Martin Wenglinsky

One of those companies that checks your DNA sent me an ad saying they could find my grandparents' World War II military records. Grandfather? My father was a soldier in World War II, not my grandfather. I clicked "grandfather" anyway and got the draft registration for my father, known then as Martin Wenglinsky. It showed his address in the Lower Park Heights neighborhood of Baltimore, his parents' address, in an apartment building off Grand Concourse in The Bronx, and the name and address of his employer, David Wendell, who lived in then-tony Ashburton in Baltimore. David Wendell was my grandfather's younger brother.

M. Wenglinsky and Sons was the family business, making pieces for mens' suits and wholesaling them out to manufacturers. "M." was my great-grandfather Mendel, who went by "Morris" in the United States, having brought his family to New York from Russian-occupied Poland around 1903. Someone tried to sandblast the name of the company off the side of the Cluett Building, but one can still see it at 22 W.19th St. in Manhattan. M. Wenglinsky had contracts with the government for clothing and supplies in both World War I and World War II. Mendel had six sons, and at one time, in addition to New York, there were factories in Paterson, New Jersey, London, England, Havana, Cuba, and Baltimore, Maryland.

My American-born father, I suspect something of a hipster, was not much of a student, not stupid by any stretch, but not well-disciplined. They gave up after he left his third high school, and he went to work in the family business. He told me that at some point he found out he was being paid less than anyone else in the plant, so he joined the union to make more money. When the union went on strike, he still went in to work with his father, but they had nothing to do. Someone gave him a package to deliver across the street, and the union people saw him and would not allow him to be hired back after the strike.

"No problem," said my grandfather, "you can go work for your uncle in Baltimore, and he'll teach you the business." Only Uncle Dave, who was much younger than my grandfather, had an infant son, and didn't want my father to learn the business. Apparently, they never got along well.

So, it's 1942, and my father is twenty and renting a room in a row house in a working class Jewish neighborhood, and I know that 1942 was not a good year to turn twenty in the United States. He was drafted, sent to Needles, California to train for desert combat, then shipped off to the Pacific.

My father was not much of a talker, and I was able to get very little from him about his war experiences. When we were children, we lived in a suburb full of kids, and most of our fathers were veterans. On summer nights they would sit outside and talk about the war with each other, but would clam up if any of us kids were around. 

It's hard for me to imagine how lonesome he must have been in Baltimore, and how terrifying it would have been to be drafted during World War II. At twenty, I was in college and protesting the war in Vietnam. It was when the shootings at Kent State happened, and the patriotism my father had evaporated from my thoughts. 

I might write more about this another time.

From Memorial Day Weekend

There's been a lot of talk about reopening the economy, and even in Morgantown, our Acting City Manager is opening offices, with precautions, of course, and expects the City Council, of which I am a member,  to resume meeting in person. We have a workshop in June where fifteen or so of us will be locked up for a day and a half to talk about the future. I have my doubts about attending. The woman who will run this event, Julia Novak, who has a consulting firm, asked us a few weeks ago to speak to  her about our thoughts on the city. I spoke to her by phone Thursday and expressed my doubts about attending at all, that several of us had misgivings about spending money for this when city revenue is sharply down, and that the former cohesiveness of Council is fraying. She took all of that in. Some of the people on Council had not contacted her, as she requested.

As usual in my life, there is a point to my being on Council that I hadn't counted on. Our City Manager left last week for a job in his native Michigan, the Police Chief is resigning at the end of June, and we have an unprecedented financial and medical emergency in the city. Most people would poo-poo this, but I can't help feeling that, despite my reluctance, God has chosen me to step up to the plate and be a leader, exactly when I don't want to be a leader.

In my last post, I was hoping that everyone could be tested for COVID-19, so we would know exactly where we stand. After Joe Severino, a young reporter for Charleston's Gazette-Mail (and a former WVU student who reported on City Council) wrote a series of articles about a group of African-Americans who were infected at a large church service in early March, and for some reason couldn't get tested, the state started two days of mobile testing, open to everyone with or without insurance. The dates in our county were yesterday and today. Joe and I didn't go. We've been cautious about going out and we're not sick. The test I want, to see if there are antibodies, is not widely available, and my friends who know say those tests are not yet reliable and don't mean you have immunity from reinfection.

