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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

A fellow traveler to Sicily, who was my age, had come from Germany to the United States when his father accepted a job with a brewery in Tampa, Florida. He said that it had been hard to leave his friends, but America was then very exciting, and, of course, it was the setting for the western stories he loved of Karl May (you can look him up) and for American movies and TV. He said that many Europeans view the United States differently today than they did back then and now had no desire to move to America. They do not want to live without universal healthcare; have expensive “public” colleges and universities and other “public” education that has to be supported with bake sales; and do not want to live where the middle class is shrinking.

 

At least one Sicilian, however, enjoyed his trip to the United States. After the server in a Taormina restaurant gave me some Italian instruction (if you want the check, you don’t say “conto” as I had said, but “il conto,” I think. He continued that Americans said “grazie” with two syllables when it has three), the server talked, at considerable length, about his trip to the United States. He and three others started in Miami, the home of his boss’s wife. They drove across the southern United States—Alabama and Mississippi, he reported—to New Orleans. They continued into Texas and he scored a seat to the Super Bowl–$800 for the ticket—even though he knew nothing about American football. (He should have talked to that Palermo server. See post of November 21.) Then on to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and California. He loved San Francisco and hated Los Angeles. He said several times that the trip took forty-five days and cost 10,000 Euros. We listened. We asked some questions. He talked at length. And then some more. When we left, the bartender stopped us and gave us two free limoncellos. As I had concluded on previous trips to Italy, it is a disgusting drink.

 

I had not known that limoncello is a generic name for a lemon liqueur. I thought that there was one brand. Instead, I was told that each region of Italy that grows lemons has its own limoncello. To me, that just means the proliferation of something that should not be drunk. The spouse likes it fine.

 

I will never regard tiramisu the same again. A guide stated that the dessert originated in the brothels of the Veneto region where it was thought to help patrons . . . um . . . get it up.

I had many wonderful Sicilian desserts and pastries: almond cakes, a puff made from pistachio flour, gelato, but my favorites were the cannoli. I learned they were not all the same. The shells varied as did the texture and the sweetness of the fillings. The best was in a Palermo restaurant. The filling was the lightest of all the cannoli I had and barely sweet. The shell was not the typical cannolo tube, but two fried pieces of pastry, puffed and crunchy, forming a sandwich with the creamy cheese. Delizioso!

 

The strangest confection is known as St. Agatha’s breast. I don’t know if St. Agatha of Sicily is the patron saint of all the island, but she is the patron saint of some of its regions. Agatha lived in the third century and made a vow of chastity. A Roman lusted after her, but she spurned his advances. He, knowing that she was a Christian, had her arrested during a time of Christian persecutions. She was sent to a brothel where she was raped, but she refused to renounce her God. She was then further tortured, and her breasts were cut off. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake, but a timely earthquake saved her. (What it did to others is not mentioned.) She was sent to prison, where she died, but not before St. Peter healed her wounds. (Hearing this story, I am again reminded that so much of religion is about sex.)

She is commemorated in many ways in Sicily—in paintings and sculpture and churches—but most bizarrely in a sweet confection. It is a white mound with a cherry on top, representing a breast of St. Agatha. This may seem to be sacrilegious, but apparently not so. We visited an old convent, and we ended up in the gift shop. Pastries were for sale that the vendors swore were made from the convented-nuns’ recipes. These included row after row of Agatha’s breasts.

I bought one at a shop in Catania. It was a white cake with a gloppy fruit filling covered with a too-sweet white frosting and what I took to be a maraschino cherry nipple. Awful might be too strong a word, but it was assuredly not good. Something that seldom happens with me—I did not eat it all, and I wondered what it would have done to my sexual development if I had grown up with this bizarre “treat.” I speculated on how it had affected all the Sicilians who had grown up with it. You can quote me on this: St. Agatha’s breasts are not as good as real ones.

(continued November 28)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

Sicily has many ancient remains. They reminded me of something I learned in Turkey: If you have seen one Greek ruin, you have not seen them all.

