Brian Wilson 1942-2025

 I've hardly been posting on here, but the death of Brian Wilson hit me harder than I expected. I was a Beach Boys fan before The Beatles hit America, and I can still listen to their old music and think "This is cool." Right now, I'm listening to "Surfer Girl" from a cassette by Time-Life called "The Beach Boys 1962-1967" from a set called "The Rock 'n Roll Era." I bought a complete set of these with a rack from a thrift shop. When I see someone's collection, whether the person gave it up or the survivors sold it, I feel like I have to keep it together. In addition to "Surfer Girl,"Be True To Your School" and "In My Room" were favorites of mine from the early days.

In the summer of 1965, I traveled to California by car with my friend Joel, his parents, and his cousin from Brooklyn. We had only t-shirts and shorts to wear, so we were surprised by snow on the ground in Wyoming, froze in San Francisco, and, 15 year olds that we were, we were stopped by the police in Los Angeles for being out at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles after curfew. We wondered why nothing was happening at this famous intersection. We made it Ensenada in Baja, hung out at the beach, and came home via a southerly route. We just missed the Watts riots. "California Girls" had just come out, and we thought it was about the coolest song we had ever heard. When we got home to Baltimore, we found out that our new favorite song had not yet been released on the East Coast.

I continued to listen to The Beach Boys, although my main love at sixteen was Motown music. I bought "Pet Sounds" when it came out. I can admit now that it was too deep for me. Like everyone, I was moved by "God Only Knows," but the song that hit me hardest was "I Guess I Just Wasn't Made For These Times." Even at sixteen, I was beginning to think that might be true, and that song continues to hold meaning for me. 

I continued to collect Beach Boys albums, particularly liking "Surf's Up" and "Holland." At the time I didn't know what was going on Brian's life, only that they were  no longer in the "my girl, my school, my car, my surfboard" era. 

Fast forward to 1985. I was living in Los Angeles, ironically, since my first trip there I hated the city. I was working for Social Security as a first-line supervisor, and although I was good at the job, I could see I wasn't going to stay there. I took a class at UCLA Extension called "The Career Exploration Seminar." I thought I might be an actor, starting at thirty-five. There was a gorgeous woman in the class, an actress who thought she was too old to get parts. She encouraged me to try acting. The last night of class, we all went out to eat later. She lived with her boyfriend at an address on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was a therapist, handsome enough, probably fifty at the time, with a diamond stud earring. I said "You must be doing well to live on PCH in Malibu." He smiled at me and said "I actually only have one client right now."

That mystery lasted until I bought a Brian Wilson solo album, where the woman in class was listed as cowriter on some of the songs, and on the liner notes, he thanked his therapist, Eugene Landy, the man I met at that restaurant.

I tried to complete my collection of Beach Boys albums. "Beach Boys Today!" became a favorite, especially the song "Kiss Me Baby," a perfect expression of teen angst, and a gorgeous piece of music.

I moved to Morgantown, West Virginia with my husband (we met in 2005 and legally married in California in 2008). He is a rabbi and was hired by Tree of Life Congregation here. People encouraged me to go to Osher Life-Long Learning, since I had no plan to work here. I saw some of the classes people taught about music, and I started teaching about my favorite music. One of my first classes, which I later taught in a more expanded version, was about The Brill Building sound. I had a book about it. Like me, Brian was a fan of "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes, and cribbed some of his orchestration from Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound." 

I pretty much devoured the 2014 film "Love and Mercy" with Paul Dano and John Cusack as Brian. Eugene Landy was much better-looking than Paul Giamatti, who played him in the movie. When we bought a used Honda Civic in 2018, I showed the pretty blonde saleswoman the trailer. She screamed "Oh God, is that Elizabeth Banks? I love her." Brian married the car salesperson in real life. 

I came to learn about the split between Brian and Mike Love, grieved over the deaths of Dennis (my crush for longer than I care to admit), and Carl, who kept the group together when Brian was having issues. 

For my fiftieth birthday in 1999, I threw a "Soul Oldies Dance Party." I bought four tickets to see Brian at The Wilton Theater in Los Angeles. My friend Jeff and I went with a lesbian couple we knew. We were in the front row. Brian introduced a song he wrote in memory of his brother Carl. He was met with weak applause from most of the crowd. I could see how angry he was. He brought out an electric guitar and played "Barbara Ann." not an original Beach Boys song, but the Beach Boys' cover was popular. People jumped up and screamed, and I could see the look of contempt on Brian's face. 

I recently found a copy of the reissue of "Carl and  The Passions So Tough" and "Holland," of which I had a decades-old copy. I still collect solo albums by Carl and Dennis. I cherish my CD copy of "That's Why God Made The Radio." When it came out, I watched the video over and over. Thinking about it though, I knew no one drives on PCH when there is no traffic, no group of young people are all happy and skinny like those actors, and they wouldn't be excited to meet The Beach Boys. What The Beach Boys sold us was a fantasy of California, not necessarily the real thing, at least not often. 

The Beach Boys were faves of mine from the time I was twelve, and I continued to love their new music long after the end of Motown and the breakup of The Beatles. 

I'm not the kind of genius who can write and arrange music, and I was never a great actor, but I can appreciate great art, like Brian's songs, and also how hard life can be, and how we deal with our difficulties, even when we are materially well off.

The great musicians we loved as teenagers in the 1960s, if they managed to live past thirty, are all in their eighties now, and like Brian Wilson and Sly Stone this week, may not last long. At least they've left us an enduring legacy that I hope we can pass on to the next generations.

It's 5785!

 We all have hopes for a new year on the Jewish calendar. This last one has been rough for me personally and for the Jewish community generally. Last year Simchat Torah, the end of the fall holidays, will be October 24 in Israel. Last year, it was October 7, and many of those who were not in synagogue were at the Nova Music Festival near the border with Gaza. Soldiers from Hamas broke through the border, murdered 1200 people at the festival and in nearby town, raped and mutilated many people and took over 200 hostages back to Gaza. This has been compared to Pearl Harbor or 9/11/2001 in the United States. Israel's government, under Prime Minister Netanyahu, retaliated with a pledge to destroy Hamas.

What I've heard from Israel is that people are angry that the government, filled with right-wingers and religious conservatives, had notice that this attack might happen but were unable to stop it. There have been protests against the government about this issue, and the failure to get most of the hostages back.

Meanwhile, college students and others in the United States, some of whom are Jewish, blame Israel for the attacks, for not acknowledging the national demands of the Arabs. I've heard lies from people on the left about how Israel was founded. It's called an "apartheid state," "settler colonialism" or that Jews have no right to live in "Palestine" and should go back where they came from. I grew up in a real apartheid state called "Maryland" and Israel is not like that at all. As for "settler colonialism," to say that as an American of European heritage is perhaps the ultimate chutzpah. And of course, people in Israel aren't just the descendants of Holocaust survivors, as many think. Even they, three generations later, are not going back to Germany or Poland. Many Jews were kicked out of Iraq, Iran, Morocco and Egypt, as well as other Arab countries, or came from Yemen or Ethiopia, where they were not safe. It bothers me that Jewish students at many colleges and in some large liberal cities do not feel safe. I've often thought we would be better off in Pittsburgh or New York than in Morgantown. There have been demonstrations here about the war in Gaza, but it has been respectful and law abiding. I understand the grief over the loss of life in Gaza and now in Lebanon, and I think Israel, with a different government, could have found a more humane way to meet its goals. The rest of the world could also have done a lot more to stop this bloodshed, or to ameliorate the suffering of Arabs. who are living in refugee camps for 76 years, with the delusion that they can return to Palestine.

On the other hand, I have friends who think Donald Trump could have solved this and blame President Biden and now Kamala Harris, for all the bloodshed. I'll just say they are delusional and leave it at that.

This wasn't supposed to be an essay about Israel's war or government policies. I had my own tsuris to deal with. In the summer of 2023, I was diagnosed with skin cancer and thyroid cancer. They cut out the cancer from my arm, and that's fixed, although now they want to take a non-cancerous (yet) mole off my leg. The thyroid cancer was a fairly big operation in November, with follow-up treatment that included a strict diet and a radioactive iodine pill. That also seems to be done now. I've been MRI, CT-scanned and echocardiogrammed the last few weeks. It all looks good, except they said my heart is "no worse than a year and a half ago." They also decided I have osteoporosis,  and need prostate medication. 

