The Morgantowner: December 2019

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

End of the Year and New York 2019

This year didn't totally suck, Friends from California visited us here in Morgantown: Jonathon and George from Long Beach, and Roy and Pat from Los Angeles, now living in Lompoc, in Santa Barbara County. We traveled to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where we saw our old crowds, and felt welcome, and just this week, we were in New York City for the first time in three years.We were in Memphis at Thanksgiving. On my own, I visited eleven of the twelve counties I planned to visit, four each in Ohio and Pennsylvania and three in Virginia. The largest and most interesting was Cuyahoga County, Ohio, including Cleveland. Many of the places I visited were economic dead zones, pretty towns with declining populations and abandoned business districts. I ran into a demonstration against abortion in DuBose, Pennsylvania, which infuriated me, and visited Bucyrus, in heinous troglodyte Jim Jordan's Ohio congressional district. I noted that it was warm in northern Pennsylvania in January and February, when it should have been cold. Virginia is pretty, Ohio has good libraries and Pennsylvania has extensive state parks. Most of these places are exclusively white and at least nominally Christian. I know people are in pain, but I still don't get voting for the awful Congresspeople they support. I have that problem here in West Virginia as well.

At the end of last year, Joe and I were talking about whether we wanted to stay in West Virginia. We are bicoastal people, at home in New York, Maryland and California. We have friends in big cities on both coasts, and we miss them. We have many homophobic people in our state legislature, and they showed it openly on several occasions this year, including an attempt to overturn Morgantown's non-discrimination ordinance. I told Joe I wanted to run for reelection to Morgantown's City Council just to prove it wasn't a fluke that I won. Ultimately he was offered and accepted a five-year contract to continue as rabbi at Tree of Life Congregation, so we are staying.

The congregation has been lovely to both of us and people have included us in their lives. Younger people have moved away and are difficult to replace. There were several funerals this year, and Joe spends a lot of his time visited hospitalized congregants. How long this congregation can continue is a question, but it's important that there is a liberal Jewish presence in this part of the world. Joe often speaks to non-Jewish groups, and I spoke to a high school class south of us about the Holocaust, and to pharmacy and counseling students at West Virginia University about "Jewish culture," even though I am unsure what that means.

My reelection turned out to be a joke. Two people originally challenged me. We had to turn in seventy-five signatures in our ward in January and February. I didn't get the help I had two years ago, although my friend Ash helped and neighbor Paul circulated petitions for me. One candidate turned in signatures in the last ten minutes of the last day. It turned out that many of his signatures were fraudulent, a fact discovered by a civic gadfly who thought there was something fishy about this guy, who had moved into the ward, to an apartment building owned by a real estate developer who has made his contempt for our Council clear, specifically to run against me. Why the City Clerk's office didn't catch the signatures that were the same as those on my petitions is a good question. Long story short, there was fraud, as far as I know unpunished, involving this candidate, who not coincidentally, had run for a statewide office as a Republican. The clerk's office and the Republican Party are up to their ears in this, but thanks to our Republican State Attorney, Mac Warner, from our county, nothing came of the investigation he supposedly conducted. The election was the end of April and for several weeks, it looked like I would be unopposed. Then the other challenger, on the Republican central committee in our county, signed up as a write-in. He ran a pathetic campaign, but still won 27% of the vote. I got 73%, but I was robbed of the challenge I wanted, someone with ideas I could debate and prove myself against.

Our big issue on Council was a proposal to annex a large unincorporated area of our County into Morgantown. This is important for us to maintain the vitality of the city, to increase housing options and to make these areas more livable by providing police and fire services, zoning and building requirements. We were met by a barrage of criticism from real estate developers, business owners and some homeowner associations. We had meetings where some people brought up good questions, which we were able to work on, but mostly we faced off against powerful interests who have no interest in the community other than making a fast buck. We were also personally attacked by a number of people, making me question who we might actually want in our city. I've changed my shopping habits to try to buy more from merchants in our city limits.

I look back at pictures of the victory of our "all-progressive" City Council when we were elected in 2017. We were happy and optimistic. That's gone now. Cracks have appeared over the issues of homelessness and drugs in Morgantown, and we have gotten no respect from the Chamber of Commerce (now called Morgantown Area Partnership), West Virginia University, and the Monongalia County Commission. We have five good people from our County in the State Legislature, but they are up against homo-haters, anti-abortion zealots, white supremacists, and people paid off by extractive industries from other parts of the state. It's tough. No knock against the new Councilors elected in 2019; I totally respect Dave Harshbarger and Zackery Cruze, and we are united on most issues. Still, I miss Ryan Wallace, who moved to Canada, where his wife has family. He was my closest friend on Council. And Mark Brazaitis, the Prophet, who was criticized relentlessly for his take on issues, didn't run again. He was right about everything. I have a year-and-a half to go on Council. I hope I can stand it.