 

The guides often mentioned the architectural style of a temple, and I wondered why of all the many things that might be learned, my generation of grade school students had to learn the distinguishing marks of a Doric, Ionic, or Estonian, or whatever, column. What things did we not learn as a result? Why was this considered important instead of, for example, more about Greek government, science, or literature? When I raised this to some fellow travelers, the conversation morphed into a discussion of the decline of civics teaching. Surely understanding the basic structure of our government is more important than distinguishing fluting on old pillars.

 

The Romans often built on top of Greek structures, frequently changing a Greek theater into a Roman amphitheater. I learned the distinction between a theater and an amphitheater. Now I am looking for ways, which turn out to be few, of casually dropping my new knowledge into a conversation.

 

The Greek theater in Taormina is striking. Taormina is a mountainside resort town. The theater, carved out of the mountain, is a short walk from Taormina’s center. The Greek architecture kept the area behind the stage open. The Romans enclosed the entire structure. Open on one side, it could not be used for gladiatorial contests; the wild animals and the combatants could escape, and thus the difference between a partially open Greek theater and a completely enclosed Roman amphitheater. Part of the Roman addition behind the stage has fallen in Taormina, and the existing structure resembles the original Greek theater. When sitting in the ancient seats, one gets a view that the theater-goers had twenty centuries ago. It is beautiful. You look out at the Ionian Sea (extra credit: where is the Ionian Sea? Where is the Tyrrhenian Sea?) with Mt. Etna.

 

The remains of another Greek theater were twenty-six centuries old. My mind can’t really comprehend that, and perhaps that is why I thought that even if I waited centuries, I still couldn’t afford seats I wanted to Hamilton.

 

Mt. Etna is visible from the main square of Taormina. I saw it at dusk. Steam regularly escapes the volcano, and with the setting sun, the vapor took on a soft pinkish color as if a benevolent fire were causing the glow.

 

It rained one night while we were in Taormina. The next day the upper tier of Mt. Etna was covered in snow—a beautiful sight, as the first snowfall often is (but not the too-early one we got when I returned home.)

 

We went part way up Mt. Etna and walked around a crater that had been produced by volcanic activity but was no longer a vent for the volcano. The ground was covered in black, volcanic rock, which we could collect. I filled a pocket with stones and pebbles even though I can’t imagine what I am going to do with them.

The crater was a nearly perfect bowl, perhaps thirty yards across and deep. Somehow this made me think about Italy and Sicily’s present economic difficulties. They can use more revenue. Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio has soared, giving concerns to other members of the European Union. I suggested to travelers and guides that the crater be asphalted over and used for international skateboarding contests. This could raise much needed revenue. No one else thought that this was a good idea.

 

An ancient bowl in a museum depicted men drinking. A guide informed us that such gatherings were stag affairs. I thought that Greek society might have produced more offspring and lasted longer if women had attended the drinking parties.

 

I smiled every time by the frequent use by our guide of the term, “Mama Mia!”

 

I had known before going to Sicily that we Americans misuse the word by saying, “Give me a panini.” Panini is plural, and we ought to say, “May I have a panino, please?” In Sicily, I realized that we also misused “cannoli,” which, too, is plural. We should say, “I would like a cannolo.” (I ate many delicious cannoli on my trip, one cannolo at a time.) The guide pointed out that we misused “biscotti” in same way. I replied that biscuit meant something different in England and America, and that what the English call a biscuit, we call a cookie. The guide inquired what a biscuit was in the United States, and as I started to explain, her eyes lit up and she said, “Like Bisquick!” To my surprise, she had grown up with that American product.

(continued November 26)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

We visited salt pans near Trapani. Someone mentioned that flamingoes become pink when they eat tiny shrimp. Some skeptics did not buy this, but I had heard this explanation before on the Discovery or National Geographic Channel, and therefore felt it must be true. Even so, that evening I googled why flamingoes were pink; the shrimp explanation was given. That was the end of the exploration of that topic for me. Like many others I believe something on the internet when it confirms what I thought in the first place.

