, mouses, microphones, speakers, powerstrips and monitors. Because of the francophone GPS device and climate destroying speed limits I arrived before 4. The sun was sinking through the same arctic skies I had left behind, but it was marginally warmer. The fields and wooded hollows were snow choked, beige and tan and brown with broken bracken. We walked for hours through silent woods, talking about Thomas Aquinas, Japanese culture, my novels, his book analyzing the psychological and philosophical attributes of meditation, Disciplines of Attention, and everything else imaginable. The talk continued in his kitchen, with the worn, cracked linoleum, ancient sink, enormous broken chainsaw, and heater cranked to 64 degrees. On a beat up, olive green electric range he prepared lentils and rice and some miso soup made from homemade miso. Around midnight we stopped talking and I went to my room, cold enough to see breath, and slept well beneath blankets and a down coat. Talk continued in the morning until I left.

Louisville is 2-1/2 hours away, over small country roads for the most part. It was a pleasant drive, probably because I didn’t have to think, having delegated that activity to the tiny TV sitting on my dashboard speaking the language of Voltaire (and Julie Doucet!), distorted by new world informality and chips. I had Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America for company, and this brilliant, absorbing book actually made me wish for a longer drive. The funny thing is, the book, and my family in Louisville, largely echoed each other. For one thing, the climactic event of the book, occurs in Louisville, as does the riot that kills a minor, but important character. Kentucky is also the state where Philip’s brother goes to be mainstreamed away from his urban, Jewish enclave in Newark, a project Roth invents for his friendly American Fascists and one he uses to scorn the idea that 2nd generation American Jews at midcentury were anything BUT American. Aunt Betty et al are my Jewish family. They were always more devout than we were, but they were also in some ways much more American. We come from NYC and its suburbs. My identity was distinctly shaped by 2nd generation, Ashkenazi American NY Jewish culture, leftist, secular, artistic, avant garde, cosmopolitan. We were not from the heartland! Kentucky seemed to me to be like Kansas, you know, the place there’s something wrong with. Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell are the enemy. Tobacco, coal, are the enemy. Christianity and guns are the enemy.

Five minutes into conversation with my cousins revealed that they were all left of center. Medical professionals were the rule: an audiologist, an MD, a nurse practitioner. Also, one of my cousins is the Executive Director of her synagogue. All of them supported the Affordable Care Act and preferred a single payer system. Most surprising to me was the nuanced and highly critical attitude towards Israel. I finally had to ask, “Is Louisville different from the rest of Kentucky?”

Resounding response; “YES! Ever since the civil war. Louisville sided with the north and was anti-slavery. The rest of the state has never forgiven them.”

It was a wonderful visit. The last day Aunt Betty told stories about the family, her grandparents, how her grandmother fled Sherman’s army as it burned Atlanta (Jews from Georgia!) and settled first in Indiana and then Kentucky. How Alvin’s family came from a shit hole in the Lower East Side to work in the fur business. I hope to see them all far more often. Travel teaches you that the world is a much more complex and interesting place than you imagined sitting on your ass in upstate NY. I drove straight home in 11 hours, eyeing the arrival time on the infernal machine, trying to tick the minutes down, while Roth enthralled with his alternate history of a Fascist takeover of the US.

Last weekend I had an 80th birthday in NYC, so youngest son (11) and I headed down to the city to stay with my mother-in-law. She has a huge rent controlled apartment on Riverside Drive in the upper nineties. I deposited him with Mama and K (an aunt) and headed out. Saturday I walked for hours with M and M, oldest friend and spouse, through the dormant and frozen gardens, woods and paths of Central Park. Oh, remember when it was dirty, overgrown and dangerous? Now the only danger is that of Blake’s Chartered Streets. Every fucking bench has a name on it. It is the apotheosis of the neo-liberal, bullshit social contract we live with. Corporatist paternalism. Friendly fascism.

Saturday night I saw a brilliant work in progress, Suzan Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars at The Public Theater. These are 3 one hour plays, ultimately part of a nine play cycle, and tell the story of Hero, a slave, and his experiences in the civil war, and how it affects his family. The play climaxes with a Greek Tragedy. I had the privilege, honor really, of being a fly on the wall for the post performance discussion between the playwright, director and artistic director, who invited me to listen. My son had the women to himself and couldn’t have been happier if you told him all he had to eat for the next week was ice cream and apples.

Sunday I attended the birthday, at the Kimberly Hotel, on 5oth and Third. There I saw old old friends, a family I lived with in high school, who, like the Roths in The Plot Against America, took in troubled people who needed a home. They were my second family. The party was in the penthouse and had a jaw dropping view of midtown, centered on the Chrysler Building, the jewel in NY’s crown. The birthday celebrant is the coauthor of an amazing guide book, Not the Met, a guide to the small museums of New York.

The next trip will be to visit daughter QRX in Maine. I’ll wait for sun for that. No doubt by May it will be 98 degrees. I only hope the senators from Kentucky will be broiled on spits.