My knee was operated on September 10, for a "meniscus debridement," not as bad as expected, and I'm in physical therapy to deal with that. The eye doctor sent me to the clinic, where they will take out the wrinkled film on top of my left eye. It's all depressing, but when I go to any medical office or pharmacy or to physical therapy, I see people younger than I am, and in much worse shape. I also remind myself of the many gay friends I lost to AIDS when they were in their 30s and 40s, and the young women who died of cancer. I'll be 75 this month, and when I think about, I guess I should be grateful I lived this long.

The worst thing this year was the death of my sister, Robin Wendell Olson, on March 5. I think I've processed it and moved on, but then I wake up some nights and miss her terribly, or expect a phone call from her that doesn't come. At times, something happens that I want to share with her, that no one else would understand, or I need advice. I'm trying to arrange a date when Joe and I and my nephew in Colorado can do an unveiling, where family and friends go back to a cemetery to "unveil" the monument or plaque on the grave.

I did manage to travel in 5784, some on my own, in my project to visit one county per month within about 300 miles of Morgantown. Last October, I visited Hancock County, West Virginia, Hancock County, Ohio, and Harrison County, Ohio. My long-time friend Roann, who I met in Los Angeles in 1984, came down from Ann Arbor to meet me in Findlay, Ohio, in Hancock County. 

We flew to Memphis at Thanksgiving to be with Joe's family. It was great to see everyone, especially the now-grown up children of his first cousins, who, like their parents, are brilliant and beautiful, and seem to have made good matches for themselves. Joe's sister and brother were glad to see us, too. 

In early December, I visited Clarksburg and vicinity, in Harrison County, not far from here, so I spent most of a day and came home. There's a mall in Bridgeport, the other city in the county, that was mobbed with people carrying packages. The economy must be better than people think.

At Christmas, we visited my sister in Greenbelt, Maryland. She found us a Jewish deli in Howard County, just north of where she lives, and took us to Nordstrom Rack and bought us both clothes. We had Chinese food in Beltsville, and streamed both "Maestro' and "Oppenheimer." 

In January, I visited Richmond, Virginia, and surrounding Henrico County. I was supposed to take an extra day to visit Hanover County, just to the north, but came home to avoid a pending storm. I got back to Hanover County in February. 

We were in Greenbelt again when my sister died in March, and stayed for the funeral and three days of mourning. We had another service at our home once we got back, and we were grateful that 30 people came to grieve with us.

In April, I fell off my bicycle onto the grass on the side of the road. I was almost home, but it was a hot, humid, day and I had drunk all the water I brought with me. I hadn't ridden my bike in a month, and there was a lot of traffic as I was trying to slow down and look back to see if I could make a left turn. I fell, and couldn't get up. Two women came out of a restaurant to help me, and insisted on calling 911. I was in emergency for three or four hours, and got eleven stitches in my leg. They bandaged my bleeding arm with sterile tape strips. I haven't been on my bicycle since. Not that I can't ride, I just can't fall and bleed like I did. After my sister's death, this was the second saddest thing that happened. I've been a bicyclist since I was five, and now I can't do it. 

Joe and I were invited to a Memorial Day weekend bat mitzvah in New York for the daughter of one of his classmates, who is now the rabbi at the synagogue off Central Park West. We were adventurous and took AMTRAK, which meant driving 60 miles to Greensburg, Pennsylvania to get the train. It seems to take forever, but we could move around, get food in the dining car and go the bathroom whenever we wanted. We also didn't have to pay hundreds of dollars for parking. There were three days of events at the temple, and people we knew were glad to see us. We also made some new friends. While we were there, we saw two of my cousins, and Joe's stepmother and half-brother, the famous Zack Hample. Our last night there, we dined with a friend Joe knew from high school. I loved being in New York. It was intimidating at first with the crowds and the traffic, but after a day, I calmed down and enjoyed being there. 

Less than two weeks later, we drove to a wedding, the son of one of Joe's long-time friends, to his girlfriend of many years. The ceremony was Jewish, although the bride is not. The older guests, many of whom go back decades with Joe, were fun, they had a fabulous soul band and great food. Before the wedding, we spent some time exploring and got a tour of a fire museum and and ate outdoors at a French-Thai  restaurant in Somerville. 

Later in June, I visited Harford County, Maryland, the last of the twelve I scheduled for the period of July 20213-June 2024. I saw Bel Air, Aberdeen and Havre de Grace, and some rural parts of the county. 

July was our big trip to California. We had six days in Los Angeles and six in San Francisco. Almost all of the time was seeing friends, not so much touring. People cooked for us or took us to restaurants. I lived more than two decades in Los Angeles; Joe lived in San Francisco about the same length of time. We had a car in Los Angeles, but not in San Francisco. Our first day in Los Angeles, we attended the funeral of someone I knew form BCC, the temple I joined in 1987, and where I met and married Joe. We visited the graves of some of my pals in that cemetery. We went to services there Friday night, also. We moved away in 2010, so of course, there have been lots of changes. Our friend were happy to see us, and I still think Los Angeles is beautiful, despite the ubiquitous homeless encampments and trash on many of the streets.

In San Francisco, we were treated well by Joe's long-time friends. We had some time on our own, and explored a bit. When we visited The Castro, the central gay neighborhood, I was thrilled to see so may older gay men, many of them in couples, out on the street. We were not outsiders there. One day, we saw my people. We went out to Contra Costa County on BART to see my cousin Eric, who is close to my age, his wife Karen, two of their three children, and all four grandchildren. They call Eric "Poppy," which is what he and I called our mutual grandfather. Their daughter and her husband had just gotten back from a month-long hiking trip with their 13 and 10 year old daughters on the north coast of Australia. Eric and Karen's son and his wife had taken their 7 and 4 -years old to Italy for a month. Eric and I reminisced about how hard it was to get our parents to take us anywhere. It was lovely to see all of them. Eric pointed out that he is 75, and his father, my mother's brother, died at 78. We hadn't seen them in three years, and I think it occurred to us both that we might not live to visit again.

From Eric's, we took the BART back all the way across San Francisco to see my friend Art and his wife. Our parents were friends before we were born, so we've known each other forever. His older brother was in town for his grandson's 9th birthday, so we met all of them at a cold and windy park. We saw the two brothers, the brother's daughter and her son, and the daughter's mother. We went back to Art's, bonded with the cats and went out to dinner. They booked us a WAYMO, a driverless taxi, to take us back to the hotel. It was a sci-fi experience, but went off without a hitch.

One more word about San Francisco. We had dinner at the home of a college friend of Joe and his husband, out at the west end of San Francisco. We came back to the hotel on the Geary bus, the main east-west bus. A lot of people got on who looked be Cental American. They were  probably hotel and restaurant workers getting off work, and seemed friendly and upbeat, laughing and joking with each other. They mostly got off a few blocks before our hotel, in The Tenderloin, a place known for homeless people and drug users, and probably one of the few places these people could afford to live. It burns me that one of the candidates for President makes demonizing immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign. 

I took two more trips in August on my own, determined, despite my leg problems, to get back to what I like. I visited Martinsville, an independent city surrounded by Henry County, Virginia and Monterey, in Highland County, Virginia's least populated county, in Appalachia, adjacent to West Virginia. My later trip was to Highland County, Ohio, and to Fayette County, which I missed a few years ago because of the pandemic. I enjoy being out on my own, exploring an unfamiliar town.

I had surgery on my bad knee on September 10, and my physical therapy is helping. Tomorrow, October 9, they will fix my eye, and with new glasses, I should be all set. 

It's been hard, but there was fun, too. I'll be seventy-five later this month, and I;m determined to enjoy whatever time I have left, and as my sister Robin said, quoting (loosely) Michelle Obama, "Whatever comes up, you get through it and keep going." We might move in two years when Joe retires. I might not be able to a big trip like we did to California this year. I'm hoping we can get to Memphis for Thanksgiving.

On the world scale, I'm hoping that Israel can live in peace, and that all people in that part of the world can live freely and without the tyranny many have had to deal with.

Shana Tova!

