Petersburg, VA

It was time to get coffee as I approached Petersburg, VA, where 85 splits off from 95. Google indicated that there was a non-Starbucks coffee shop with a name that seemed to hint at a degree of seriousness, so I plugged it into Google Maps as a destination and pointed my car in that direction. Turned out it was right in the heart of Petersburg's historic district, along with a hipster bakery and a brew pub and even an art gallery, if memory serves correctly. After snagging a cold brew, I was really in no hurry to get right back on the interstate, so I kept going through the historic district, the main residential street of which featured an improbably large number of well-maintained historic homes before giving way to a much larger lower wealth area.

Wikipedia attests that the town is 79% Black, is very low income, and has lost about 20% of its population since 1980. Which begs the question, where did the money for hipster stuff and nice houses come from? My guess is that a lot of it is people commuting to Richmond and sending kids to private schools.

One more day on the road

After a lovely lunch in Brooklyn with Corinna, sandwiches on folding chairs in the shade of her front stoop, I made my way out to Princeton. First coffee with my friend Steve, then some wandering about town, seeing what was new, what was closed, the usual COVID era stuff. In general there are many more good noodle shops than once there were, and Labyrinth Books is a great joy. Maybe the best book store I know of right now anywhere. They had pretty much all of Chaim Potok's books. Chaim Potok. Hadn't thought of him for years. Does anybody still read him? If they do, I know where to find them. To support Dorothea Von Moltke's fine shepherding of the enterprise, I snatched up a couple of tomes and bustled out. I know COVID is generally pretty light in Princeton, but there is no reason to fuck with anything by lingering unnecessarily, especially as I will be basically sneaking the books into my house, where I have plenty.

Then out on the street I ran into Stacy and talked for a while, then I visited with Craig and Nico at Maggie's Playground. Then I ran into Ted and Kirsten, on whose porch I was planning to have dinner, then we ran into Vivian the Elder, who later joined us on the porch. Then Alberto, who lives across from Ted and Kirsten, responded to an earlier text and stopped over to the porch for a few. All in all a proper Princeton afternoon. 

Tomorrow I drive back to Chapel Hill, concluding my 5,000 mile August. It will be good to be done. Except for Alan's wedding this weekend in Virginia. Sigh.

Turtle in the Road

Natalie and I were headed north on 86, somewhere between Hillsborough and Yanceyville, when I saw a sweet little turtle making its way languidly across the road. I saw it's little head and legs. A nanosecond later it disappeared below the left side of my car and I heard a thunk. 

It was rather disconcerting, I felt bad. Natalie said "what was that?" and I told her. There was nothing I could have done.

A blue umbrella

Going back to school has been hard for Graham for a number of reasons. After being largely apart from his peer group for a long while, except when they come to the lake, Graham's social life has gone backwards, perhaps more than most kids'. I wrote about some specific issues he's been having a couple of weeks back. So he was hoping that he'd just see more of his friends back in school. Alas that has proven harder than expected, as the school system is working hard on keeping greater control of kids' interactions for contract tracing purposes (a valiant but most likely foolhardy effort for kids with driver's licenses, who have too much ability outside of school to recombine with one another).

Lunch in particular, once the freest of social times at high school, a time of joy and release, is a pale shadow of its former self. Kids have to sit in specific places outdoors and have only 15 minutes to eat. For a fair-skinned kid in the South, raised by his mom to be very conscious of the sun, that's a problem.

When Graham was leaving for school yesterday he saw this blue pastel umbrella that Natalie had used in the rain the day before. After ascertaining that it was dry, he said that he wanted to take it for school. I had checked the weather, so I knew there was no rain coming and I said that, then "Why do you want it?" "To keep the sun off me at lunch." There wasn't much time, so I just said "No" and sent him on his way.

We will need to go back and discuss. The social world is cruel. There is no good reason why men and boys shouldn't use brightly colored parasols to shield themselves from the sun, but they just don't do it in the South. It is not a good move for a boy who is trying to rebuild social capital that has eroded through a global public health crisis. He doesn't just glean this knowledge from the social norms, so sometimes I just have to teach it to him, a role I don't relish.