 

I asked the server in a Palermo restaurant how he had learned such excellent English. He responded that he had studied it in school but became more proficient because of American teammates on his professional football teams. He rattled off names as if I should recognize them. I was surprised that there were so many Americans playing professional soccer in Italy. Only as the conversation progressed did I realize that he was talking about American football. I had not known that there was American football in Italy, much less a professional variety. He had played for teams in several Italian cities and proudly reported that he had been on the Blue team, which is the national team. He did not look big enough to play professional football in America, and he said that his weight had dropped from 215 pounds to 170 since he stopped playing. (He did not use kilograms for his American football weight.) He said that he was not smart enough to play offense and asked me to guess what position he played. Thinking of professional football in America, I responded cornerback or perhaps safety, but he said that he had been an outside linebacker and was proud of his pass-rushing ability. I jokingly said that professional football must have made him wealthy. He laughed and said that he made more waiting on tables than in playing American football. He had made only $1,000 a month (he did not give his football salary in Euros), but went on to say that he also got his food, a place to live, and the use of a car. He no longer played football. He gave American football up after a number of surgeries. Now he was working on being a power lifter.

 

They say that travel gives new experiences and expands the mind. That was true for me. I did not expect when I went to Sicily that I would meet an Italian who played professional American football in Italy.

 

I don’t remember how it came up, but the Italian guide expressed her disgust that Americans put their feet on tables and desks, a practice she had seen in American movies, TV, and photographs. She could not imagine a civilized Italian ever doing such a thing. One of my fellow travelers chimed in with her displeasure with the practice and said that is why she had a hassock for every chair. I did not agree. I would not put my feet up on someone else’s table. I would not put my feet on a dining table. I would not put my shoes on my coffee table. However, I often put my stockinged feet without shoes on the table in front of my couch. I said, somewhat facetiously, to the feet-off-the-table duo that it was an efficient way to dust the surface, but somehow that did not convince them of the civility of the practice.

And I put my shod feet up on my desk. Why have a reclining desk chair if at least once in a while you don’t recline and put your feet up? And, of course, there are famous pictures of President Obama with his feet in shoes on the Oval Office desk. Conservatives cried out about Obama’s disrespect for the Oval Office, but then pictures of President Bush the Younger and President Ford surfaced with their feet on the same desk. What is there to say? American men put their feet on desks. Instead of being disgusted by this, I would say a man is not a real American if he does not do so.

 

In Sicily, I learned once again that even Italian men cannot pull off carrying a man purse.

 

The guide struggled for an English word, and someone told her that she was searching for “toothpick.” She thought that this was a funny word and said several times, always laughing. I thought that it was funny that she thought toothpick was funny.

(continued November 23)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition

We thought we were in the line for the flight to Rome where we would make connections to Palermo, but we were wrong. We were not the only ones to have found the signage (when did it become “signage,” and not just “signs”?) unclear; others traipsed after us to the new queue. The man behind us said something amusing about our situation, and we started talking when we settled into our new line.

He described himself as a “scholar.” He was a university professor from Naples. He had been visiting an ethnic center at the University of Minneapolis and had then spent a few days in New York City with his daughter who was traveling with him. They were now headed home.

His field was a new one for me—Italian-American literature. He studied American authors of Italian descent. When asked for examples, he offered Don DeLillo and Richard Russo. I was surprised. I have read novels by both these authors and had never thought of them as Italian-American. I regarded both as quintessentially American. Russo’s capturings of small-town life and academia just seemed to me to be, in the best sense of the word, Americana. DeLillo has portrayed other aspects of the country to me, often its paranoia, but again, I thought of him simply as an American writer, not an Italian-American writer. Standing in line to check in for a flight was not the time for a deep literary discussion, but in another setting, I would have liked to have heard the Neapolitan professor talk about how, if it all, he saw that the Italian ancestry of Russo and DeLillo influenced their novels.

In response to a question, the professor, without hesitation, said that Underworld was the best of DeLillo’s books. I told him that I had read the book twice. The first time I was mostly confused by it, but the second time I thought that it was a masterpiece. I continued that each time, however, I had considered the opening chapter marvelous—some of the best writing I had ever read. Its setting is the legendary playoff game that decided the 1951 winner of baseball’s National League, which ended with the dramatic home run by Bobby Thompson. The professor smiled and said that the chapter was just incomprehensible to him. I guess that one needs to know something about American baseball to grasp the genius of the piece.

