Spring in Morgantown

We've had exceptionally warm weather here in Morgantown, setting a record high of 83 this past Saturday. I saw an article claiming that this was because of the "aerosol layer" being destroyed. I admit to ignorance of this, but I know everything here bloomed a month early, and while, as a former resident of Los Angeles, I appreciate warm dry weather, I know it's not right for North Central West Virginia in March. It's pretty, but ominous.

That's the macro. The micro is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We have had twenty-some cases in our county, most of them in one nursing home, a mile and a half from my house, and one wing of that home, among residents and staff. We can still go out for a walk or a run, buy groceries and gas. This week we picked up carry-out at two different restaurants, a treat given the bland stuff I usually cook, and the limited cooking skills of both of us. People at the grocery store tend to keep their distance, and with WVU closed, many people are gone altogether, but a few came up close to me to pick out fruit in the produce section Sunday. I should have said "back off," but I guess I'm too polite. The check-out person Sunday told me that the older workers were told to stay home, that if we brought our own bags, no store employee could touch them. I got home and wiped down the car door handles, shift knob and steering wheel with disinfectant, then washed my hands carefully. It's hard to say what is enough.

We. told our cleaning woman not to come last week, but paid her on PayPal, which she says everyone does. I usually leave a check for her, being a last-century kind of guy. I totally understand how privileged Joe and I are. Just today, I scrubbed the bathroom sink and cleaned the toilet. I know millions of people do this every day, but neither Joe nor I have done that in years.

I get lots of invites to dance routines, yoga practice, or stretching exercises online, as well as religious services and political talks. I've done one City Council meeting on Zoom, and we have another tomorrow. Some of us want to find a way to help people in Morgantown who have lost work or are threatened with eviction. Joe has done services, Torah study and a class online, and tonight he is speaking on a virtual panel to students at WVU. Other than those, neither of us has much interest in participating in online groups. Joe works nearly as much as he always has, and I spend more time on Facebook and Twitter, or looking up random things (music, cities) as my ADD directs me.

. For now, at least, things are stable here We went out and walked the trail along the Monongahela River north of town. lots of people were out as well Saturday, but the restroom was locked and the water fountain wrapped. Playgrounds in town are taped off, warning children and adults to stay away.

I read about New York (my spiritual home) and Miami, New Orleans and Los Angeles, all places I have lived, and my heart goes out to the people in those cities. I pray for the victims of the disease, the healthcare workers, the clerks in the grocery and drugstores and the post office, and the politicians, who I hope will show some wisdom. I hope the business people and the ultraconservatives I see online will have some compassion, and note that we are all in this together.

Pandemic!

Today (Monday, March 23) Jim Justice, the Governor of West Virginia, announced that we were basically locked down. One can get groceries or medication, or go to church (although that would seem to be a bad idea) but that's it. When I last wrote, nine days ago, things didn't seem so bad. Now they are. Our state has fewer COVID-19 cases than any other state, but testing on any scale just started Friday. A friend put on Twitter that they were sick and qualified for testing. There is a new case at a nursing home up the hill from us. One must be symptomatic and in a risk group to be tested. The testing is in a drive-up tent at a local hospital. Results take a few days. I don't think they will take people without insurance.

Bradley, a young doctor who went to med school at WVU writes from New York City that the hospital where he works is overwhelmed and it gets exponentially worse every day. My cousin Olivia, a nurse in South Florida says the same thing. Italy, Spain and France are disaster areas.

I love big cities, New York in particular, but for once I'm glad we're not there. although the next few weeks in West Virginia could be just awful. We still go the grocery store. I walk or run around the neighborhood. Our income is not at risk, and we have health insurance. We are better off than people who are losing their jobs in our nearly-deserted city, people who can't pay their rent and have no health insurance. Although our television is not hooked to anything, we have internet, and a supply of records, CDs, books and movies to keep us entertained. Joe and I have been polite around each other, and give each other space around the house. We don't argue.

We still work. We've learned to use Zoom the last few days, and Joe is teaching a class while I'm writing this. Our synagogue had a phone-in service last Friday. I have a City Council meeting tomorrow night, which I will attend on Zoom. The agenda we were sent last week said nothing about the pandemic. We have to submit a budget, but our plan is in tatters as the local economy collapses. Some of us are looking for things the City of Morgantown can do to ease the way for our constituents.