A Visit Home, Part One

I often have dreams about trying to go home.  I lived in Los Angeles for more than twenty-five years, in eight different apartments. I sometimes dream about standing on Wilshire Boulevard, trying to figure out where my current apartment is and how to get there. One time, I dreamed that I moved back to Baltimore and I was working in the kind of men's clothing factory my father used to own. I was unhappy with the work and the cold weather, and decided to go back to Los Angeles, to the sun and palm trees.

Joe moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1980 with friends from college. He lived in Berkeley for a time before settling in San Francisco about the time I moved to Los Angeles from Miami in 1984. He wanted to go back to visit his long-time friends. We were last there three years ago for a week each in Southern and Northern California. I came back from that trip with a sinus infection that lasted a month.

I've had a rough year. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer last summer, and my thyroid gland was removed in November. My sister died in March, in Maryland, after an illness of only a few days. Then in April, I fell of my bicycle and need eleven stitches in my leg, and glue and surgical tape for a wound on my arm. I've been riding a bike since I was five, and the idea that it might be too dangerous, along with everything else, depressed me. I've had trouble with my left knee for some time, and the sports doctor from WVU Medicine figured out that it was a torn meniscus. I met with the surgeon, but I needed permission from both my cardiologist and general practitioner before they could proceed with the operation. I didn't get those before the trip. I'll have the surgery August 9.

We finally agreed to two days of travel, and six days apiece in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Joe had a schedule. We would see one group for lunch and one for dinner every day. I could schedule Los Angeles, and he would schedule San Francisco. He wanted all this written out before we left. Joe wanted to throw diet-consciousness to the wind. I didn't want to gain a lot of weight, or have my bad leg swell, which has happened before. 

Nothing went wrong with the travel times, only that the facial recognition equipment at the airports didn't recognize me, or it didn't match my driver's license. Everything was hard from the drive to Pittsburgh airport, to picking up the rental car in Los Angeles, to being at San Francisco airport for the trip home at an early hour, to walking through the airports. I did all the driving in Los Angeles, about 300 miles in six days, trying to figure out which lane merged onto the freeway I wanted.

We saw many of my friends, long-time buddies some going back to the 1980s. We don't have that in Morgantown. It's not anyone's fault; we just didn't get here until 2012. We walked around the Silver Lake neighborhood, where we stayed, with my friend Gregg, who took us to a Persian restaurant near our motel, ate Italian food and visited a bookstore in Los Feliz with Stephen and Thomas, had dinner at a fancy fish place in Santa Monica with Jay and his friend Dr. David. We were supposed to have lunch the first day with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife Tracy, but Lisa texted Joe that she had to officiate the funeral for Martin Krieger that morning.at the old Jewish cemetery in East Los Angeles. I knew Martin. He was 80, and used to come to the monthly Saturday morning service at Beth Chayim Chadashim, where Lisa was the rabbi and Joe and I first met and were married. Martin came with a little boy he had adopted. So we went to the funeral, and saw David, the little boy, who is now thirty-eight years old, and well over six feet tall. Steve and Steve were there, the couple that used to run the minyan (and might still). A few other BCC people were there. Joe and I asked Lisa to track down the graves of other BCC people I knew. Ginger Jacobs, an ally of the LGBT community, was buried near Martin, and we wandered around in sunny, 90 degree weather to find the graves of Fred Shuldiner and Sol Halfon, long-time friends who died in the 1990s, Fred of HIV-related disease at 49, and Sol of heart failure in his mid-60s. We found Sue Terry's niche in the wall inside a building. She died not long after we left. She was always joining things at temple: the Israeli dance group, the choir and whatever else was around. She wasn't good at any of it, but she was always upbeat and enthusiastic. She met my sister once and told me Robin was "hot." We left the cemetery, and I suggested we go to El Pollo Loco, a chain Mexican chicken place, and a favorite of mine back in the day. We found a branch near the cemetery. I had a white meat quarter chicken, rice, beans and  a corn tortilla with a Diet Coke. On the way back to the motel, I saw Garfield High School, my favorite place to substitute my last few years in LA School District. 

Friday night, BCC was having a dinner out at a restaurant before services. Our friends Jonathan and George, just back from a train trip across Canada, met us at the temple, and we walked a few blocks to the restaurant. I didn't know many of the people; there has been a lot of change since we left in 2010.

There is a new clergy at BCC, Rabbi Jillian Cameron and soloist Rebecca Mirsky. I thought they both did a fine job with the service. The people who used to never  miss a Friday night were mostly not there. There were about twenty people on Zoom. My friend Sylvia was in town from St. Louis. We became friends on the temple Israel trip in 2007 (I think). Don, who I met early in my time at temple, around 1987, came in from Burlingame near San Francisco. Lisa and Tracy were there and my long-time pal, Gordon. I looked at the memorial board, copper plaques put up in memory of the deceased. I was shocked at how many of the names were familiar to me: men who died of complications of AIDS, women who died of cancer, which seemed to be an epidemic at the same time men were dying of AIDS, and even the names of parents of my friends, who used to come to temple sometimes. There was a plaque I had put up for my mother, who visited once, and created quite a stir among the older men. You would have thought Elizabeth Taylor herself had walked in.

We had lunch with Rabbi Deborah Goldmann and her husband Eyal in Hawthorne, a formerly working class suburb where The Beach Boys grew up in the 1940s and 50s. Eyal is a college professor, and Deborah is moving away from the rabbinate to a teaching career. Joe was always close to them, and I like them a lot. Their baby daughter, now in middle school, was there with a friend, all dyed hair and piercings. We had fun with them. 

We headed across town to Altadena to my friends Jim and Michelle. Jim and I were like Matt Groening's Akbar and Jeff, brothers or lovers, whichever offends you more. We were neither. He unexpectedly fell in love with Michelle Huneven, a novelist and food critic, and they have a compound out above Pasadena, complete with chickens. We talked like it was old times and Michelle made us a scrumptious dinner. I own copies of all of her novels. 

We had lunch one day at a vegetarian restaurant with Les and Richard, a long-time couple. Les and I attended the Jewish genealogy conference in Washington together in 2003. 

We were free one afternoon, and did some luxury shopping at the Beverly Center, near Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, but in Los Angeles. We visited Bloomingdale's, Banana Republic, and Michael Kors, and bought expensive stuff at "end of season" sales. The clerks actually talked to us. I asked one woman if she was Russian or Armenian, because I heard an accent. She said "I'm from Persia. Do you know people from Persia?" I do, actually. I didn't ask if she was Jewish, but I know Jewish people from there don't say "Iran."  There was a beautiful young woman at one of the stores who asked where I was from. When I said "Baltimore" she told me she was from there, too. I asked about her high school. It was one that was unfamiliar to me, because it opened long after I had left town. 

I guess the peak for me, and the one thing that made me think I could live there again, was the Monday night hike in Griffith Park with Great Outdoors, a gay men's hiking group. Until I had a heart attack in 2003, I did their difficult hike on Thursdays, but once I was able to hike again at all, a year or so later, I stuck to the easier one on Monday. Most of the men on the hike were the same ones from twenty years ago, many of whom were at our wedding in 2008. The route is different now. We used to start at the planetarium and hike to the top, but since Los Angeles made it expensive to park there, they start on a neighborhood street at the bottom of the park and hike halfway up. I wasn't sure I was in shape to do it, but I managed, even with my bum knee. The view of downtown from the park was spectacular, and the weather, of course, was perfect. I thought "This is what I love about Los Angeles." There were 25 men on the hike; 20 of us went to dinner at Fred 62, a restaurant on Vermont Ave, They had set up a long table on their patio and took each person's order on a tablet and were able to give us separate checks.

I saw the trash in the streets, the homeless living in tents along the boulevards and under the freeways. It's disgraceful, given how much money there is in Los Angeles. Still, there is the weather and the strange plants that grow there, and the people I know and the memories. I was ready to leave in 2010, when Joe and I left together, but it was great being back there. It felt home-like.

The morning after the hike, we checked out of our motel, drove to the place to drop off the car, after filling the tank, which was nearly empty, and flew to San Francisco. That will be Part Two this epic narrative.

I have a few L.A. pictures on my phone, but I haven't figured out how to get them up here. If I do figure it out, I'll post them here. You can find most of them if you scroll back through my Facebook feed.