We talked a little about some of the Italian authors the spouse and I have read. He speculated that the first of Elena Ferrante’s quartet of Neapolitan books was written by more than one author. If so, the spouse and I had not noticed. The professor taught me how to pronounce the last name of Salvatore Quasimodo, the Sicilian poet who won the Nobel prize for literature, but I did not master it and asked my guide again in Sicily. The “s” sounds like a “z,” and the emphasis is on the second syllable, not the third as we would say for the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The professor’s daughter said that she was finishing college in the spring. She did not know what she would do then, but she was studying “languages.” As one who cannot speak anything other than English, I noticed the plural.

The professor said that he was now studying a John Fante novel. I stated that I had never heard of Fante, and the professor responded that he was mostly known for writing B-movie scripts, but that he had also written some outstanding novels. On one level, it was humbling to have an Italian inform me about an American writer; on the other, I like reading good authors whom I have not read before, and I have now vowed to read Fante’s Bandina Quartet.

As we finally made it to the head of the line, we exchanged contact information, and the spouse and I told the daughter she could stay with us if she visited New York City again, which seemed to excite her since she had enjoyed New York so much.

I thought that this was a good start for our trip to Sicily. Before even boarding Alitalia, I had had an interesting conversation and learned things from a person whose path I would like to cross again.

(continued November 21)

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Snippets

The spouse asked me what time I wanted to leave to be on time for our restaurant reservation. I answered. She immediately said she wanted to go five minutes earlier, and it was clear that we were going at her preferred time. As I started to ask why she asked me what time I wanted to go, I, of course, knew the answer. If by happenstance I had stated the time when she wanted to go—the time when we would go–she could look like she was merely acquiescing to my wishes.

 

If a mirror flips your image so your left side appears to be your right side, why doesn’t it also flip top and bottom? Why don’t you look as if you are standing on your head when you look in a mirror?

 

The two had co-authored the book of a play I attended. The credit for Leo Schwartz in the Playbill said, “His musical, Till, about Emmett and Mamie Till, won the Mainstreet Musical Theatre Festival in 2016.” The credit for DC Cathro said, “His musical Till, written with award-winning composer Leo Schwartz, was one of three winners in the 2016 Mainstreet Musical Festival.”

 

The Christian radio station gave a few brief Bible readings, although where the sacred words left off and commentary began was not always clear. It also presented short inspirational stories and exhortations. Mostly, however, it played music, and mostly that music fell into the rock category. I remembered back to when rock started. (Alas, I am old enough to remember when “Rocket 88,” Bill Haley, and Elvis Aron were all new.) I recalled how ministers smashed 45s saying that rock was music of the devil. This made me think about how powerful He is. In only the short span ofmy lifetime, He had transformed a genre that would send me into eternal damnation into music that was now for the devout. Hallelujah!

 

“There is no such thing as hell, of course, but if there was, then the sound track to the screaming, the pitchfork action and the infernal wailing of damned souls would be a looped medley of ‘show tunes’ drawn from the annals of musical theater.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

 

I was driving midweek in central Pennsylvania. Signs seemed to be everywhere for a weekend church festival. I was sorry that I was not going to be there then because the festival offered not just the usual entertainment and food, but something that I have never experienced and could not entirely imagine: A Polka Mass!

 

“But, despite the convictions of many of the faithful in any tradition, who are convinced that religion never changes and that their beliefs and practices are identical with those of the founders of their faith, religion must change in order to survive.” Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History.

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DSK–Citizenship Issue (concluded)

 

Aylin, my Turkish-German friend from the DSK bar who wanted to stay in the US but whose student visa was about to expire, had different concerns about her immigration status than giving up her birth citizenship. Her immediate goal was to become a permanent resident of the US so that she could stay in America. She may have wanted to become an American citizen someday, but if so, that was down the road. Only then would she have to deal with her German citizenship. Germany, I have been told by a friend who holds dual German-American citizenship, does allow for dual citizenship with the United States but does not grant it automatically. A special need must be shown for it.

Aylin’s immediate concern, however, was how her marriage might be viewed by American officials. She was getting married because she loved her husband-to-be, and he loved her. But they were also getting married sooner than they otherwise would have to allow her to become a permanent resident, which she would get by marrying an American citizen. Or she would get it if our immigration authorities did not contest her marriage. She had heard that the ICE officials often concluded that marriages between citizens and non-citizens were shams entered into, often for money, to get the desired immigration status, and if that were the determination, permanent resident status would not be granted.