The news has been saying that Democrats have held up a proposal to provide relief to the economy. That proposal bails out Wall Street, banks and large corporations. Democrats are quite right to hold out for a proposal that provides unemployment insurance, free testing for the virus, and rent relief. The U.S. Attorney General is threatening to block civil liberties. Our whole country, with its long history of democracy is teetering on the edge of a precipice, about to be pushed off by our President and his cronies.

I'm seventy now. I've survived serious asthma, reckless drivers, and a heart attack. I was born in the United States with great-grandparents who had the sense to leave Europe in the early part of the last century. I didn't go to Vietnam, and avoided contracting AIDS. I would like another ten years of reasonably good health, but if I don't get that, I don't have much to complain about. The worst thing I have to do this week is tell the cleaning woman not to come Wednesday, since we are not supposed to have visitors.

The best we can do now is be cautious, generous, call people in power and ask them to do the right thing, and live with faith that this too will pass, and hope that we will live to see it.

Delaware County, Ohio

Delaware County is north of Columbus, twenty-seven miles downtown to downtown Delaware, the town that serves as the county seat. Parts of Columbus, Westerville and Dublin are in Delaware County, it being easier for cities to annex in Ohio than it is in West Virginia. I was set to go Wednesday to Friday, but woke up late after a grueling and annoying City Council meeting Tuesday. Then I checked the internet and read the paper.

Tuesday there were no reported cases of  covid19 in West Virginia or Ohio, so I figured I could go. I would be alone in the car and in a motel, and not in crowds. By Wednesday morning, there were three cases in Cleveland (not close) but Ohio University in Columbus was closing for the duration. There were no cases in West Virginia, but very few people had been tested, less than ten at that point. Maybe this was more serious. So I didn't go.

Friday, the President seemed to take someone's advice and declare a national emergency. He has been exposed to the virus, but continues to shake hands with people. Democrats in Congress finally bullied the Centers For Disease Control to offer testing for free. In Morgantown, West Virginia University went on spring break Friday, extended it to two weeks instead of one, and students were told not to return to campus. An undergraduate friend spending the semester in Australia was ordered to come back, although no one can see what the point is of that. Public schools closed early Friday and are not coming back. The students have "snow-day" assignments they can do at home.

West Virginia University's basketball team won its first round of "March Madness," but now the rest of the games are canceled. Professional sports are off, the high school basketball tournaments won't happen. Major League Baseball canceled spring training and the season will be "delayed."

We've seen the potential failure of the whole American enterprise. I don't mean just the ups-and-downs of the stock market. Many, many students receive free breakfast and lunch, feminine hygiene supplies and even take-home food at school. People have no health insurance coverage or high deductibles. Coronavirus is not a big deal for young healthy people, but for older people it is life-threatening. Those with mild forms of the disease need to be isolated, with pay. We have no mechanism for that, no way to make sure people have medical care, infected people have a place to go, poor children have food to eat and someone to care for them when schools are closed. No one has said what will happen to college students with part-time jobs, paid-for meal plans or scholarships.

If anything, all of this proves that Bernie Sanders was right all along, and Elizabeth Warren, too. The United States has been coasting along with some thinking everything was great because the stock market was up and unemployment was down. On the ground, though, we knew that people didn't have health insurance or sick leave, couldn't afford to feed their families. We have been absolutely unprepared for a catastrophe, and yet things happen all the time all over the world.

Rabbi Joe (full disclosure: my husband) went ahead with services Friday night. As usual, most of the congregants were older. He spoke about the plagues that were God's wrath, like when Moses found the people worshipping the golden calf, and many people died. We don't believe that now, that God controls those things. Still, there are consequences for our actions. Electing someone incompetent and uncaring to be President, and for Republicans in Congress and the Senate, going along with whatever he wants, has left us all vulnerable.

The Friday when President Kennedy was killed was warm and sunny in Baltimore, where I was fourteen and a ninth grader. The next day, it rained heavily all day and by Monday it was bitter cold. We've had seventy-degree highs this week, about twenty degrees above average, but this afternoon, it turned cold and it's snowing. Sometimes I think the weather does somehow follow world events.

The City of Morgantown sent out an overloaded agenda for Tuesday's meeting: interviewing people for city boards, dinging a landlord for nuisance properties, passing a budget and a five-year capital improvement plan, then meeting after the regular meeting about potential lawsuits. I suggested yesterday by email that we table as much as we could and talk about the emergency in our city, which even if no one gets sick, will be devastating economically. I also sent a message to my doctor asking if I should even go this meeting, being high risk for this illness. I've been offline last night and today for the Jewish sabbath (I still wrote this on Saturday, but will post it after dark), so I only saw a post from one Councilor, who agreed with me.