A dream of loss

Last night I dreamt that some partner, I think it was my friend Jill from Columbia (who has been living in Moscow for a couple of years teaching Russian), had basically sold our financial planning practice to another guy who used Raymond James rather than Charles Schwab as a custodian. This happened while I was away -- I think I was in prison or something like that, maybe it was just jail, or maybe just a long vacation. 

This fucked me up for a couple of reasons: my split was going to be about 10% lower than it currently is, plus I knew that switching not just firms but custodians was going to make for a buttload of paperwork and, inevitably, the loss of a few clients. So my income could easily drop by 20%.

One saving grace was that the new firm's owner was going to be doing all of the Social Security claims analysis for our clients himself. He had some really good software.

I actually dreamed this, people. How pathetic and boring is that? The loss of income itself would not be fatal, indeed I of course need to be able to sustain drops of 20% of revenue given how tied I am to the vagaries of the markets, but the feeling of needless loss of control was dispiriting at best: I've worked hard for the money and it vindicates the effort I've made. 

When I woke up I could tell I had been sleeping the sleep of the dead/just, being still quite tired from a couple of days of driving and then from going out for a bike ride around mid-day. My weight had gone the wrong direction somehow while road-tripping through the deep South and investigating some regional delicacies.  

Return to darkness

As we were leaving Tuscaloosa yesterday morning, Natalie and I decided we really needed to pop into town to see a little bit of the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!). On our way in, I was struck by the absence of markings on pavements, yellow lines in the middle, lane markers, etc. Which reminded me of how dark it had been on the way back from picking up our bbq the night before, which of course was the same impression I had in Schenectady a couple of weeks before.

A quick check shows that despite being the home to the university -- itself the home to astonishingly gargantuan and lavish looking sororities and fraternities that pretty well define the place, outside of football -- Tuscaloosa's population is low-income even by Alabama standards, which in turn is poorer than most of America, at least in nominal terms. So it's not a rich city, and its municipal budget would appear to be strained.

Poor lighting + poor street markings all in all adds up to a sense of relative lawlessness. The individual is pretty much left to his/her own devices. Small wonder that guns are favored devices.

Tuscaloosa and some dreams

After a lovely dinner with Austin with Justin and Allison and their boys as well as Susan, we went to check into our Airbnb. Turns out the AC wasn't working, which made staying there a non-starter. I quickly booked a room at a hotel an hour away and we got on the road early, clipping an hour off yesterday's drive, which took us through Louisiana, Mississippi, and into Alabama. Despite all the people dying in these states, the pandemic would seem to be over here, because very few people are wearing masks.

After checking in to our hotel in Alabama, we took Justin's recommendation for dinner and went to a BBQ place called Dreamland and got some ribs and sides for takeout. It was said to be a small chain but there only seemed to be two of them. The one we went to may have been the flagship. It was a small old school bar, seemingly Black-owned, super homey and old school. I was sad we couldn't stay and eat inside. They didn't seem to be set up for outdoor dining. Natalie hung out in the parking lot with a little black stray kitty while I got the food.

Last night I had some dreams. In one of them, AZ and I were in Phoenix and we ended up in a cab on the beach where there were some cartoon characters swimming in the water alongside a couple of generic cartoon characters (i.e. not Bugs Bunny or Popeye but recognizable as cartoon characters). Adam's daughter Lily swam over and talked to us. Later I'm pretty somehow CAZ came up and then I ran into Debby at a restaurant kind of like the sort of LA restaurant you see in movies -- talking to a couple of snooty bitches -- so it was definitely a Zinn-heavy dream. 

At the end of the dream, or of the night of dreaming, Natalie, Graham and I were in the mountains, traveling. Mary wasn't there. It got insanely steep. We were going down a slope and Graham got going too fast and fell off the slope and went crashing down onto the slope below. It's hard not to read this as an extension of my conversation with Natalie yesterday about Graham's college search and the wisdom of having him apply early to Yale, just because of how intensive Natalie views the competitiveness, money-orientation and conformity of so much of Yale culture. I.e. even if he gets in (a stretch for most) it might not be the right place for him. In any case, thank God it was a dream. Oddly, I seemed conscious of the fact that it was a dream as I was dreaming it. Maybe that's normal.