I had a light bulb moment in New York Christmas night. People in West Virginia talk about how much they love this place: the beautiful scenery, the friendly people, the sense of place. It is pretty, away from the strip mines, the trash heaps and junk yards. Morgantown is a unique town, and there are many good people here. But I don't find most people here friendly, quite the opposite. So the moment came when we were out with family at Sammy's Roumanian Steak House, a famous Jewish spot on Christy Street on the Lower East Side. It's loud and crowded, in a basement, with raunchy jokes from the DJ/Comedian, Dani Luv. He asked where we were from, and he was shocked that we were Jewish from West Virginia. But I also knew that my great-grandfather ran a little store across the street from where Sammy's is, in the early part of the twentieth century, when my grandfather was a child. I felt a strong connection to that place. I feel that way in New York City generally, even though I never lived there. We visited often from Baltimore when I was a child, and my mother's parents, who lived in Queens, took me into Manhattan to see the sights. I get, more than I did before this trip, how people can feel attached to a place. It's an emotional and visceral thing.

In New York we stayed in Hell's Kitchen, once a rough neighborhood, and maybe still, to some extent. There were lots of gay clubs on the streets, and our non-luxury hotel was filled with people speaking foreign (to us) languages. We felt welcoming to them, and I tried to translate from Spanish for a couple who couldn't make themselves clear to the desk clerk. We walked quite a bit and took subways to most of our destinations. We weren't far from Times Square, absolutely mobbed at all hours. I like it, but I was sad that we are too old to enjoy the gay clubs, and that the people on the subway were almost all much younger than us. The stairs to the subways were daunting for me. Decades ago, I would have run up and down them; now I clutch the rail and walk slowly and carefully.

Joe's brother Henry, a musician, was in town from Louisiana and dragged us to Carnegie Hall to see Handel's "Messiah"with a small baroque orchestra and amazing soloists. While I might disagree with the theology, the music was glorious. I took Joe to see Pedro Almodóvar's stunning new movie "Pain and Glory," out of fear that it would never play in Morgantown. We walked around Greenwich Village that day. One day we visited the Guggenheim Museum, one of the last of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpieces, on Fifth Avenue, to see an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe photos and those of people who came after and critiqued or imitated him, then we visited the Neue Gallerie, in a mansion down the street, to see German and Austrian Art, including Gustav Klimt's "Woman In Gold."

Just being in New York, seeing the 59th Street Bridge, the block where the album cover for Dylan's
"Freewheelin'" album was photographed, walking through Central Park and Times Square, places we could identify from movies and television, was great. We visited Joe's stepmom and went out with her a few times, and hung out with Joe's brother and sister, in from the South, and his half-brother, the notorious baseball collector and YouTube personality, Zack Hample. I saw two cousins of mine, one after forty-five years, because I made a connection with her adult grandchild on 23 and Me. A successful friend of Joe's from Harvard came into town from Long Island with his husband and treated us to lunch at the fancy Harvard Club. Our last night in New York, we took the subway to Brooklyn to participate in the lighting of a giant menorah by Chabad in the rain on the last night of Chanukka. We wanted to show solidarity after the attack on Jews in Monsey, Jersey City and in Brooklyn.

I noticed that the temperature was well above normal for the last week of the year in New York City. It's not just weather, it's climate change, and it's here. The day we left there was a forecast of flooding in many areas around the waterfronts.

Of course, the trip was exhausting and expensive. We drove, and paid to park the car for a week, in addition to the hotel. I came back with a cold, and we had boarded the cat, who has been clingy and neurotic since we picked her up.

So, if you asked how I was doing, I would say I'm depressed about how things are going politically, for me personally on the city council in Morgantown, but also with the corruption and hatred generated by our state's Republicans and by the current administration in Washington, I turned seventy in 2019, so I'm a year older than my father was when he died. Of course I worry about my health and that of everyone in my generation. I feel left out of contemporary culture, like my time has definitely come and gone. Joe has been stressed too, and while our relationship is strong, it's been strained this year by the pressures we both feel.