Los Angeles and Palm Springs

 I finished my second and last term on Morgantown's City Council June 30. Joe had a wedding in early July, a bar mitzvah July 17, and a bat mitzvah August 14. We were working on renegotiating our mortgage. We had a narrow time where we could get away. We were gone July 19 to August 2. 

The Centers For Disease Control said that, since we were fully vaccinated, we could go anywhere without masks and be safe. We discussed driving up to New England, but we both wanted to see our long-time friends in California. We decided on a week in Los Angeles and a week in San Francisco. Joe's credit card gives him points, and they have a travel agent on staff to help out. That took care of much of the plane fare. I booked hotels through "The Usual Chain" where I have points. We were able to rent an overpriced car in Los Angeles, but the agent couldn't find us one in San Francisco. I'll write a separate post about our week in San Francisco.

By the time we left, the Delta variant had shown up in the United States. Los Angeles County required everyone, vaccinated or not, to wear a mask indoors. We had to be more careful than we expected to be.

We drove to Pittsburgh to the airport early for a 9 A.M. flight. I picked up my carry-on bag, which was too heavy, and the strap slid across my arm, taking my paper-like skin with it. This was at 5 A.M. as we were trying to get out of the house. I bandaged it as best I could. We changed planes in Denver, where the airport was crowded with, to my eyes, more people than live in West Virginia. Both planes were full. "Social distancing" was a joke. They did ask everyone to wear a mask in the terminals and on the plane. Almost everyone complied in the terminals, and everyone on the planes. 

We got our car, supposedly mid-size, but actually a compact, which wasn't bad. Compacts are bigger than they used to be. I had booked a motel on Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, between Glendale and Pasadena. It's not a wealthy or Jewish neighborhood, but there's a mall with a Target and a Macy's and a Trader Joe's. It took an hour and ten minutes to get to the motel from the airport. The desk clerk said "You made good time."

The purpose of the trip was to see our friends, and we had mapped out a schedule for lunches and dinners for the week we were there. Many of my friends are from Beth Chayim Chadashim, the synagogue where most members are LGB or T and where I met Joe in 2005.  Joe was a popular student rabbi there from 2007-2009. I became a member in 1987, and maintain a membership. My closest friends from there are not Hollywood heavies, but teachers and librarians, mostly now retired. Joe's friends in Los Angeles are women who were in rabbinical school with him. 

Despite just getting in and being off by three time zones, we found out that the gay mens' hike in Griffith Park was back on (after being off for a year because of COVID), so we went. It was mostly the same people we knew years ago, maybe fewer of them. They don't go all the way to the top of the hill as they used to, and they rarely go out for dinner afterwards, although they agreed to go with us. We got behind when I saw my friend Meyer, known as Mike, an avid hiker and a Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh native, and we stopped to talk. By the time we got back to the starting point, everyone had left. 

I was worried about my arm, and Tuesday morning I found Eagle Rock Urgent Care online, and we stopped by after breakfast. The motel typically provides breakfast, but all they had to offer was a bag with a microwaveable sandwich, a packaged pastry and juice. We ate that one or two days, otherwise we went out. I had told Joe I wanted to see someone who remembered when I was a substitute teacher in Los Angeles schools, or when I was a bar and bat mitzvah tutor at Temple Israel of Hollywood. 

The woman who checked me in at the clinic was named Karla, and I asked her if she was from around there. She was and had gone to Florence Nightingale and Luther Burbank for middle school and Benjamin Franklin High School, before her parents pulled her out to go to Catholic schools. I told her she was probably too young to remember me, but then she said "I'm forty-two and I thought you looked familiar." She told me some personal stuff which I don't want to share here. I was happy that someone remembered me from my work.

We arranged to be in Long Beach by 11, maybe thirty miles from where we were staying, We met up with two of my favorite couples, Jonathan and George, and Stephen and Thomas. I was friends with Jonathan and Stephen when we were all single, but by the time I met Joe, Jonathan had paired up with George and they had adopted a child, now a rising high school senior, and Stephen and Thomas were together. We walked along the ocean in Long Beach while catching up, and stopped for lunch. Later on, Joe and I went out for coffee with my friend Ted, also in Long Beach, leaving at 5 P.M. in the usual traffic to get back to our motel. Tuesday night we were in Alhambra with my friend Greg, who I used to hike with in Griffith Park, when our group did a much longer and more complicated hike. 

I went back to the clinic Wednesday, then we headed to South Bay, near the airport, for lunch with Deborah, one of Joe's rabbinic colleagues, and her husband and two children. We saw Dahlia, another rabbinic colleague, Saturday night in Woodland Hills, in the far western part of the San Fernando Valley. Joe was close with her in school, and one of my first dates with Joe was to Dahlia's wedding. Their two daughters are thirteen and eleven now, and learning to talk back to their parents.

We spent Wednesday late afternoon and evening with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife, Tracy Moore (not the L.A. writer whose work we've seen recently). Lisa was the rabbi at Beth Chayim Chadashim for twenty-five years before retiring recently. She picked Joe to be her student rabbi for two years (after we were a couple, or else it would have been against the rules for us to get together) and she performed our wedding. We sat by their pool and snacked. I would have gone in the pool but for my bandaged arm. Our friends Jim and Michelle came by. Jim and I were L.A.'s version of Akbar and Jeff, "brothers or lovers, whichever offends you most." We're not brothers and we were never lovers. I sang at his wedding to Michelle. He's still active in BCC. We visited at their home Sunday for lunch.

We took a side trip to Palm Springs, a place where many gay men retire. Two couples, Joe's friends from San Francisco, moved there in recent years, and my friend Richard, a now-retired college-level ESL teacher, also moved there. We spent one night with Dan and Jerry in their mid-century modern house, remodeled. They claim they have more stuff to move in, but I liked it uncluttered and clean looking. We also met with Paul and Deek, longtime pals of Joe from San Francisco. They live in Cathedral City, next to Palm Springs. Friday, we saw Richard, who lives in a large complex that reminds me of where I lived in Florida forty years ago. We all went out Friday night to an early service at a synagogue in Palm Desert (past Palm Springs and Cathedral City). The rabbi there graduated a year or two before Joe, but I met him when I first moved to Los Angeles in 1984, when he was probably just out of college. It was a nice reunion, as Richard also knew him, and he was in school with Joe. We stayed over at Richard's and came back into Los Angeles Saturday.

Joe loved Palm Springs, and suggested we move there when he retires, possibly in three years when his contract at Tree of Life in Morgantown expires and he will be almost 68. I have my doubts. It was 109 F. there and had been 120. I've been to Palm Springs a few times (twice before with Joe) and it's nice, I guess, but I would like a more "real" city and not a collection of resort-style suburbs. 

 I loved seeing everyone, and we're sorry we didn't get to see everyone we wanted to see. BCC had services Friday, but it was only open to board members; they were hoping to have the full congregation back the week after. We didn't get to the West Side and missed Israeli dancing on the beach in Santa Monica with my former dance partner, Reva. We missed Jerry, Gordon and Neal, and friends from Morgantown and Fairmont who live in Los Angeles now. For old times sake, we drove Sunday night to the Farmers Market on Fairfax, near where we lived together, and had dinner outside with hundreds of people. We put at least 700 miles on our little car in a week. I slid right into freeway driving, and I felt "at home."

I want to mention also the "ghosts" who inhabit Los Angeles, friends who died while I lived there and after. I still fell the presence of Sue, Sherry, Art, Fred, Avram and others who are no longer with us. I went through lots of changes in Los Angeles, and everywhere reminds me of something. I pointed out an apartment building to Joe where I rehearsed scenes for an acting class with someone I can't picture, an apartment building in Los Feliz where a wall crumbled in the Northridge earthquake, and I remembered the two young men whose names I can't recall that were in the performance art workshop I attended in the 1990s, and died of AIDS. 

I understand why we are strangers after nine years in Morgantown. We were 62 and 55 when we moved here, and people our age had lifetime friends. I was thirty-four when I came to Los Angeles and sixty when I left. From our temple, I had a community of gay men and lesbian women, singles and couples. That doesn't exist in Morgantown. I'm not criticizing our little town. I understand that people had their long-time friends before we got here, just as my long-term friends are in Los Angeles. 