Natalie's coffee cup

After I pack, it's time to head to the airport to fly to Austin to meet Natalie, have dinner with Allison and Justin (and meet Haydn and Dylan for the first time!), then drive back through the deepest depths of the Mississippi Delta (sadly, pun intended) region. We will pass like Lenin on the sealed train from Zurich to St Petersburg in 1917, going into as few buildings as humanly possible for as short a time as possible.

When Natalie left for California in June, she left us with a couple of coffee cups for the summer. There's this old china one and then another with some cute little animal on it. I have folded this one into my mix of morning caffeine delivery vehicles, whereas Mary has adopted the latter. It has been a nice little addition to the variable elements thrown into my daily routine and has helped to pass the time.

In general, COVID living continues to help me hone life skills around appreciation of such little things. It has never been so manifestly clear how good our lives are, so that all we need to do is appreciate our bounty. As you can see from this picture, a rare glance into the sanctum sanctorum of my study, where a select few mortals are permitted to tread, mostly because Mary is self-conscious about the underdecoratedness and slight messiness of our bedroom, I have a lot of books. Frankly, I haven't read most of them, probably, or haven't read them in decades, which is more or less the same thing. Plus I have not one but two guitars now, and many baseball caps (just out of view). Plus the whole interweb. I am rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Much better

By yesterday evening, Graham was doing much better. He had made some progress in ferreting out some specifics of his seeming social isolation. He was being blackballed within a social circle by a friend who was saying that someone else was "made uncomfortable by his presence" and had devised a plan to sort it out. Find out who it was and then try to understand what was going on.

I need to remember to talk to him a little more about some of my own social challenges back in the day. Adolescence is a difficult time for lots of kids, certainly it was for me. I was never great at figuring out how to hold operate within groups, so I generally adopted a kind of brute force methodology involving lots of hustle (find out where all the parties are and/or throw parties myself, organize things like bands or alternate school periodicals, generally outparty people). Some of that worked well, other aspects of it less so. 

Over time the use of alcohol in particular as a way to leap over social anxieties hardened into a muscle memory which helped me overcome fear of other/new groups of people, even when not drunk. Sometime pre-pandemic I was having lunch with a woman in Manhattan and somehow the subject of how I was perceived in college came up. She said I was ubiquitous. Which was an unexpected response, though I can see it. I did hustle. I was also drinking then, which definitely made some things easier, at least until I was shit faced.

Another after the fact surprise was when I learned, many years after high school, that lots of the girls had thought I was good looking and that the combination of that with my intellect was perceived as attractive. I had never thought that high school girls cared much about brains. I might have played up a tier in high school. I probably even should have asked Alison Baer out, though rejection by her would have been just too crushing.

Bad night

Had as bad a night of sleep as I have had for a while. I came home last night after Spruyt's bachelor party -- a tame affair to be sure - though we did eat a lot and even (dare I say it) beef. Graham and Mary were arguing about clothes, of all things, specifically what kind of clothes he should by when he goes out shopping with Granny sometime this week. It was a very complicated discussion, much of which was about him feeling like the way she talked about the ultra-casual way he dresses implied a huge value judgment she was making about him, but really it was less about her judging him than the great mass of other people out there judging him based on a super complex set of codes that he totally didn't understand.

But as Graham and I kept talking, it seemed that the real underlying issue was that he felt isolated amongst his friend group, that even his closest friends were having get togethers without him, that he was being left out and he didn't understand why.

This is a rough one. I tried to explain that people were always having get togethers and couldn't invite everyone and that he needed to just keep inviting people himself and blah blah blah, but underneath it all it's just a tough nut to crack. I have been there. On the way back from a walk with a colleague this morning I thought back to the time between college and grad school when I felt like I was left out a lot and I didn't get it (this was during the time of my peak substance abuse and mental health challenges, when I was smoking and frankly probably not bathing often enough). Then there was the time when I was in elementary school and I was preyed on by neighborhood kids in the afternoons, especially this one guy who would casually come to the door and express interest in hitting our stash of maraschino cherries and American cheese and then let the other guys in to hide under couches and tease and torture me (yeah, dear reader, you know who I'm talking about). That was some fucked up shit.

But somehow I got through it all OK, with some bumps. Now Mary and I just need to help Graham.