I hope we can all get through this. I saw Readers Vent comments in The Charleston Gazette-Mail, where people said they think it's all a hoax because they don't know anyone with corona virus. I am reminded of 1982, when friends said that about AIDS. Many of those people died of the disease. We need to be vigilant and demand that our governments at all levels do what is needed.

Harrisburg

Dauphin County, home of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's state capitol, was on my schedule for December 2019, my ninetieth county visited within three hundred miles of Morgantown since I arrived in July 2012. I was at my sister Robin's in Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington, the second week in December, with a plan to go to Pennsylvania for two days, when I got a call from home that Howard "Rusty"Mall, a long-time and well-liked member of  Tree of Life had died, and the funeral would be in two days. I drove home the next morning. Then Joe and I were off to New York before Christmas. I spent most of January with a sinus infection and no energy.

 I drove to Harrisburg Sunday, and stayed two nights over Presidents Day. I couldn't read my notes from December, so I started over. Sunday I got a late start. I had to buy gas, and a Washington Post. I took cash out of an ATM, wrote out a few checks (hopefully to pay off our newer car) and dropped them at downtown Morgantown's post office, and took off from Monongalia County's courthouse to Dauphin County's courthouse, 216 miles, close to 11 A.M.. It was sunny and got warmer as I went along. I stopped for lunch in Halfway, Maryland, near Hagerstown, at a chain noodle place in the parking lot of a mall.

I made it to the County courthouse around three, looked around a bit downtown in Harrisburg (free parking on Sunday) and made it to the hotel, a cheaper nameplate of The Usual Chain, just south of downtown. I checked in and fell asleep for an hour. 

I looked on Google maps for a close-by restaurant marked by one "$" and found a Chinese restaurant on Second Street., the main commercial street paralleling the Susquehanna River. It wasn't terribly cold out (about 40 F.) so I walked there, on the trail through the park along the river to downtown, then, a long block to the restaurant. It was family owned, and I had my usual chicken and rice, listed on the menu as a "healthy option," steamed, with a little brown sauce on the side. I am surprised that many of these little restaurants don't make hot tea, but it finally occurred to me that they have contracts with major beverage companies, in this case, Pepsi-Cola, to only sell their products. I can't prove it, but it explains why one can't order hot tea at many small Chinese restaurants.

I walked back to the hotel, and laid out plans for Monday. There are 64 places on the National Register of Historic Places in Dauphin County; thirty-four of them are in Harrisburg's city limits. I thought I could walk from the south end of the city, where I was staying, to the north end, since the city occupies a narrow stretch of land along the Susquehanna. That plan was good until the next morning, when I decided it would be too hard, and with libraries closed for President's Day, I might not be able to find a bathroom when I needed it. This is seventy and on a diuretic. I didn't change my plan until I was ready to walk out the door, when I decided to go to Middletown, a small city eleven miles south along the river, with a historic synagogue and Penn State Harrisburg's campus.

It was relatively warm out after a cool early morning, and I walked all over Middletown, a pretty, historic and seemingly kind city, with historic houses, many divided into apartments, and lots of those signs saying "We welcome all kinds" or "Black Lives Matter" and other liberal signs. I found the small synagogue building, from 1906 and still in use, at least part time, and also a late eighteenth century church. There's a local supermarket, not part of a chain, well-stocked and clean, where the workers were friendly and helpful.

I visited the bland campus of Penn State, but couldn't stay because the parking was a dollar, no credit card and, although I had change, the last five cents were pennies, which the machine wouldn't take. I gave them 95 cents and got nothing. I only stopped to take a pic, and, driving through the campus, got a glimpse from a distance of the cooling towers from the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

It was after twelve, and I had planned to lunch at the food court in Harrisburg Mall, just outside the city of Harrisburg, so I figured out how to get there. The mall is pretty, but like so many malls, there are empty storefronts throughout. I found a skewer place that has a sign saying its meat is halal. A good sign in my book, halal being the next best thing to kosher. I ordered a skewer of salmon, and it came with salad, a boiled egg, a pita-like bread and rice. Much better than most mall food. The nice young man working there made me an Earl Grey iced tea from a tea bag.