I thought back to a student of mine from many years before. He was attending law school part time. He worked full time for the Immigration and Naturalization Services, as it was then called, and he was in the part of the INS that looked for sham marriages. Mostly he did this in New York’s Chinatown. The INS would surveil suspected couples to see if they lived with each other and what their daily routines were. Eventually, the couple was brought in for interrogation. The man and woman were questioned separately to see how their answers matched. The questions were from the sexually intimate to the mundane. What did you have for dinner two nights ago? What time did each of you get up last Monday? What distinguishing marks do you have on your body and does your spouse have? Although I understood the reasons for this work, the enterprise seemed demeaning and depressing, both for the couple and the investigators.

I was hoping that Aylin would not have to go through anything like that. She asked me some questions about immigration law, but this is one of the many legal areas I know little about. Aylin and her fiancé did not have much money. She was tending tables to be able to afford her college courses, and he had just obtained an entry level job after college. I contacted an academic friend experienced in immigration matters and obtained the information for an immigration attorney who, I was assured, was both affordable and good. Aylin was extremely grateful for this referral.

With a wedding planned and graduation in the offing, Aylin’s life was changing, and she left DSK. We exchanged email addresses, but of course you know how that goes–neither of us reached out to the other. However, I did see her one time after her departure. The bar was holding some sort of event—an infrequent occurrence—that had been promoted on the internet. She came. I just happened to be in the bar, but I had not seen her enter. I found myself pleased when I saw her coming over to me. We exchanged a hug, and I said, truthfully, that I thought of her often, and she replied, I think sincerely, that the same was true for her. She was now in a graduate program in experimental psychology without any immigration difficulties. She introduced me to her husband, whom I had not previously met. He was very handsome, and he beamed at her. She beamed back. A couple very much in love. And, happily, a couple without immigration problems. A happy, in-love American couple.

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DSK–Citizenship Issue (continued)

(Postings will only be on Monday and Thursday this week and the next. Traveling.)

I also thought about dual citizenship and how birth citizenship and identity are intertwined because of a conversation with Jennifer, a patron at DSK. I have met Jennifer only once. I would have noticed her because she was sitting next to me, but also because she was dressed differently from others in the bar, wearing a white dress and looking as if she had just come from the kind of work where it is important to be wearing something like a stylish white dress. She was eating a meatball dish, having a beer, and studying her phone. The meatballs were a recent addition to the menu. I had never had them and asked how they were. She replied, “Pretty good.” She volunteered that she had ordered them because she had never had them even though she had had most of the other items on the menu. She had been in the bar several times before, she continued, visiting a friend in the neighborhood. That friend had moved, and she had now taken over the friend’s apartment.

She asked how long I had lived have nearby. I replied, “Longer than you have been alive.” She laughed and said that she doubted that and asked me to guess her age. Perhaps our time is more enlightened than previously, but it is still a dangerous game for a man to guess a woman’s age. Even so, without thinking, I said 37. She said that was pretty good; she was 41.

I must not have offended her with my guess, for we started chatting. She told me that her mother is Korean. Her father’s origins were only described as “Californian.” Her parents met in Seoul. Jennifer said that her father had been in the military and after leaving the service, he had worked for the government, which he continued to do. She was not more specific about what that “government” work was, and the conversation turned to other things.

I said that I would not ask what her father thought of Trump. She indicated that even though her father was a Republican, he was not happy with the president. I said that it was unfortunate how much we denigrated government workers and that many of them, rightly so, considered themselves public servants. She nodded in agreement.

She told me that because of her father’s work, she had lived in many places. She had gone to college in northern Washington. I tried unsuccessfully to guess the school, and she told me “Olympia.” She might have been a bit defensive about that because she immediately mentioned that it had in-state tuition.

She had come to New York after college and started work as a receptionist for a music company and had worked herself up to a more meaningful position. For the last six years she had worked as a production manager for, as she described it, “a documentary company.” I asked if I would know anything her company had done, and she said it had made the recent documentary on O.J. Simpson. I replied that I knew about it but had not watched it because I avoided everything about him. Then I realized that this was not some documentary maker unknown to me. She worked for the documentary branch of ESPN that produced “30 for 30.” On occasion I watch some of these documentaries, and I told her how much I admired the ones I had seen because they weren’t the usual sports stories. I liked that they often used athletes to explore broader societal issues. I learned that the title “30 for 30” came about because on the thirtieth anniversary of ESPN, thirty filmmakers had been hired to make documentaries, and the show continued beyond those initial ones.