I don't feel a need to go somewhere else to live, not even to Southern California. I grew up only 200 miles from Morgantown, and there is a familiarity (and familiar allergies) to what I knew in Baltimore. I guess my persona is split these days, and I can cope with that. I'm glad we got away and saw our friends, and I hope the world doesn't shut down again. 

                                             With our hiking group, Great Outdoors, in Griffith Park

                                             The view from Griffith Park across Glendale

          With our crew in Long Beach, l.to r.: Joe, Jonathan, Thomas, Stephen, Barry and George

                                                        On the ocean in Long Beach

             At Lisa and Tracy's pool. Lisa has the glasses. With Jim. The red on my arm is a bandage

                        Bagels and lox and fruit with Jim and Michelle in their garden in Altadena.

August 1, 2020

A  mutual friend invited me on Facebook to a "coming out" party for a trans woman, also a friend. It  was today, socially distanced, at different locations and times. Joe said he would go with me. I waited until yesterday to respond and I declined. I'm just not comfortable going out anywhere at this point. Joe and I have been home with our cat for a month (I skipped out for two days in June). We usually order carry-out Saturday night, and I guess I'm in a rut. The idea of going to a party with other people, even distanced and masked, just seems foreign to me now. A few years ago, I was delighted when younger people invited me somewhere. At this party the people would have been 25-40, I'm guessing. That's a lot younger than I am, and where I used to be flattered, now I'm uncomfortable.

I've been preaching kindness online, and talked about "baseless hatred" as a cause for the destruction of the second temple, which  we commemorated at Tisha B'Av Wednesday night and Thursday. Meanwhile, a dear friend in Los Angeles has been inexplicably pushing  hydroxychloroquine as a cure  for coronavirus and touting Republican talking points. I've been shocked, and I finally told her she "needed to get help." She didn't take that well; who would? I went back and deleted that today. It's easy to say "Be kind  to everyone," but even with friends it's hard to do. I try not to have "rage" as my foremost emotion, but sometimes that is what is called for.

People are comparing this pandemic to AIDS, but then there were behaviors that could be avoided, once you passed the initial test. I spent a few years without sex before there was testing, not knowing if I was infected. Still, there is a lingering pain with me over friends who died, and I remember people saying it was worse than World War II, because there didn't seem to be an end. This pandemic is much more random than AIDS, and even more endless. There is no evidence that this virus will ever go away. At seventy, I feel that it's very likely, even if  I don't get this, that I won't live to see the end of it.

I've been keeping busy with my obsessions. I'm teaching a class about the music from The Brill Building in New York in the early 1960s, some of my favorites by The Drifters and composers like Burt Bacharach, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. I've spent an inordinate amount of time doing research and putting together strings of videos. They are on YouTube  at "Music From The Brill Building Week One" up to "Week Four" under my name.

I also have City Council where we are trying to hire a new city manager. I've tried to get a ban on evictions through, but others want to take  a "wait and see" pose, or think the Governor or the President should impose a ban (they should but they won't). We also have a homeless encampment where local agencies have worked to place people in housing. The camp keeps growing and we are torn between dealing with illegal activity at the camp, not spreading people out during a pandemic, and hearing some in the adjoining neighborhoods complaining. Anything we do will be criticized.

Joe and I get along well. We have too much in common, I fear, and I know we each have resentments against the other, but we  really have no one else, so we just give each other space. He has a sister, two brothers and friends in New York and California he talks to frequently; I have my sister. My best friends are in California, and I don't talk to them often. Last Saturday I called a close friend in California who doesn't do social media, and we spoke for a long time. Most days, it's Joe and the cat for me.

It's hard  to complain when money is not a problem, we have affordable housing (although it needs lots of repairs) and two cars. We almost never use both cars now. I'm not uncomfortable being home so much, and even that is scary. Why don't I want to be somewhere else?

I feel like the United States is over as a country. What will happen with the election, I don't know, maybe it will be good. As a teen in very racist suburban Baltimore, I knew that everyone wouldn't just get along because a civil rights bill was passed. And if Trump is defeated, the people still mourning the Confederacy or carrying Nazi flags will still be here. I know too much history not to be frightened for the future.

That's enough ranting for now. I'm still working on being kinder, gentler and happier. I wish that  for you who read this as well.

Great Outdoors

We've been at home for five weeks now, at least. Joe has classes and services and runs a  a bit of Sunday school. I'm working on a list of about 212 counties I thought might be better places to live than Morgantown. What I've learned from my list is that this is where we live now, and starting over, unless it is specifically in a gay retirement community, is not a good idea. Just today, I looked at Island County, Washington, county seat Coupeville, largest city, Oak Harbor. The weather is mild there, the current President received fewer votes than his opponent, but not by much, and Washington is a gay-friendly state. Still, there is no synagogue there, which is a deal-breaker, and really, we are not going to pack up all our stuff and move back to the West Coast. We are just not going to do that.

I attended a funeral on Zoom from Los Angeles last Sunday, led by the interim rabbi at Beth Chayim Chadashim, where I have been a member since 1987, and the cantor, a friend, who has been there at least eleven years. There were sixty cameras on, and I knew probably 57 of the people from my time in Los Angeles. I think the man who died, Bruce Weil, had a heart attack, because he had not been ill. I met him more than thirty years ago, and although I always thought he was older than I am, I think he was a year or two younger, so late sixties. He was an argumentative sort of stereotypical New Yorker, but also kind and generous. I found out that he had cared for a woman I knew in L.A, who was not well when we left town ten years ago, and died after being committed to a nursing home. I also know that he donated money to the temple for our anniversary a few times. I never would have gone to Los Angeles for this funeral, so I'm glad it was on Zoom. I loved seeing so many people I know online, my real long-time friends. We have congregants here we are close to, and there is a gay social group where we have made some friends we dearly love, but it can't be the same as people we've known for thirty years, and it makes me sad to be away from these people.

A lot is going on in the City of Morgantown, where I am on the Council. Tension between some of us on Council and the City Manager have arisen over a lack of information, and Council is being blamed for decisions we did not make. The Manager has taken a job in his native Michigan, and given  notice, and just this week, the Police Chief tendered his resignation. The City  is being sued for what seems like an exorbitant amount of money. Lots of work and not a lot of fun.

I'm teaching a class at Osher Life-Long Learning that just started, also on Zoom, about pop music in 1968. It's not the same as being live, but it's not bad. The people at OLLI have helped me with the technical stuff. If you want to know what I played this week, go to You Tube and type in "The Great Hits And Albums of 1968 Week One," and videos of all the songs should pop up.

We have been running to the grocery twice a week, although not all of the employees and customers wear masks or socially distance. Grocery shopping feels reckless. We picked up Indian food for dinner. I noticed that our next-door neighbor had pizza delivered tonight. It's the macho in me, which I have tried to kill off several times, that won't let me have people bring food to my door. I don't want to feel like an invalid, although my life will be at risk if I get Covid-19.

Today was the first warm day in a few weeks, and I asked Joe to go to WVU's Core Arboretum, on a hillside overlooking the Monongahela River about a mile and a half from here. The spring wildflowers, early this year, are still blooming, and we ran into our friends Zack and Annie Fowler and their two kids, keeping a distance from them. Zack is the Director of the Arboretum, and he pointed out an owl he named Aldo living in a hole in a tree. We also saw, masked, West Virginia House of Delegates member  Barbara Evans Fleischauer, who had a question for Joe about a program that might happen at the synagogue in the fall. So although we complain that we don't know people here, we do. I put up pics from Core Arboretum at the end of this post.

I've been doing a run and walk through the neighborhood, and today I broke a record by doing it in seventeen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. I'm not sure of the distance, but it might be two miles. Thee is one hill I can't (and shouldn't) run, but I can now run the rest of the course. I do the same course every time, and thanks to the changing season, I can see different things blooming over the last few weeks, and leaves starting to sprout. I say "Hello" to a few dogs along the way, all fenced or chained, and many of the ones who used to bark angrily at me no longer do.

So this is our life now. We still have an income, we can still pay our mortgage and we have health insurance. We had $2400 deposited to our joint checking account. I plan to spend mine to help certain political candidates. At this point, I think that is the best thing I can do.