I'm trying to be hopeful for myself and our country. I hope to build some bridges politically with other progressives, and be more understanding of those who think differently. I want to continue to travel, and to strengthen my marriage, shunning those who think it is illegitimate. I say this every year: I want to lose fifteen pounds (I lost five this year) , and declutter my house. May this be the year. If you've read to here, thank you for letting me rant, and may 2020 and The Twenties, be a healthy and prosperous time for all of us.

Monday, December 9, 2019

Cuyahoga County

This was my eighty-ninth county, the last of the forty-two counties that start with "C." It's also, according to the latest U.S. Census estimates, the largest county I've visited on these trips since we moved East in July 2012. Cleveland is the main city in Cuyahoga County, and only the second (after Athens County, home of Ohio University) of nineteen I've visited in Ohio, that didn't vote for the current President in 2016.

I allotted four days, Friday to Tuesday over Veteran's Day weekend, to do justice to the county. Between Council meetings, my last class at OLLI, and our planned trip to Memphis, I couldn't find other times to go. I thought I would stay downtown, but The Usual Chain charged twice as much as a suburban branch, plus an extra fee for parking. I had figured I could drive the 200 miles to Cleveland from Morgantown before lunch. I left late, as usual, so stopped for lunch on the Ohio Turnpike at Panera at a rest stop. I don't know if the kids who work there don't listen, but this was probably the third time, at different locations, that my order was taken wrong. This time, I caught it before they made up the order and got it straightened out.

I pulled into Cleveland's Public Square about two, found a parking garage, and started looking for a bathroom. I walked into a fancy branch of a big chain hotel looking for one. This is a time when I use the privilege of being white and unscruffy, looking like I might being staying at the hotel, to find a bathroom off the lobby. No luck! It was locked and one needed a guest key to get in. There was a coffee place next door. I thought I would order tea, and use their facility, but a sign on the door said there was no public restroom. I ducked into the iconic Terminal Building, figuring it might still be a railroad terminal and thus have a restroom. The lobby area and several floors of the building are now an indoor mall, with some upscale stores and many vacancies. I found the food court in the back, with an adjacent restroom, open to the public. It was crowded with the locals, mainly African-American men, looking for a bathroom and a warm space to hang out. This seemed to be the only spot on the Square to do that.

I did check out the Civil War monument, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, much fancier than the obelisks honoring Confederate soldiers in every county in Virginia. It's quite elegant, with a museum inside with brass bas reliefs of scenes from the war. From there, I went back to the car, and drove out of town to the hotel, eight miles south in Independence. Wikipedia says the Rockside Road corridor, where my hotel was located, is the "Silicon Valley" of Metropolitan Cleveland. After a nap, I walked to a fast-casual Middle Eastern restaurant. It was cold out and it wasn't a great place to walk, with only intermittent sidewalks.

I picked twenty historic places in Cleveland to visit, out of several hundred on the National Register, and planned to visit the most eastern ten Saturday and the western ten Sunday, leaving most of the suburbs for Monday. I planned on seeing the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood on Saturday. Sunday I figured to go to Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Saturday, the temperature ranged from 29 F. to 37, overcast and windy. I started at Cleveland State University just east of downtown, saw some old buildings along the "green necklace" park system along Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. I stopped at Case-Western Reserve University, then passed the museums (some of which Joe and I visited with my sister Robin in 2018), then out to the far eastern end of the city, to find a historic theater on East 185th St. I ate at Gus's Diner on the same street, an old-fashioned kind of place, like the diner in the movie that we used to visit in Baltimore. From there, I checked out Wildwood Park along Lake Erie. This was my third trip to the lake, after Ashtabula County, Ohio in February 2014, and Chautauqua County, New York in March, 2018. On both of those trips, the lake was frozen over. Not this time. There is a strip of small shops on Waterloo Road, parallel to I-90, out that way, and I stopped at a record store. I bought a 1969 Warner Brothers teaser, a two-record set of up-and-coming artists from 1969, like Sweetwater, and The Fugs.

I visited the Maltz Museum in suburban Beachwood, the current fashionable Jewish suburb, after close-in Cleveland Heights, where there is still an Orthodox community in that walkable inner suburb, and past Shaker Heights, Cleveland's answer to Baltimore's Pikesville, where Jews lived fifty years ago. Beachwood is past there, and the houses are larger than Shaker Heights and on bigger lots. The museum is next to a sprawling synagogue complex.

The museum featured a traveling show from Philadelphia's Jewish Museum about Leonard Bernstein. There was a lot about his family history, an explanation about the music, and his life as alternatively an openly gay man, and a husband and father of three children. What moved me, was his political advocacy for humanistic causes, and his abiding love for Israel. Politics today are so much coarser, and Israel has made itself much harder to love since those days.

