The Morgantowner: New York and New Year

It's New Year's Eve and we are back from more than a week in New York City. We stayed with Joe's stepmother, Naomi. A friend of hers recruited Joe to officiate at the wedding of a couple from Liverpool on December 29, and Naomi said we could stay with her. But Joe's brother Henry, a Cajun musician in Louisiana, had booked a concert at a hipster club on the Lower East Side with his New York-based jug band, Washboard Jungle, for the twenty-first, so we decided to extend the vacation.

We were both busy the evening of the twentieth, Joe with a temple board meeting, and I with a Morgantown City Council meeting where they were to discuss banning guns in municipal buildings. I am in favor of restrictions on guns.

So we were late getting out and late getting to Henry's concert. Henry also stayed with Naomi until Christmas day, when their sister Martha came from Memphis with a friend, then he stayed with their half-brother, Naomi's son, the famous Zack Hample.

It's too bad we are not rich. We could easily be bicoastal jetsetters. I am most comfortable in New York and Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We have friends and family members who can put us up in all of those cities, so we are able to visit.

In New York, we spent an afternoon in Macy's, like the "hicks from the sticks" we really are. We visited the train exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx. I wanted to go there because I read about it in New Yorker, and I love model trains, and because The Bronx is the county in New York State where the President-elect got the lowest percentage of votes. I can tell you which county that would be in every state.

In addition to Joe's family, we saw cousins from my mother's family, and one more distant cousin from my father's side. I met him through Jewish Genealogy. I love them, but we don't get together often.

I started to understand how people in West Virginia feel about being "eleventh generation West Virginians." I hear that all the time here, and, as someone without West Virginia connections, I'm a bit offended by it. Yet my ties to New York, although I never actually lived there, are strong. My parents grew up in The Bronx and the club where Henry's band played is two streets over from where my maternal grandfather lived at thirteen, as recorded in the 1910 census.

My relatives in New York expressed concern for us being in Morgantown, as some people here worried about us being in New York, which feels safer to me than West Virginia. Naomi Hample lives in an apartment building with a doorman. It would be hard for someone to get to her at home; we live in a house on a public street. My relatives thought we should live in New York, if Joe could get a pulpit there. It's tempting, but we own a home in Morgantown, and have a cat who likes to be out on our lawn. Most importantly, we have meaningful work here. Joe is the mayven of liberal Judaism in this part of the world, and I am working with other progressives to change the political culture here. Our life is now in Morgantown, and I don't see that changing soon.

This year I noted that the street food in New York is more likely to be Halal than kosher, the cab drivers all had Arabic names, the people working at a luncheonette where we ate one afternoon were all from Bangladesh. Yet, on the Upper West Side, where we stayed, each apartment building had a Hanukkiah as well as a Christmas tree in the lobby, and Jews are an accepted part of the scene.

The wedding Thursday night was lovely. The groom is sixty-four, the bride, sixty. There were fewer than fifty people there, mostly relatives and some friends from England. I loved hearing about being Jewish in Liverpool, and they talked about how the city has grown and changed since the days of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Manhattan has changed too. While some things seem timeless, others change rapidly. When I see immigrants there, wherever they are from, I think about my father's parents and my mother's grandparents, who came to New York as immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I feel a kinship with them, rather than a fear.

And here's piece for the end of the year that I wrote on December 15 at my writing group at Osher Life-Long Learning at WVU.

I'm at Life-Long Learning, where a group of us elders spend two hours Thursday morning on our writing projects. I thought I would spend a half-hour reviewing my year on Facebook, then write for an hour about what happened this year. Instead, I spent an hour on Facebook looking at posts from last January and February.

Many people have said 2016 was the worst year on record. That typically refers to the presidential election this year, which left people like me (gay, Jewish, urban, educated) appalled by what has happened, distrustful of our own neighbors, especially here in West Virginia, where a higher percentage of the population voted Republican than in any other state.

But for me, personally, the year has been a great one. Against the advice of everyone I asked, and with the help of only a campaign treasurer, I ran for state delegate in Morgantown. I lost, which I expected, but I did better than anyone expected, made lots of friends, and a point, about how people need to be treated.

In the midst of the campaign, Joe asked me to go to Israel with him to the conference of Reform rabbis. I didn't know if I had the strength to do it, and things have not been going the way I would like in Israel, politically. What I found in Israel was that the people are friendly and welcoming, even many of the Arabs. There are leftists who fear their militaristic government, just as we do here. I saw some long-time friends, and since I was not technically registered for the conference, I had time off to rest up if I needed to.

Joe turned sixty in August, and in lieu of a party, I suggested we visit San Francisco and Los Angeles. We missed some of our friends, who were away when we were there, but we saw many of our peeps in both cities. Part of me wished we could be back there, where we are not freaks like we are here, but a part of the social structure of those cities. We stayed with friends in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and a few blocks south of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. In L.A. we stayed where Jews are an overwhelming majority- almost like being in Israel. Still, another part of me felt we got out just in time, before the cities were overrun by zillionaires whose agenda is not the same as ours, and where we could not compete even if we wanted to.

We were in Memphis for Thanksgiving with Joe's family, still in shock from the election. We attended an interfaith meeting, where Jews, Christians and Muslims came together to pledge to fight hate. There was gorgeous gospel music, in the Memphis tradition, and the invocation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke, just before he was murdered, at the church where we met, now used as a community center.

Travel was theme for us both this year. I'm leaving Saturday for my twelfth county of the year within three hundred miles of here. Some of the places I visited this year went so heavily Republican in the election that news crews went out to interview people about their views. In some of these declining counties, people are frustrated by cuts in jobs, especially in coal country. Here in Morgantown, where the economy is more vibrant than in most of Coal Country, young people still don't stay here after college. I tried, in my campaign, to change the culture here, make it more accepting.

Joe and I both taught at Life-Long Learning this year. Joe had two classes on Jewish themes, booked solid. I taught about the popular music of 1960, 1961 and 1962. Our classes were wildly popular, and I learned a lot from my research. I'm a bigger fan of Elvis, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline and Judy Garland than I was before.

In our congregation, we lost five young families. The reason given was that the young college professors were offered better, higher-paying positions, but in two cases, sons of the families were harassed at school, one for being half-Asian, and one for being openly gay. Those two families had lived in California and went back there.

We'll be in New York at the end of the year. where Joe is doing a wedding, and his brother is having a CD-release party. Since the election, we have both been happy to be away in bigger cities, with family and friends.

Morgantown seems less friendly than before, although we have friends beyond the congregation after nearly four and a half years here.

My goals for next year include keeping on with the same things, being politically active, trying to block almost everything the Republicans in the US and state governments here try to do, and making the Democrats a better party.

I hesitate to make my perennial resolutions: to lose twenty pounds, organize the junk in the house and finish my novel.

I wish everyone reading this a healthy and happy 2017.

All the pics are from New York between December 21 and December 29. Apple Photos has changed, and now I can't get my photos onto the blog. These were all from my phone or taken by others and downloaded on my computer as documents.