Her father’s job was bringing her parents back to Korea. I asked what this would be like for her mother, who, although born there, had not lived in Korea for many years. Jennifer said that her mother, who is 75, was more than happy to go back to Seoul. After moving to the United States, she had become an American citizen, but in order to do so, she had to give up her Korean citizenship. Relinquishing her birth citizenship, as it was for my Chinese friends, had been hard. She felt that she had had to deny an important part of her. Korea, however, does have a form of dual citizenship, and it is easier to obtain for a once-Korean citizen who is over 70 and living in Korea. Her mother now planned to get her Korean citizenship back. She was excited about returning to Korea because of the prospect of reclaiming part of herself.

(Concluded November 12)

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DSK–Citizenship Edition

(Postings will only be on Monday and Thursday this week and the next. Traveling.)

Many of the staff at the DSK biergarten, my local for the last few years, have volunteered that they make good money working at the bar. Even so, many have left. This is hardly surprising. Most of them have interests outside waiting on tables or bartending, and they move on to those other things.

My favorite of the servers who has left I will call Aylin. When I learned her background, I said that she was a New Yorker’s nightmare: a German Muslim. She was born in Germany to Turkish parents who had emigrated to Germany. She has spent a lot of time in Turkey, and we talked about that country frequently. She taught me where the accent should go for the last name of the Nobel-Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. She, somewhat shyly, said that she had not read any of his books, and I dusted off a Pamuk book or two I owned and gave them to her.

She was an undergraduate studying psychology, and while a DSK server, fell in love with an American citizen. She was in the US on a student visa but wanted to stay here after she finished her undergraduate degree. She knew that she could get permanent resident status if she married an American. Aylin and her boyfriend, in an ideal world, would have waited a year or two more before marriage, but with her student visa expiring soon, they planned to wed as quickly as they could.

Several of the DSK servers are not citizens, and from them I have learned that their immigration status affects many of their decisions, big and small, something that this native-born citizen seldom thinks about. And, of course, the anti-immigrant sentiments sweeping the country have, on some level or another, rattled nearly every one of them, even though all are here legally.

Aylin’s situation made me think back to a family who had Thanksgiving dinner with us for many years. The parents, both medical doctors who had been born in mainland China and were citizens there, had worked in the United States for a long time and had permanent resident status here. Their only daughter had been born in China, but she came to this country, not speaking a word of English, in the first grade. She attended public schools in the New Jersey town where her parents had bought a house. By the sixth grade, she won the English, and other school academic, prizes. She had her choice of colleges, and after attending a prestigious one worked in a management consultant firm before heading off to one of the country’s top medical schools. She may have been born in China, but she was an American woman who soon married and started a family.

The daughter said that she was planning to become an American citizen and asked her parents to get American citizenship, too. The mother talked to me about whether she should become an American citizen. She said that it would be hard to give up her Chinese citizenship; she had grown up as a Chinese citizen and it had always been a part of her identity. I don’t really understand dual citizenship, but America apparently allows a naturalized citizen to keep their original citizenship, at least if they come from certain countries. Many countries, but not all, are fine with dual citizenship, but some require that people lose their original citizenship when they become naturalized in the US. China apparently does not allow dual citizenship, or at least it does not allow it with the United States. My Chinese friend, if she became an American citizen, would no longer be a Chinese citizen; she would be a foreigner in her birth place, her original home.

I listened and understood. Whenever I have thought of starting a new life in another country, I knew that it would be hard to stop thinking of myself as American and even harder to relinquish my citizenship. But I asked the mother, “Do you plan to stay in the United States?” She said yes. I said that in that case I thought she should get American citizenship. We were talking years ago when anti-immigrant feelings were strong, but not as strong as now. I told her that I did not trust this country and its feelings towards those who were not citizens. I was not predicting this, but there was always the possibility that the country would strip today’s permanent residents of that status. There is no guarantee that the present system will continue, I told her. If you know you want to stay in the US, be safe and become a citizen. Both she and her daughter did.