Here are the pics from Core Arboretum:

Hard to see, but there is an owl in that tree

High Holidays 5780: How Terribly Strange To be Seventy

"How terribly strange to be seventy" is a lyric from Paul Simon, who turned seventy-eight last week. I wonder what he thinks about that now. I can tell you, it's not strange at all. It's just what happens when you just get up every morning, as I did this morning, on your seventieth birthday. I didn't just sit on a park bench, with nothing left but my memories. I ran/walked (ran downhill, walked uphill) through my neighborhood in beautiful, slightly-warmer-than-average fall weather.

The past month of Jewish holidays has taken a toll on both me and Joe. I chanted haftarah (prophets) the first day of Rosh Hashana, and Torah the second day, and Torah the morning and afternoon of Yom Kippur. In the Reform movement, today is Atzeret-Simchat Torah, the last day of the holiday period. In between everything else, Joe and I are teaching classes at Osher Life-Long Learning through West Virginia University. He is teaching "Old Testament Rituals-Don't Try These At Home," and I'm teaching "The Great Hits and Albums of 1967," fun for me, but a lot of work. We attended a wedding on the Saturday between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in Alpine Lake, 40 miles east of here, near the Maryland line, and a bat mitzvah in Pittsburgh two days ago. Yesterday, we combined Simchat Torah with the Sunday school, then Joe had an unveiling near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and spoke on a  panel later in the afternoon, followed by a dinner, through Greater Morgantown Interfaith Association. I spoke on a panel at WVU for counseling students Thursday morning, with a priest, a Dakota elder and our local Imam, then grabbed lunch before my own class. We attended a mourning prayer service Thursday night, for the mother and grandmother of congregants. This is in addition to Joe's regular services and my City Council responsibilities. I didn't expect to be so busy in retirement, and I'm sure it's not what Paul Simon envisioned oldness would be.

The kids at WVU asked about my history, and how I came to be religious and believe in God. I told them my story of coincidences in my favor piling up over time, and how I thought Someone had a plan for me of which I was not aware. I got kind of emotional about it all. At the evening service for Rosh Hashana, my attention wandered, and I saw myself as a child with my parents and at Passover seders with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, in Hebrew School and at high school dances, with my first boyfriend in New Orleans, and that time there was snow on the palm trees. I thought about how my grandmother loved me and worried about me when I lived in Miami, and the times I was sick there, about how I came to Los Angeles, my job issues and many career changes. I remembered again all the friends I helped bury during the worst years of the AIDS crisis: Fred and Art, Hal and the others whose names I can't bring up now, all these years later. I remembered how I wanted to meet someone and leave Los Angeles after I suffered a heart attack and my mother died a few weeks later. And then I saw Joe on the bimah leading services and said a quiet "Thank you, God." No one could have predicted fifty years ago that my life would be what it is now.

I still worry plenty about the climate, refugees, Israel, the United States, Morgantown, how long I'm going to live. I don't have any big, immediate worries. Physically, I'm as healthy as can be expected. I've started running, slowly and not far, after thirty-five years of not running. It's  a testament to the heart and asthma medication I'm on every day. Still, there are times when I am just exhausted, and no matter the time of day, I need to stop and go to bed. That happened Saturday, when we came back from the bat mitzvah in Pittsburgh, with a stop at Apple Butter Day at friends' farm in Mt. Morris, near here in Pennsylvania. 

When the kids asked me Thursday about my spiritual practice I told them the main thing is to say "Thank you, God." I do that when I wake up and when I start a meal, and at random times during the day. I extend that practice to being kind and compassionate to people around me (still working on that), charitable and generous in spirit. 

Joe bought me two t-shirts with funny things about cats for my birthday, and we'll have dinner out tonight. I'm speaking to another panel Thursday morning and my class continues in the afternoon.  At seventy, having lived longer than my father, grandfather and great-grandfather in my paternal line, I give thanks for my life today.

This is what 70 looks like

California 2019

What's not to like? We decided to be adults and stay in a motel, rent a car. We had maid service, breakfast was included, friends took us out to dinner or cooked for us. The rain stopped, as it usually does at the end of May. I glanced at e-mails about the water pipeline and annexation, looked at the Charleston newspaper, but not the one from Morgantown. Joe freed himself, at least a little, from his rabbi persona, and relaxed.

In San Francisco we stayed at My Usual Chain, where we got a free night, at the foot of Russian Hill and walking distance to Fisherman's Wharf. It's a touristy area. In Los Angeles, we stayed in Pasadena, where we have friends, but away from the noise of West Hollywood, the expense of Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles. Parking was free, but we drove 600 miles in a week just to get around.

I had several goals for the trip: generally to get away after the toxic City Council election, which I won by a large majority, to get Joe away from the crush of responsibilities, and his contract negotiations (even though both he and the congregation want him to continue as Tree of Life's leader). More specifically, Joe has a long-time friend in San Francisco who is ill, and I wanted to make sure Joe saw him again, and Rabbi Lisa Edwards, of Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, who I met when she was a student rabbi, who mentored Joe as her student rabbi for two years, and who married us in 2008, was retiring, and the annual BCC brunch was honoring her and her wife Tracy Moore. So, a week in San Francisco from May 23 to 30, and a week in Los Angeles from the 30th to June 6.

We hiked, we danced, we saw lots of friends. I went off to the East Bay from San Francisco to see my cousin Eric, his wife Karen, their son David, his wife Julia and their daughter, not yet a year old. They all migrated from Long Island to Contra Costa County, and they had that look that people have when their life markedly improves.

Joe and I gave up lifetimes of friends to go first to Crescent City, which was at least still in California, then to West Virginia, closer to his birthplace in Buffalo and mine in Baltimore. For Joe, it was a career choice; for me, a chance to support my husband.

I learned some things that I can use as a Councilor in Morgantown. San Francisco planned years ago to cut auto traffic, tearing down an earthquake-damaged freeway and not building parking. People with money use Uber and Lyft to ride to and from work to avoid the lack of parking; tech companies run a private bus system while BART, Muni and the busses continue to crumble. There are bike stations around town, and electric scooters, proposed for Morgantown, but not implemented. I never saw anyone wear a helmet while riding an electric scooter, and although the speed is supposed to be limited, they seemed to go fast down San Francisco's hills. I would not want to see them here.

Homelessness is up in Los Angeles. Many freeway overpasses have people living in tents beneath them, a disgrace in a city with as much money floating around as Los Angeles has. A proposed school levy for Los Angeles Unified School District, where I worked for more than eighteen years, Proposition EE, which would have added nurses and counselors to the schools and reduce class sizes, was defeated while we were there. Rich people in Los Angeles don't send their kids to public school. People in Los Angeles told us the subways and busses are dangerous or unpleasant and they avoid them, which is too bad. There is now a good basic system to get around, and a new line is being built to Inglewood and the airport. While I have many friends in the Los Angeles area, and the weather is nearly perfect most of the year, it is a bit like in "Blade Runner," not an entirely functional place.

Many people in West Virginia said "Be careful!" when I told them we would be in Los Angeles for a week, but the only time I was scared was navigating the freeways in our rented Ford Escape. And maybe I was frightened when we hiked up Eaton Canyon north of Pasadena, crossing a stream several times, and, in my case, falling in once and banging up my already injured wrist. Lots of people were hiking up the canyon, even though signs warned us that it was dangerous. Most of the hikers were in their teens and twenties.

We met with two women rabbis in Los Angeles who graduated with Joe, each with a husband, a house, and two children born in the ten years since ordination. One flies to a smallish town in Texas monthly to be the rabbi; the other works as an educator at a synagogue. Both stayed in Los Angeles for their husbands' jobs. Joe feels they are underemployed, but I can see how they care for their children, and I doubt they regret their choices.

And I don't regret our choices either. Yes, we gave up a lot. Some of Joe's friends in San Francisco go back to his college years, and I saw when I first met them that they grieved losing Joe from their circle. I had several communities in Los Angeles, from BCC, from Israeli dancing, from Great Outdoors, a gay hiking group, from the schools where I worked, and the temples where I sang and the one where I worked with bar and bat mitzvah kids. I divided my close friends into two categories: "stuck" and "moved on." One of my gay friends married a beautiful and accomplished woman, who moved him into a social circle that was more appropriate for his own accomplishments. Another gay friend married a man, bought a house and adopted a child, now a teenager. My "stuck" friends never found the right guy, although they are smart, not bad looking, and financially stable, if not wealthy. I thought of them when I met Joe, how easy it would have been to say "I'm not leaving my life here," and then letting him go. I was old enough to make a rational decision, although there may have been more emotion there than I care to admit.