Meanwhile, our local mall opened this week, and restaurants are able to open if they limit capacity and take precautions. We ate outside two weeks ago on a warm, dry day (we've had rain nearly every day the last few weeks) and the staff was cautious and prepared.  There were only four or five tables, where usually there would be ten. Still, a raucous family of five sat behind us, and they and everyone who walked through the area did not have masks. Reports from friends who have been to Lowe's and Wal Mart say that very few people are masked, and someone said they were confronted and mocked for wearing one. It's Saturday afternoon, and Joe and I will probably get Chinese or Indian carry-out for dinner from a downtown restaurant. Even if we are allowed to eat in, I'm not ready. In the Eastern Panhandle of our state, near Harper's Ferry, Charlestown and Martinsburg, the number of cases has increased dramatically. They border areas of Maryland and Virginia where nothing is open, so people have migrated in. Democratic legislators in the area have called for the Governor to close things up again in that part of the state, but he assures them that he and his great friend, the President, know what they are doing.

It's increasingly clear that the President has no idea what he is doing, and our Governor is giving in to pressure from certain businesses, like allowing tanning salons to reopen. Our whole country seems to be derailed, and while the Governor was cautious at first, he seems reckless now.

The only place I've seen obituaries for people who have died is in The New York Times, which we get delivered late Saturday night for Sunday, and in Rolling Stone, which this month featured obituaries for singer-songwriter John Prine, and for  Adam Schlesinger, of the band Fountains of Wayne, who died from COVID-19. Schlesinger's symptoms in early March are similar to what I had in January, only they took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse and he died at age fifty-two. Maybe I had that and maybe not, but I have to think there is some kind of purpose to my life continuing. I take that as a challenge to be better, more of an activist.

I'm not optimistic about the future of the country, or really, of our species. I should be doing more. I gave some of my $1200 government money to political candidates who might make a difference, and I argued on Facebook with people on the left who say they can't vote for Biden because he is pro-Israel. Our synagogue had a presentation this week online with Rabbi Joe, Imam Kip of the local mosque and Pastor Zac of First Presbyterian Church, about how to lead the congregation from a distance. Of course, all three were frustrated, but when Mavis Grant-Lilly, a local activist and the moderator, asked what surprised them, Imam Kip gave the most honest answer of the night, when he said "I'm surprised by the lack of intelligence of people...even those in positions of power." Pastor Zac said he was surprised that people are so impatient when they know lives are at stake. Rabbi Joe and I sent a picture of ourselves in masks to Morgantown's Communications Director to forward to the County Health Department, saying we wear masks because pikkuach nefesh, saving lives, is the most important commandment in Judaism.

What I've learned from Joe and others is that our first priority is saving lives, and the economy is way behind that. Because we don't eat meat at home, only out of the house, I have not eaten meat other than fish since we've been locked down. With the callousness of the meat industry toward its workers, and the "meat at all costs" attitude of the President,  this would be a good time to stop eating meat altogether. And before the pandemic, I had picked out a new car for us to replace our 2012 Suzuki, but now, I don't think I will ever buy a new car. We have not both been out at the same time since early March, so two cars is a luxury. Maybe it's a good time now to push for that Green New Deal, for Medicare For All, for a much reduced consumption of everything. As we say in Judaism "Therefore Choose Life."

Medical Check-In

I have healthcare through WVU Hospitals. I see a general practitioner annually, a cardiologist, dermatologist and allergist usually twice a year, and I have an annual check-in with a Medicare doctor. They GP, cardiologist and Medicare doctor  were scheduled for this month, but the general practitioner was postponed and they asked me to do an online with the Medicare doctor. I've seen the same Medicare doctor for four years, a soft-spoken Italian woman. This year they told me she was on leave and gave me a physician's assistant. There were complicated instructions involving an app on my phone, but they relented somewhat and said I could do it on a laptop. The app on the laptop wanted permission to go into all the other apps on my desktop and change them, so no. The phone app was better, but then there was a WVU app on top of that that wanted to access everything on my phone. When I clicked "No" it said I couldn't use it, so I said "Yes."' Later, I sent a note to WVU complaining.

The PA was an older woman  (I checked. Her degree was from 1979, so maybe sixty). She had issues with the technology. They always ask the same questions "Do you have rugs or rickety stairs?" "Do you have a bar in your bathtub to hold on to?" "Are you afraid in your house?" No, I'm afraid out of my house these days. They test your memory, and ask if you are depressed. "I'm a 70-year old gay man living in West Virgina," I said. "Of course I'm depressed." I said that.