I checked out the Macy's in the mall (there is also one across the river in the mall in Cumberland County). It looked threadbare compared to most Macy's, and I got the impression no one was working there. There's a store called 2nd and Charles, selling records, CDs, movies and games, all used. I found a copy of the movie "A Home At The End Of The World," which I had been looking for. It was five dollars, and the cashier warned me that it was scratched and it might not play, but that I could return it within two weeks. I watched it a week later, and it was fine.

Meanwhile, it was late- after one. I decided to check out the three synagogues at the north end of the city, then hit Midtown Scholar, an independent bookstore, and take a glance at the Pennsylvania state capitol building. It was way too sunny out for February in Pennsylvania and warm. There were plants starting to spring up. I parked the car, and walked from the Orthodox synagogue, a few blocks off the Susquehanna River, back to Front Street, where the Conservative and Reform synagogues are located. They are all quite large, with added wings for classrooms. There are mansions along the river, many of them schools or other institutions. The streets back are row houses like one might find in Baltimore. Many of the people I saw out were African-American. It felt home-like to me.

Midtown Scholar is in a space that may have been a movie theater, that was next to a bookstore. The whole site is a bookstore. I had a list from The New York Times of the best books of 2019, and I looked for one that Morgantown's library didn't have. They also have a coffee bar in the bookstore, and the kind young lady serving coffee found me a copy of Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. The Times listed it as one of the ten best of last year. I'm about one-third of the way through. It's about a family's road trip from New York City to the American Southwest. They are an unusual family. Go read it.

Across the street from the bookstore is an old-time market, open  only Thursday to Saturday. I was there on Presidents' Day Monday, so it was closed. There is also an art house movie theater in the neighborhood. People in the motel told me midtown is the up-and-coming hipster neighborhood. I could see that.

The State Capitol Building sits on a rise above the Susquehanna. It's impressive. I just stopped for a minute to take a picture. It was after four and I badly needed a nap, so I headed back to the motel.

I woke up exhausted and not ready to go out and look for a restaurant. My go-to place when I just want to eat something is Panera. There are several in Dauphin County, but none in the city of Harrisburg. I drove five miles into one of the townships to a treeless, soulless shopping center with a supermarket and a liquor store. There was an Italian buffet restaurant next to Panera, and I might have gone there, but it was closed for the Monday holiday. I ate soup and a sandwich, drove back to the motel, caught up on social media, and went to sleep.

I left early Tuesday, stopping for lunch at The Creamery, just off I-68 in Cumberland, Maryland. I had driven to Harrisburg via I-81 from Hagerstown. Going home, I drove the Pennsylvania Turnpike, prettier, and paid eleven dollars and change in tolls, to Bedford, then south on U.S. 219 to Cumberland. I had time for a nap before Morgantown's City Council meeting that evening.

Dauphin County is one of the most populous of the counties I've visited, and Harrisburg is a "real" city, with neighborhoods, a large Jewish and African-American population, an independent bookstore and movie theater. I skipped a lot of the suburbs, and missed the Appalachian Trail, which runs on a mountain north of Harrisburg. Still, with the good weather, I got to be outside and see quite a bit. The week I got back someone asked me where I had been that I had such a good tan. The person was surprised when I said "Pennsylvania."

Dauphin County Courthouse, Harrisburg, completed 1942

Railroad bridge over the SusquehannaRiver connecting Dauphin and Cumberland counties.

Simon Cameron House and Bank, Middletown, 1832-33

Joseph Raymond House, Middletown, 1891

Charles Raymond House, Middletown, 1889

Across the railroad tracks in Middletown

Swatara Ferry House, Middletown, about 1820

B'nai Jacob Synagogue, still in use, Middletown, 1906

Residential street in Middletown

St. Peter's Kierch, Middletown, completed 1769

Penn State Harrisburg Campus, near Middletown

street in uptown Harrisburg. I liked the armored knight in the yard

Kesher Israel Orthodox synagogue, Harrisburg

Beth El Congregation, conservative, Harrisburg

Blue Zone fitness station in the park along the Susquehanna River, Harrisburg

Temple Ohev Shalom, Reform, Harrisburg

Flowers blooming in February

Broad Street Stone Market, Midtown Harrisburg, 1863

Broad Street Brick Market, midtown Harrisburg, 1874-78

Midtown Scholar Bookstore, Broad Street, Harrisburg. The first two buildings left of the corner are the bookstore, next to that is the LGBT Community Center.

Pennsylvania State Capitol, 1902-1906

Stallions, a gay bar, conveniently close to the Capitol Building.