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!

The New (Jewish) Year

 Last night before we fell asleep, Joe asked me what was good about 5780, the year on the  Jewish  calendar that ends tonight. I said "Our trip to New York in December." New York feels like home to me, even if I  never lived  there. We saw my relatives and Joe's, and friends Joe knows from high school and college. We got around  on busses and subways, and walked quite a bit. Although it was  December, the temperature never went below 40 F. We left December 30, just  before the madness of New Year's Eve, as our motel was filling up with  people from all over the world. In January, back home, I had many of the symptoms of COVID-19: sore throat, headaches, coughing, fever, and a sinus infection. It  was before anyone thought of COVID-19; no precautions were taken by the doctors who saw me. I had an antigen test in the spring. It said that's not what I had, but I hear the tests are not accurate, and that the antigens don't stay with you anyway. Just today, I got the results back from a new COVID-19 test, and I'm still negative. 

I'm less worried about what I'm missing than I might be. I used to go away every month for a few days to explore a new town, and I like going to the movies and the mall. I need new shoes for running, but I haven't been to the store. I'm not sick or broke, I have health insurance and a partner with whom I get along, even though  we're both  home all the time. That doesn't mean I don't dread going to the grocery store, or that I don't rage at fans of the current President who refuse to mask or even acknowledge  that we  have a big problem. 

I understand people who want to drop everything and run away, I've  been looking at other places to live  in one of my long, complicated studies. I'm teaching about pop music  in 1969 at OLLI this fall, and that may be my last class, at least for awhile. I can run again for Morgantown City Council in January, but maybe not. My mother's parents at seventy got rid of almost everything they owned, sold their townhouse in New  York City (like ours in Morgantown, but a little  larger) and moved into a one bedroom apartment in South Florida. It's tempting to do that somewhere. I already  lived in Miami, so maybe not Florida, but somewhere. It would be  a lot easier to stay here and let someone else figure out what to do with my stuff when I'm gone. 

It's 2 P.M. and I'm super tired and just rambling incoherently. A friend made us a round challah bread for the holiday and we have apples and honey, signifying a sweet new year. I guess we'll watch ourselves on YouTube tonight and tomorrow and then go down to the Monongahela River and toss  our sins into the water in the afternoon. It could be worse.

End of the Year and New York 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

New York and New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish everyone reading this a healthy and happy 2017.


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

At Macy's window

Selfie with Joe, Henry and Zack Hample

New York Botanical Gardens Model Train Exhibit

The Empire State Building, lit up for the holidays

Lighting candles for Chanukkah

With many of my cousins from my mother's family December 24

With my cousin Georgeann

At the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village

The four Hample siblings

The view just before sunset from the wedding venue at 5th Ave. and 14th St., looking east

Concert at Naomi's apartment with Henry and members of Washboard Jungle. That's Naomi on Henry's left