Beth Chayim Chadashim has hired an interim rabbi, a course recommended when a long-time and much-loved rabbi like Lisa Edwards leaves. Maybe after a year or so, a new rabbi won't be compared,  perhaps unfairly, to the former rabbi. Many people asked me at BCC's brunch if Joe would like to come back to Los Angeles to be the rabbi  in a year. We've talked about the possibility, and I know Joe has spoken with Rabbi Lisa. Sure, it would be easier to live in California: the weather, the politics (compare Shelley Moore Capito to Kamala Harris or Jim Justice to Gavin Newsom), the people we love and who love us.

But we've been in West Virginia for seven years now, and Joe is revered at Tree of Life, and I've been reelected to Morgantown's City Council. Traffic here is backed up for one mile on two streets, as opposed to being backed up on 45 miles of eight-lane freeway. Nine years ago, at sixty, I took a giant leap with Joe to move away from the people I knew; he had leapt five years earlier when he left for rabbinical school. As I approach seventy, I'm feeling more settled, and more risk-averse. Morgantown has become a much more gay-friendly place in the years we've been here, and we have helped make that difference, even if we are two generations older than the LGBT activists who are continuing to transform our town.

To travel across the country is hard now, and I don't know when or if we'll get back. I would love to be closer to my cousins, to see my long-time friends more often, for both of us to be more comfortable in our surroundings than we are in West Virginia. But Morgantown is our home now, and I can't complain about the people we've met, especially at Tree of Life and in liberal politics, where we have love and respect.

Yes, it was great being in beautiful San Francisco and Los Angeles with our friends and family, but I understand that our life now is here in Morgantown.

With my Polk family cousins in Walnut Creek, Contra Costa County

Windows on Castro St. in San Francisco celebrating the memory of Harvey Milk

Joe's friend Randy from college, his husband Greg with us in the Castro District, San Francisco

With our friends Glenn and Caroline in the Outer Sunset, San Francisco

Lunch in San Mateo with Joe's long-time friend Paul and his husband

Near the entrance to Eaton Canyon County Park, Altadena, CA near Los Angeles

At BCC's brunch at the Skirball Museum in Bel Air, Los Angeles

After a hike in Griffith Park with thirty mostly older gay men, Twenty of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. Photo is with John, Mark and Rob, long-time friends, and Steffan (seated), a new friend.

With my long-time friend Jonathan at Dominguez Gap Wetlands in Long Beach,  Los Angeles County

With my Israeli dance partner of Many years, Reva at "Dance With  Orly" 

February Blues

The weather here in February is hard. It may not be as cold as January, but it rains and snows, and there are few sunny days. It's chilly. Both of us have been reading books that make us nostalgic for something else. Joe's is Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, about a San Francisco gay man turning fifty, an author regretting his lost youth, who takes a literary trip around the world to avoid going to his ex-boyfriend's wedding to another man. I'm reading Gary Shteyngart's Lake Success, another picaresque novel about a guy named Barry, his wife Seema (Seema was the name of my first and last serious girlfriend in high school and the beginning of college). Barry in the book leaves his wife and three-year old autistic child in New York to go look for his college girlfriend across the country. Seema visits her parents in Cleveland. Of course, both Arthur Less, from Less, and Barry Cohen from Lake Success have lessons that must be learned to find some sort of redemption.

Last week, a committee in the West Virginia House of Delegates  proposed a rule to annul laws made in several cities, including Morgantown, to add LGBT protection to the anti-discrimination laws. The amendment to the original bill (which would have prohibited cities from changing labor laws, like minimum wage) failed, but 10 Republican men on the committee voted for it, and one went on a rant calling LGBT people "terrorists" and a lot worse. This state does not have a reputation for being gay-friendly, something Morgantown City Council has tried to change.  There is a plan afoot to have a "gay picnic" here in April, and I went to the first planning meeting Saturday, where I was the oldest queer person (including all LGBT people) by several decades. It's been lonely for us, and, with the crappy February weather, the hostility in the House of Delegates, and our literary friends, we've had our doubts.

I was at our local grocery store today, and while I knew few people there, I did run into three friends, which was good. I also saw people who looked familiar: a woman who I thought for a second was Janet the Dentist, who came to Israeli dancing at BCC, the synagogue for gay people, thirty-some years ago, pregnant. She talked about her "partner" with whom she was having the baby. When pressed, she admitted the partner was a very traditional Jewish man, and that they were in fact married. She didn't want to seem different. I saw her more than ten years ago, and she told me about having breast cancer and surgery. I wonder how she is now. And then I saw the Principal Realtor, a woman I knew from temple in L.A., who was an elementary school principal, then retired and sold real estate. Her partner in later years was a woman I had also met dancing at BCC. The Realtor passed away a few years ago from pancreatic cancer. Suddenly, I feel like people from my past, alive or dead, are showing up for me and making me regret the community I lived in, not Los Angeles so much, but the people there who were my community. Still, I think about a young friend, who grew up in Europe (now 40) who complained to me about the constant sunshine in L.A., how boring it was! I loved that about L.A., and I think about his complaint, and how, like him, I should be more grateful for what I have.

We'll stay here and live with our old-people regrets. Maybe with Joe's new contract, we'll be able to take a month in the winter and go to Palm Springs or Ft. Lauderdale, although I fully intend to win my Council election at the end of April, so maybe not, at least not for the next two years. It was our choice to come to Morgantown, and people depend on both of us here. We've made friends, some our age, some much younger, and when we don't get all maudlin but look at reality, we have it good.

Spring is here early in March, at least in the afternoons, so we are almost there. Regrets are real, as is Seasonal Affective Disorder.

My Turn

In January of 1967, when I was seventeen and a senior in high school, I went with my parents and younger sister to visit my mother’s parents, my Nanny and Poppy, in Queens, in New York City. We lived in suburb of Baltimore, so it was about five hours of driving to get to their house. We were on semester break, a Friday and Monday off from school, and I had an interview set up at Columbia University for Monday. We were going to stop there on the way out of New York.

When we got to my grandparents’ house, we were surprised that my grandfather wasn’t there. He was a teacher in New York City public schools, retired at sixty, and then continued to substitute. The school board told him he could no longer sub when he turned seventy in February. He was furious. A neighbor had been to Florida and suggested to my grandfather that he check out a whitewashed, lakefront condo development, a new thing, north of Miami, and that’s where my grandfather was.

A snowstorm was coming Monday and my parents decided to go back to Baltimore Sunday to beat the weather. My grandmother, who was sixty-nine, not quite five feet tall and didn’t drive, assured my parents that she would get me to the interview at Columbia, and to Penn Station to get a train back to Baltimore.

Monday morning, Nanny and I bundled up. I was sick, but didn’t want to say anything. There were spots of blood in my underwear. We walked up 69th Avenue to Main Street in blowing snow and cold, caught a bus to Flushing, where we took the elevated train to Manhattan, and then a subway north to Columbia. Nanny waited for me while I had the interview.

The interviewer was a skinny guy with glasses and a bad attitude. He showed me the list of “Great Books” everyone had to read, and I said that  it looked interesting. My cousin Eric had gone to Western Reserve in Cleveland the year before, and told me the neighborhood where the school was located was rough, and they didn’t go off campus, leaving him bored at college. When the interviewer asked if I had questions, I asked if there activities on campus. He blinked at me, incredulous, and said “Well, we are in New York City.” The interview was finally over, thankfully. Snow was still coming down when we left Columbia’s all-concrete campus. In my memory, the snow was coming down black, but that was probably just how I felt. We went back to Grand Central, walked the tunnel to Penn Station, and Nanny got me on a train to Baltimore.I slept most of the way.

I stayed home the day after I got back. My Mom told my father about the blood in my underwear. He said “ I bet you thought you had a venereal disease, didn’t you? “ Actually, I was a virgin, still, and did not think that. I figured I had some weird cancer and I was going to die soon. Dad explained that it was my pilonidal cyst, a vestigial tail, common to men in his family. From wiping too hard, it probably got infected. We took a trip to Dr. Checket, the surgeon in Woodmoor Shopping Center near our house, and he lanced it. He suggested that my father shave my butt for me to reduce the possibility of infection. Dad did that twice, but it was too icky for both of us. Even though I went back to school, I felt sick for at least a month after that.