Scheming and pedaling

Before heading out on my bike ride today, I spent some time looking at Google Maps thinking about where I was going to ride. Last summer I had some epic days, somewhere in the 35 mile range. This summer, between this, that and the other, I haven't quite gotten out that far. I have gone maybe 25 miles. Today I couldn't find a route that was going to get me to 25-30 without going far over, so in the end I just headed out the door at around 10:45 and decided to let me body tell me what to do.

Boy did it ever tell me. It often seems like, so long as I have adequate liquids -- preferably including electrolytes -- and I stop to get rest, I can just keep going, whatever the heat. Today was different. I stopped in the shade and drank every five miles or so. The hills were killing me, so I decided to loop back home and keep the ride to about 20. By the time I got to my neighborhood, my quad started cramping on me, or whatever the lower part of the quad above the knee is called. I ended up coasting the downhills in my nabe and gingerly walking the uphills.

One thing is clear. America has a ton of work to do to get the message of the most recent UN Report on the climate emergency drilled into its head. Still tons of people just riding around in big assed trucks. More people are going to need to have everything they own burnt to a crisp or blown away by a hurricane, more people will need to die, before the message is brought home. Shit, I myself have a lot of work to do. Priuses and cutting out beef won't get the job done.

nb. Per discussion with Adam Sunday morning at the Farm, my exhaustion was probably as much a function of not having rested enough from two hours of tennis the night before as it was the heat. Apparently, 55-year olds need to rest.

The Dream of Chicken and BBQ

Last night I had a dream. In it, I arrived at a favorite chicken and BBQ place -- which was in a strip mall so was basically an amalgam of Bullocks and Jamaica Jamaica out at 55 and 54. There was a boisterous line out the door like I had never seen before. It fairly quickly became apparent that they were out of fried chicken. Somehow I figured out that the huge crowds were Trumpists who were there to show support for the place because it had been disparaged in a snarky column in the Yale Daily News.

For some reason I didn't let myself get dissuaded by any of this and stuck it out in line, and ended up with a plate of some darkish but tasty BBQish concoction (actually rather like the stuff Mary brought home from Trader Joe's and had for dinner last night) and some sort of vegetably stuff, despite the fact that when I got to the front of the line there was no one there to take my money. I think the staff were just exhausted or something. Somewhere in there, the crowd forced me backwards and I ended up momentarily falling back to where I was sitting on an older Black lady's lap. I quickly got up and apologized. She was OK.

When all was over the place was more or less cleared out. I went back out to the parking lot and saw that some cars had been roughed up. My Prius was gone.

Talking to one or many

Just as I was about to sit down and blog, I saw a note on yesterday's task list that reminded me that I needed to send a card to a friend from college whose mother had passed away recently. I went and did that, I even wrote the address by hand rather than putting one of those pre-printed sticker on there since the whole point of doing it in the old way is to do it yourself and do it slowly and individually, in acknowledgment of the uniqueness of the loss.

Of course this is in marked contradistinction to the blog, which goes out to millions. Just kidding, my readership is not that big, the true contrast is of course to one of the well-known social networks, you know what I'm talking about. This blog is an intimate space, more so because my real name's not on it, read by a few, and I am grateful when any of you stop by.

We are fortunate to live at a point in history when there are many ways of keeping in touch with people. I have found it helpful to cultivate many of these modes of communication, the blog being but one, the telephone is even better, but the lunch or coffee is the best. Though of course we only have so many of them to allocate out, and often they are claimed by my favorite periodicals. Though even as I write that I realize that -- as the pandemic rises again and we move rapidly from solstice to equinox and the days move imperceptibly but inexorably towards brevity and cold -- that really I need to be getting out to see more folx while the getting's good.

Good kid

After stopping through Princeton for a tour of and disquisition upon Princeton by our friend Ted, last night at around eight we stopped at a truck stop at South Hill, Virginia to get some food to gird us up for the last leg home. The pickings were fairly slim. It was Subway, which we diligently avoided through the whole trip, McDonalds, and a range of hot dogs spinning away in the convenience store part. Ever the lover of the frankfurter, Graham rolled with a dog. I reached in my wallet and handed him an undifferentiated wad of smaller bills and headed off for the McD's, having been intrigued by an NJ Turnpike Chinese-language billboard for McDonalds' "new" chicken sandwich (it actually sucked). Somewhere before bedtime I momentarily wondered what had happened with my change for the hot dog purchase. My query was answered when I was headed out to the driveway this morning and I found the remainder of the bills sitting in my cubby next to my wallet.