Her husband, however, did not. This is not because he has stronger psychological ties to China. He was a victim of the cultural revolution, something he has great difficulty talking about and was very upset about the government’s actions during the protests at Tiananmen Square. His Chinese citizenship, however, has family advantages. He can simply get on a plane and go to China. Now that the mother and daughter are American citizens, they no longer can. They must get visas, which means traveling to a consulate and generally encountering long lines, other delays, and officious bureaucracy. Trips back “home” for them must be planned well in advance, but not for the father as long he retains his Chinese citizenship. The mother and father were concerned that if any of their parents in China or other relatives got sick or had some other emergency, no one could get there in time if they all became American citizens.

This American family had considerations most of the rest of us Americans never had to weigh.

(continued November 8)

RELATED POST: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=DSK

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Running to Work (concluded)

When I left my job in White Plains and began to work in lower Manhattan, my running-commute continued, but now I regularly ran both to and from work. The route over the Brooklyn Bridge was a bit over three miles, which at this point was a bagatelle. When pressed for time, however, I used the Brooklyn Bridge. If I was not in a rush, I went over the Williamsburg Bridge, which is north of my home and north of where I worked. This U-shaped route was five or six miles long, and if I took the Brooklyn Bridge in the morning and the Williamsburg going home, I had put in a respectable daily mileage.

I had run the Brooklyn Bridge route so many times that most of it was boring, but the longer way brought me to neighborhoods I enjoyed going through. The route from my office to the Williamsburg Bridge had me wend through Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Sometimes I would stop in shops that looked interesting. One favorite was an old bagel shop. They mostly made bagels for delivery to other outlets, but they did have a retail counter where I would make a few purchases. My choices were limited. The shop was old school, or maybe it was alt shul.  No fifteen kinds of bagels. No pumpernickel or pesto or even cinnamon raisin. They made only a plain bagel, which was smaller and denser than what was even then becoming accepted as a bagel (the Wonder-Bread-inspired “bagels” are often correctly referred to as a BSO, a bagel-shaped object.) The bake shop rounded out their offerings only with bialys, a treat that has inexplicably almost disappeared, and a torpedo-shaped onion loaf. The products selection was limited, but all were delicious.

I also stopped in a Lower East Side store whose stock was hard to characterize. The dominant items were small appliances, but it also had a little of this and little of that. I learned not to assume that they did not have something simply because I did not see it. Ask, was the motto for this place. “Do you have a squeeze bottle with a star-shaped tip?” Or, “Do you have lefthanded pinking shears?” Often the answer was, “Let me see.” The owner would disappear somewhere for a few moments—maybe in the back or upstairs or the basement—and often came back with the requested item. I primarily stopped there to buy carbon dioxide cartridges, which were then hard to find, that I used in a seltzer bottle.

The owner and I sometimes chatted a bit. I learned that he lived on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge and often walked to work and that his father had started the business. I learned a little about his kids, but almost never heard about his wife. He asked about my work, and when he learned where I grew up, he asked about Wisconsin. He was fascinated by it, perhaps because it seemed so foreign to him, a person who seemed to have spent his life in a couple of square miles on either side of the East River. I, however, showed my unsophistication with him. It was the season of the Jewish High Holy Days, and I knew Yom Kippur was approaching. I thought that that was the start of a new year on the Jewish calendar, and I wished him a happy new year. By the look on his face, I discerned that this was not an appropriate comment. Only then did I remember that Yom Kippur was a day of reflection, fasting, and atonement, not a time of celebration. The store owner said nothing about my faux pas.

In those days, Manhattan’s Lower East Side had a strong Jewish presence. When I got over the bridge I was in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which was the home of many Hasidic Jews. Their distinctive dress makes them stand out in most places, but they were so common in Williamsburg after a while I did not notice the adults much. From having seen them elsewhere in New York I, without consciously thinking about it, assumed that none was good-looking, and all were frumpily dressed. (Does this make me prejudiced?)  I had to reassess my views. The young orthodox boys fit my preconceptions, but many of the young girls were attractive and stylishly dressed. I found that there were discounted dress shops for girls in Williamsburg, and I bought the last dress that the daughter regularly wore at one of them. But the good looks and the stylishness of those young girls seemed to decline each year as they got older. Or maybe I just got older.