I didn’t get in to Columbia, but I was accepted at Johns Hopkins, an oasis in central Baltimore, where my interview on a warm December day had gone better. The interviewer asked me where I had bought my double-breasted blazer and polka dot tie, and not much else.

Nanny was sick for a month after she got home from Columbia. My grandfather bought the condo, and they sold their house and moved that fall. My mother was glad. She said it had been hard for them to deal with winter in New York the last few years.

I had terrible allergy problems in Baltimore, and they seemed to get worse every year. I would have an asthma attack if I walked from a heated building out into cold weather. At twenty-eight, I moved to Miami, where I became close with Nanny. Poppy had died a few years before I arrived there. I stayed in Miami more than six years. Nanny moved to Baltimore to stay with my mother the last year I was there, and a few months later, I took a job in Los Angeles. After twenty-one years there, I met Joe Hample, a second-career rabbinical student. When we legally married in 2008, I said I would go with him wherever he got a job. After a stint at a prison in far northern California, he was hired at Tree of Life in Morgantown, West Virginia, just over two hundred miles from where I grew up. Luckily, I have better asthma and hay fever medicine than I had in Baltimore forty years ago.

I’m sixty-eight now, and just as my grandmother couldn’t handle the cold weather in New York, I find myself much more fragile than I used to be.This year, it’s often been cold and sometimes snowy. I was elected to Morgantown’s City Council in 2017, and I go to an exhausting number of long meetings in the evenings. I haven’t been well for a month, but I’ve kept going, first with just sniffles, then coughing, which went away, then  came back. Last week, I drove to a City Council meeting in a snowstorm where the highway people had told everyone to stay home, and Thursday, I went to a commission meeting in 11 degree weather.. The cough came back, although I attended services Friday night and a political event before hand. I didn’t sleep Friday night, wracked with coughing. I saw a doctor Saturday morning, who gave me an antibiotic and cough medicine and told me not to go out for four days. People think I am young. I keep going no matter what, and, as a teacher myself in Los Angeles, I sometimes use kid ghetto slang from the 1990s, picked up from my students. I’m not young. I’m just a year younger than my grandmother was on our trip to Columbia. Like her, I want to keep going, but i need to take better care of myself.

Joe and I will probably be in Morgantown a few more years. Tree of Life is likely to  renew his contract next year, and I may run for Council again in 2019. Sooner or later, we will step down. Joe talks about going to Palm Springs, or maybe even Tel Aviv when he retires.I came to Morgantown as a retiree, not expecting to work. What I have to do now is say “No.” I can’t go to a meeting in a snowstorm or when it is bone-chilling cold. It’s hard for me to think of myself as the same age as my grandparents, but there it is. It’s time to accept my frailties and stop pretending that I’m young and healthy.

Los Angeles- August 2016

We are on a plane from Los Angeles to Washington, likely about to miss our connection to Pittsburgh tonight. We’ve seen lots of friends, eaten most of our meals at restaurants, gone hiking twice in Griffith Park, been to an evening of Israeli dancing, and worshipped at two nights of services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I met in 2005 and were married in 2008, now in a new building.

The people at the places I used to go are pretty much the same people who were there six years ago when we left, and mostly, they are doing the same things. Some people we wanted to see were on vacation, others, those who wanted their lives to be different, left town for better opportunities in the hinterlands between the Rockies and the Appalachians, much as Joe and I did. Other friends died in the years we’ve been gone, and I feel some guilt about not attending their funerals, not mourning them properly.

It took me a few days to get used to checking the traffic report, not the weather report, before going out. Every day we were there was warm and sunny, the temperature changing by what part of town we were in: cooler by the ocean, warmer in the valleys.

Maybe it is because we stayed near Beverly Hills that I noticed how many tourists were out and how few of them spoke English. Griffith Park, too, the province of gay men out looking for sex in the eighties, was now full of French, German, Chinese and Japanese tourists snapping pictures of the Hollywood sign. Years ago, the back roads in the park were closed to traffic, and there was a disastrous fire sometime between 2007 and 2009, years blending together in my mind. The only help to my memory is which of the eight apartments I lived  in when something happened during my twenty-five years in Los Angeles.

We had breakfast yesterday morning at Brooklyn Bagels, on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, then went shopping on that street for gifts for our catsitter in Morgantown and for Reva, my dance partner, who lent us a bedroom and bathroom for all but the first night of our stay. Beverly Hills is what I call “Mythological Los Angeles.” The people are all thin and beautiful, everyone drives a Porsche, Lamborghini or an exotic BMW you haven’t seen before. The women wear gorgeous clothes, jewelry and shoes, and the men are muscular with clear, unlined faces and perfect hair. Celebrities line the streets daring you to look at them, or smiling at you in the hope you will recognize them. We saw 82-year-old Larry King at Brooklyn Bagels and scores of glamorous people and cars.

All of our friends who own homes say they could not afford to buy their homes now. And those with jobs spoke of companies trimming their health-care benefits. These are problems across the country, but particularly in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Homeowners are secure. For renters, it’s more difficult, even though there is rent control in Los Angeles and West Hollywood.

The more “real “ Los Angeles is the Spanish-speaking and African-American town, where people work in restaurants or at the airport, and kids go to public school. The people who teach in those schools also struggle to maintain some semblance of a middle-class life.

Our friends are outrageous by the standards of Middle America. One, from an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto, works hard, then goes out dancing every night of the week. Our gay friends from Great Outdoors, the hiking group, reminded us of how stiff and careful we’ve become in public.

Despite all these complaints, I am comfortable in Los Angeles. It seems  home-like to me. Being Jewish is certainly not an issue, slightly darker than Northern European is the norm, gay is not a big deal. And of course, our friends.  We have made friends in Morgantown, but they don’t go back decades.

I loved being out with my people, soaking up unhealthy amounts of sunshine, mingling with Orthodox Jews, spiritual and mostly more open gay people. We ate twice at The Farmers’ Market, a collection of restaurants outdoors in the Fairfax District. I used to eat lunch there every Tuesday when I lived nearby. Years later,t he same Armenian women work at Moishe’s, a stand with Lebanese- Armenian food, despite the Yiddish name. We also ate at the Brazilian barbecue, a place so good that I dream about the fried plantains. Speaking of dreams, I often spend my sleeping hours somewhere along Wilshire Boulevard, between downtown and the ocean, looking for my apartment and not remembering where it is. We drove much of Wilshire Boulevard last night, from Koreatown to Beverly Hills.

Maybe that is what Los Angeles is to me now, a dream. Hollywood and Beverly Hills are that to lots of people, but I’ve been there and done that. I don’t imagine us going back there to live, nor are we likely to live in that other dream city, San Francisco. I hope we can get back to California again. Until that time, we have remade our lives, like so many other refugees, in a new place, in our case, Morgantown.

Great Outdoors, gay mens' hiking group, Griffith Park

To ask for an interpreter, you point at your language

Brazilian barbecue at the Farmers' Market with Larry Nathenson

At Israeli dancing with our host and my dance partner, Reva Sober

The new Broad Museum of Art, downtown Los Angeles

With Rabbi Dalia Samansky, a classmate of Joe, and her husband Jason, Woodland Hills

Gregory Miller, at home in Alhambra with St. Francis (Greg is Jewish)

Factor's Deli. Pico Boulevard, with husbands Stephen Klein and Thomas Moore

Michelle Huneven and Jim Potter, in their kitchen in Altadena, which they are about to rebuild

At Ta'eem (Tasty) a Kosher Israeli restaurant on Melrose Avenue

In Griffith PArk, past the Observatory to downtown Los Angeles

Left to right: Tracy Moore, me, Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Rabbi Joe Hample at Lisa and Tracy's Wilshire Center home

Touristy picture at dusk with Joe from Griffith Observatory parking lot to the Hollywood sign

Kabob and Chinese Food A kosher restaurant with signs in English, Hebrew and Farsi (Persian), Pico Blvd.

Update: We made it to the flight from Washington to Pittsburgh and arrived home, after an 80 mile drive from the airport, at 1:20 A.M. EDT.