This is a far cry from how I managed cash with my dad. He took money from He's Not Here in cash, presumably as a means of tax evasion, facilitated by the fact that it is relatively impossible to accurately inventory keg beer since so much can be spilled, etc. I routinely went in and stole money from dad's cash pile on top of his dresser (which is now my dresser), often when he was passed out in bed drunk. Probably I felt justified in doing so because I knew he was cheating on my mom and because he was generally so absent, certainly I felt I was entitled to the money for one reason or another. In any case, Graham is not like that at all, nor is Natalie, for which we are eternally grateful but also more than a little bit proud.

Building muscles

Yesterday after dinner in White Plains a typical belabored dinner-table discussion erupted, with Marys Lee and Lloyd joining with Rob to argue that high school kids shouldn't need to learn things like geometry, trig and algebra. Graham and I took the other side, maintaining that there was real value in forcing kids to study things that seem impractical and divorced from the reality of day to day living.

I won't bore you with the details of the argument. What was most interesting to me after the fact was going for a walk with Graham afterwards (to loosen up a little space in our tummies for the brownies I had just baked) and hearing how he was excited to have rehearsed and run through the possible pros and contras of this argument in case he gets in it again later with his friends. Which really kind of proved the point of how important it is to get kids to think in terms of building mental muscles and habits of the type that is facilitated by math study. It is very gratifying to see him internalize these lessons, as opposed to just ingesting ever vaster and vaster quantities of seemingly undifferentiated and unstructured factoids from the internet. It's all good, mind you, but some goods are better than others.

On the second of our half mile walking loops around Rob and George's neighborhood we discussed how Graham's study of Latin prepares him well to study not just Romance languages but also Germanic and/or Slavic ones, simply because he is used to working with case systems. Graham allowed that if a university's distribution requirements forced him to study a modern language he'd be "pretty pissed," but I still hope he will bite the bullet somewhere in there. Languages just do a brain good.

Ghosts of an absent woman

After 800-900 miles of traipsing around New England and upstate New York, we are back in White Plains, in a bachelor pad for two Yankees dominated by the trappings of a woman from Mississippi. Susan lived here for a long time and then -- after her daughter Allison started having kids down in Austin and unable to get George to move, to have faith that he would ever have a team of attendants who could take care of him as well as his current team (and this is 95% Sam, I'm pretty sure), she hied off to Texas. Understandably so, mind you. It was a miracle she ever came and shared as much of her life as she did with George.

But it is funny to live amongst all of her stuff. Big prints of flowers on the walls with gilded frames. A little piano no one ever plays. A pretty sizeable Noah's Ark off in the corner.

It doesn't bother Rob and George, mind you. It seems entirely natural and honestly probably comforting to George, I think, and for Rob.... well, Rob cleaned out Larchmont, at least 80-85% by himself. I think the prospect of emptying another house of the belongings of a woman is the last thing he'd ever want to do again. And if he emptied it, he'd have to fill it with other stuff, which would be so deeply contrary to his nature that it defies description. As far as things go, Rob is a pure minimalist -- with the exception of gadgets and athletic equipment and shoes, which he accumulates in reasonable but modest quantities, relative to your average American male.

Certainly I'm glad to be back here. I have come to appreciate this little love seat in the sun/piano room, whatever you call this space to the left of the front door. And also the armchair in the corner of our bedroom, and the wildflowers Rob has "cultivated" out back. There are places to stretch out before hitting the road once more.

Facts about farmhouses

For a time it seemed to me that one of the things that made the northeastern countryside more picturesque than the southern one was that there was more money up here, which made for the easier preservation of the old wooden houses along the roadside. So there were more nice old houses, as opposed to the south where they had gone to seed and/or been replaced by mobile homes.

Broader experience driving around upstate New York makes me realize that this impression was based on a small sample size. Certainly the two lane roads leading from I-88 to Ithaca were dominated by the same single- and double-wides that dot the roadsides of the south.