I did not stop in as many stores in Williamsburg as I did in the Lower East Side. While the Lower East Side shops were Jewish owned, they seemed to cater to all those who ventured in. The Hasid shops of Williamsburg primarily seemed to exist for other Hasids. I would stop occasionally in a bakery on my way home to get some poppy seed bread, but without the beard and sideburn ringlets and in my running clothes with uncovered arms and legs, I felt unwelcome and stopped going.

My running attire, however, did not prevent me from being stopped one Friday evening by an Orthodox Jew as a ran through his neighborhood.  He politely inquired whether I was a Jewish.  I said that I was not. He pressed on and asked if my purported lack of Jewishness was because I was a lapsed Jew. Again, I said that I was not. (I don’t know if it would have made a difference to him if I then knew what one of those DNA-testing companies much later told me—I am four percent Ashkenazi Jew) After determining this pedigree, he asked if I would do him the favor of coming into the house and turning off his over. He was forbidden to do so on the sabbath. This was the only time, and it was only because of running, that I got the experience of being a shabbat goy.

 

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Posted on by rjonakait

Running to Work

The New York City Marathon this year is on November 4. The runners pass on the street at the foot of our block. Most years, the spouse and I go and cheer and chat with our neighbors who are out doing the same thing. Not this year, however. I will be out of the country when the marathon makes its way through my neighborhood, but the approach of that event always makes me think back to the times when I ran that marathon and about my running days in general.

Running just seems boring to many people, but I never found it so. For some, running is a form of meditation where an activity takes a person out of themselves into a different realm. On occasion I felt that. But mostly I think about the new experiences I got and the discoveries I made because I ran.

After I had run for a while, I decided to try a marathon, and I ran two marathons a year—one in the fall and another in the spring. Several months before the scheduled date, I would start increasing my weekly mileage with the goal of running seventy miles a week in the month before the race. I looked for ways to integrate running into my life so that the time it took to put in the miles would be less burdensome. An obvious way was to incorporate running into my commutes to work.

When I prepared for my first marathon, I worked several days a week in White Plains, a community north of New York City. My normal commute in the morning was to take the subway from Brooklyn to Grand Central Terminal. Then I caught a train to White Plains. The subway ride to Grand Central took about a half hour. I found that I could run that distance in about fifty minutes, so, I figured, that the run only took twenty minutes out of my day. I ran with a backpack in which I carried a towel and some dry clothes. At Grand Central, I would duck into the men’s room, towel off, and put on the fresh clothes. I kept stashes of clothes in my office, and when I got there, I would shower and change into work attire.

I varied my route to Grand Central. This not only gave me different mileages on different days, but it allowed me to see parts of New York City that I did not ordinarily see, and seeing new things was one of ways to keep running interesting.

Some days I substituted running for a different part of the commute. I would take the subway to Grand Central but get off the commuter train before White Plains and run to my office from these intermediate stops. I was not very familiar with the suburbs I was running through and this added to a sense of discovery that running gave me.

I furthered to my geographical knowledge when I had extra time. I would take the subway to a stop in the Bronx, the borough north of Manhattan and south of Westchester County’s White Plains. I discovered long runs through parks in the Bronx and Westchester County, parks that I otherwise would never have known about.

These running patterns changed after a few years of working in the suburbs when I bought a car to get to my office. I often worked until 10 PM. I did not run that late, and the commute by public transportation at that hour was longer than in the morning or afternoon and, frankly, often scary. The car got me home much quicker at night, and I felt safer.

But I used that car for running, too. I would find some place in between home and White Plains to park the car, get out, and run in an area I would not otherwise have gone to.  I ran the circumference of Roosevelt Island in the East River; I ran on the paths of Bronx and Westchester Parks; I ran the narrow streets of City Island, that seaside village that, surprisingly, is part of New York City. Except for that car and the running, I am not sure that I ever would have seen it and such places as Orchard Beach and Pelham Parkway and the dam up in Westchester, all spectacular places in their own ways.

 

(concluded November 2)

 

RELATED POST: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bridges