I stopped in the gift shop and bought a new kippa for Joe, and a copy of Roz Chast's 2013 graphic memoir, both funny and sad, about her parents in their old age, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" I noted to the woman working there that they had a hardcover version of Parts One and Two of Art Spiegelman's Maus. She had never heard of it, and I told her she had to read it. That may have been my one good deed on this trip. I asked her why the trees were bare in Beachwood and there was snow on the ground, when that didn't seem to be the case in most of Cleveland, where there were plenty of colorful leaves out and no snow. She told me that this was the beginning of the "snow belt" more west than south of Lake Erie, extending up to Buffalo, and that it was colder and snowier than central Cleveland. Who knew?

I got back to the hotel, not close, around sunset, napped for a time, and found, online, a diner to the west of where I was staying in another suburb. I thought about finding a movie or something, but crashed back in the room.

Sunday was warmer, but more difficult. I thought I was cool, missing a home football game in Morgantown. I didn't note that the Cleveland Browns were playing Sunday afternoon. I explored some of the old industrial areas west of downtown, saw some little coffee places popping up, and nearer downtown, a neighborhood of new apartment buildings and some factories renovated into loft-type apartments. I saw young people walking their little dogs, electric scooters for rent littering the sidewalks and other signs of young up-and-coming inhabitants. Thee was even an LGBT Center. I snapped a few shots, but as I crossed the Cuyahoga River into the city center, it became difficult to navigate and impossible to park, because of the impending football game. I gave up and headed back to the'burbs.

I couldn't find anyplace to eat that interested me, and finally lunched in a Subway in an old treeless shopping center. I stopped into a grocery store for fresh fruit. Cuyahoga Valley National Park, as the name implies, follows the river, but there is also a canal from the days before the railroad came, with a few old inns and remnants of the canal. Although the area is flat, the river is in fact in a valley, and although just over the hills there are factories, warehouses, and houses, the valley itself is remarkably preserved. I walked the trail along the canal about 1.5 miles each way. I came back to the hotel and slept, then went to dinner at the Ohio-based chain restaurant near the hotel. It was better than that chain usually is.

The weather forecast for Monday was dire, although it was relatively warm (40 F.) and sunny in the morning. It was supposed to hit 50, then start raining, and, by 3 P.M., snowing, a lot, with possibly a foot of accumulation and temperatures falling to 15 F. overnight. The hotel let me check out a day early. I went looking for a few historic houses in Independence and Parma, where I also found Sheetz, where I got gas for the trip home. There was a historic house listed at an address on a lake in the far southwest corner of Cleveland, so I went there and found two late nineteenth century mansions ( I never did see the lake). It was starting to rain by then, and I headed to Westlake, a suburb on Lake Erie almost in the next county. I went there because there was a Nordstrom Rack, and I am a sucker for bargains on clothes. It was in a development like The Grove in Los Angeles, kind of Disney-looking, only with three and four-stories of apartments upstairs, parking on the streets and much larger. The layout was confusing, as was parking in the garages, but I made my way to Nordstrom and bought a shirt, pants, underwear, socks and a belt. There were some fancier brands than other stores, but I think T.J. Maxx is as good, and cheaper. I went looking for a place to eat. I picked a noodle place (closed) and then a Chinese place (also closed). There was a chicken place, but it was all spicy, which I didn't' want, and a pizza place, where I said to the greeter that I couldn't eat a whole pizza and she snapped back "Well, we don't sell it by the slice," and walked away. By now it was getting colder and raining, and I wondered why this outdoor shopping area was built in a cold, snowy place. It would make sense in Southern California, but not here. I stepped into that ubiquitous coffee chain and had a bagel and hot tea. Next door was Graeter's ice cream from Cincinnati, deserted. I stopped in for a scoop. The proprietor told me there were now two branches in Cleveland, the other in a development like this one in Beachwood, and that, while it was mobbed in summer, it was slow November to March. I asked him if he thought all the apartments were rented and he said that in this part of the development, more expensive than some of the others, he didn't think so.

By now, it was approaching 2 P.M. and the snow was to start at 3. I was at the northwest end of Cuyahoga County, heading south and east to get home. It was pouring down rain. I got through town, and soon the weather cleared and, by the time I got to Morgantown, it was 60 F. and sunny. I was home for dinner. It snowed a bit overnight Morgantown, and the temperature dropped suddenly down to 30, but unlike in Cleveland, there was no accumulation. I enjoyed being in a large metropolis with a diverse population, and I would like to go back and see more.