I told her about being sick all of January after spending a glorious week running around Manhattan at the end of December. Is it possible I had a mild case of COVID-19? Mild, like not going out of the house for ten days, then no more than an hour a day for the next ten, not being well until the end of February. She told me there is a test, but we don't have it, and if you had it before, we don't know if you can get it again. The regular test for the virus would show if you had it, but you don't qualify for the test.

Meanwhile, our Governor wants to partly reopen the state this week. Maybe outdoor dining if separated from others (and if it ever stops raining) and haircuts. Our county is not included, because we are considered a "hotspot" in the state with 107 confirmed cases. My constituents are already asking City Council here in Morgantown to block off a lane on certain streets to add space for cafés on the expanded sidewalk. And Delegate Evan Hansen, from our district, and a scientist by training, points out that, although the state has recorded fifty deaths from COVID-19, statistics show that deaths in the state since the first of the year are running 1,600 above what one might expect, with most of the "excess deaths" in March and April. So maybe the pandemic is worse here than people think. Certainly everyone should be tested, and everyone should be covered by healthcare, not just rich people or people who are here "legally." People who lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance must be covered. You can't stop a pandemic if there is anyone excluded from treatment. Anyone.

Joe and I have still been going to the grocery store twice a week. All but one worker at our local Kroger is masked, but the vendors who come in to stock the shelves are typically not, and many of the customers are not masked, especially the younger ones. With pressure from the state and federal government to reopen quickly, I fear going out in the future will be terrifying. Even our city manager's office has proposed reopening. There's a meeting tonight (Tuesday) and I know some of us will object to opening city offices too soon.

In addition to my OLLI class and City Council, I've been reading a lot, five books at a time. I'm reading about the music from the Brill Building in the 1960s (my next class), a haunting collection of short stories from Carol Shields, purchased at a library sale in New Vienna, Ohio on my trip to Clinton County in December of 2018, a Pulitzer-winning book about people who are evicted, and how and why that happens. I'm reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' book We Had Eight Years, a collection of his writings during the Obama presidency with new commentaries, and Vikram Seth's more than 1500 page novel about India in 1951 and 1952, which I'm reading for the third time, A Suitable Boy. Coates attended my high school, briefly, I think, and twenty-five years after I graduated.

I read Morgantown's Dominion-Post and Charleston's Gazette-Mail every day, and Sunday's Washington Post and New York Times. We get Consumer Reports and Rolling Stone for me, and The New Yorker and The Economist for Joe. Joe has stopped reading news for the most part. It makes him too anxious. I have to read about the virus in New York City and the politics in Washington in short doses to keep from losing my mind completely.

I'm traveling in my dreams. Last night, I told the bus driver parked on 6th Street by the Los Angeles County Art Museum that I wouldn't be going on the trip to New York because I had been there with Joe in December, and last year with my mother and sister. I had a memory in the dream of visiting some elderly relative in The Bronx in an apartment house on a hill. I was, in reality, in New York with Joe in December, and in New York with my mother and sister (and nephew) not last summer, but in 2002. I haven't had relatives in the Bronx since the 1950s. That scene was filched from another dream. My friend and classmate (second to eighth grade) Rodger Kamenetz writes about dreams. Maybe I should ask him what this means.

The PA at WVU was only worried that I get up to pee five or six times during the night. She doesn't think it's heart failure because I run several days a week, and that seems to be getting better. Maybe it's kidney failure or prostate problems. She wants tests for all of those. The cardiologist told me that  my heart works at 40% of what it should do. My father died of kidney failure (refusing dialysis) when he was a year and a half younger than I am now. And Medicare won't cover a prostate test.

So, the future doesn't look bright. My generation had too many people to start out with. They sent some of us to Vietnam to reduce our numbers, ignored AIDS for many years to kill off those of us who are gay men, and now that we are old, we are expendable so that the economy can reopen. Without the possibility of contracting or contracting again COVID-19, I still have plenty of medical issues that could end my life. I was able to answer most of the questions in a good way. I generally remember to take my meds, I can still keep track of money, carry grocery bags, remember most things, cook, clean (although I pointed out that we generally don't). I don't fall or feel dizzy. My goal now is to keep it all going as long as possible. I said the other day "If I can have ten more years of decent health, I'll be happy." Then I remembered that one of my grandmother's friends said that sitting around the lake in her Florida condo development more than fifty years ago. I guess that's where I am now.