Or maybe it's that things have changed a lot in the last couple of decades. I remember some of this, but maybe not quite this bad, from when we used to go to Canandaigua from Princeton in the oughts. That's maybe 150 miles west of where we are, so by many measures more geographically and economically isolated. So it should be poorer over there. Maybe the trailers are a more recent thing. Certainly, I get it. Particularly if you can spring for a double wide. That can be pretty good living.

Schenectady

After resting a bit and cleaning up we headed out yesterday evening for dinner at a Japanese place with outdoor seating we had seen on the way in. I was driving along the road, maybe a little slow in an unfamiliar city, trying to figure out if I was in a 25 or a 35 zone. All of a sudden this guy pulls out and passes me on the left. In town. Double yellow lines. A couple of blocks down I learned that we were right by the town's big hospital.

Dinner was perfectly fine, if unexceptional. We were hungry. Somewhere in the middle a Black guy and a white woman came out, fully masked. He was wearing slides with white socks. She had on crocks with white socks. Made me feel right at home, though I rarely am so bold as to venture out in public wearing that combo. They got into a mustard-colored late model Camaro and drove off. America at its finest.

On the way back to the hotel we came through this nice older neighborhood we had seen on the way there. It was dark as hell, in town mind you. Only the sparest of streetlights to be had, at very low wattage. It was hard not to wonder whether municipal budgetary concerns weren't a factor.

Schenectady, it seems, was once the headquarters of GE, some many years ago. Its population peaked somewhere around 1930 and is now about a third lower than it was then. It has stabilized and clawed back a little in the last couple of decades, but is visibly not what it once was.

In the Charles Kuralt book I read earlier this summer, NC's favorite wayfaring journalist notes how, already in the 50s, he had begun to chronicle the disappearance of family farms throughout the heartland. The emptying of America's great hinterlands is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for many decades. On the one hand, the myth of a golden era of plenitude is just that. On the other, it is a powerful one, and no one can be blind to the persistence and fertility of the soil from whence sprang Trump.

The Waning of Roadside America

I have seen it in many many places, but am always sad when I do. Today we took Route 2 west from Boston headed out towards Williamstown. Lots of beautiful road, fringed with trees, abutted quite often with ponds and rivers (first Millers River heading West, then the Deerfield River as the road rises into the Berkshires). But  populated with all too many old motels and other attractions that have just gone to seed, with faded paint at best, all too often just abandoned and with roofs caved in, forlornly hearkening back to simpler days of American summers and touring.

At the top of one mountain there was one motel, the Mt Whitcomb Resort, which was still operating and was freshly painted. I rejoiced inwardly and we stopped and checked out the view. But the shops out in front of it were themselves ramshackle. We kept moving.

We were due at this swank riverside hotel (on the banks of the Mohawk) and casino in Schenectady, where I had gotten a room at a very reasonable price, I'll have you know.

Blazing new trails

George and Susan (more recently George and Rob) have been living up in North White Plains for 20 years or so, but only with the sale of Larchmont in late 2019 did it become the base of our operations when in Westchester. Then came COVID.

So we may be forgiven for having had a narrow understanding of what is around here. The Chinese place that Walter's family had considered the best place in Westchester was just a mile or so away, but then it closed down somewhere in there.

This trip, with the help of our friends at Google Maps, I've been discovering what is actually nearby, and there's lots of goodness. There are Korean restaurants, an H Mart, a good Chinese restaurant, a Columbian take out place (not great, but needed to be tried) and even a Golden Krust Jamaican beef patty bakery. I've never been to a freestanding one of those, though I've often admired the one visible from the train on the New Haven Line of Metronorth as you pass through the Bronx. To burn off those calories, 12 minutes away is Rockefeller State Park, built on land which must have been an old estate of the oil scions. We enjoyed a stroll on "David's Walk." Many miles of trails back up in there. Yesterday evening Mary and I checked out the trails at Graham Hill Park in Pleasantville. 

Not so very far away, half an hour or so, is the Pound Ridge Preserve, where I remember going in the 90s with Story, back before we had kids. Maybe we'll go back there next time we're nearby. And then get some beef patties.