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

Laura Nyro and Winter Blues

I have not been actually well since we got back from New York on December 30. It started with a cold, then a sinus infection. On my second visit to the doctor, she wrote a week-long prescription for antibiotics, which cleared up the worst of the sinus infection. I've still been congested, and my sinuses are a mess. I'm tired all the time.

I agreed to teach a four-week class about Laura Nyro, a favorite of mine, during OLLI's winter session. My classes are usually full, but in the winter, many seniors leave town for warmer climes, and there was a three-week class about Garrison Keillor scheduled for the same time as my class that pulled away a lot of people.

Laura, whose first album was released when she was nineteen in 1967, left music at twenty-four after five classic albums, then came back and put out a few more albums before her death, at forty-nine from from ovarian cancer in 1997. She is a kind of cult goddess to gay men of a certain age. While no one was officially gay when I was in college, the people who introduced me to her album "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession" in 1969 turned out, later, to be gay. My sister's college roommate played "Christmas and the Beads of Sweat" for me in 1971, and I was hooked.

I knew that her album of covers with Labelle, " Gonna Take A Miracle" was used in several movies with a gay theme. I found two. At the beginning of "Silver Lake Life: The View From Here," a harrowing documentary about a gay couple in Los Angeles living with AIDS, there's a home movie of them from the 1970s, dancing to "I Met Him On A Sunday." In the movie "A Home At The End Of The World," adapted by Michael Cunningham from his novel of the same name, teenaged Jonathan and his friend/sex partner Bobby get his mother stoned while they all listen to "Gonna Take A Miracle." I couldn't find the movie in the library or at a local store, but our library had the book, which I'm reading now. Jonathan grows up and moves to New York, where a lot happens to him, including contracting AIDS.

Now that it's a new decade and I'm seventy, I think more of life and death than I used to, and listening to Nyro, remembering the movie about the couple from Los Angeles, I think back to all the people I knew who died from AIDS, and people, like the characters in that book and movie, whose life has not turned out the way they expected. I think most people are disappointed in some aspect of their lives, especially when you are older and see that not much is ever going to change, that planning ten years ahead may be overly optimistic.

Jonathan in "A Home At The End Of The World" knows something is wrong with his body before he is diagnosed. He says "First you felt a floating sensation, as if your hours didn't add up to whole days and your presence...didn't affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily do." I've felt like that for a long time, on and off. I'll be walking somewhere and thinking about how the world would be different if I were no longer alive. Aside from my husband and my sister, most people would barely notice, and the landscape, the weather and the pulse of things would go on just as they had before.

There are still fans of Laura Nyro out there, and two of the women in my class, who were unfamiliar with Nyro's music before, but are themselves musicians, were teary-eyed, as I hoped they would be, from the gorgeous music. The music got to me, too, but I had added to that the memories of friends still here, but not close, and those who have passed away.

My last class was Thursday, and I played a recent clip of Elton John telling Elvis Costello how Laura Nyro had influenced him. As he moved to a piano to play "Burn Down The Mission," I switched to a BBC video of him playing that same song at twenty-two. Even those of us still here have changed from what we were when we were young.

Yesterday, I found out that two friends had died: Emilie Marlier, a local union activist, kind and gentle and available for every meeting or demonstration. She was about my age. And Ron Meier, a friend from our Jewish youth group, married to one of my sister's friends from childhood. Most of my peers won't make it through the new decade As for me, I'm trying to feel better, sleeping a lot, hoping I don't have some permanent condition that could end my life, getting out when I can to do the things I do.

2018

I looked back at my post about 2017, and I can see that this was not a year for big changes. On a national level, it became time to stop joking about things, and get serious about how to deal with our "problem." On a state level, politically, our formerly Democratic governor, now a Republican, appointed two raging homophobes to the West Virginia Supreme Court, as all of the justices were to be impeached. As I predicted, the Republican in a "non-partisan" election remained in office and is now the Chief Justice.

In 2017, I spoke in Charleston against overturning the "Clean Power Plan." This year, I responded to Consumer Union's request for people to speak in Pittsburgh about the EPA's plan to delete regulations requiring higher mileage, less polluting cars in the future, It's hard to say if this will have any effect.

In state elections this year, five seats in the House of Delegates changed from Red to Blue; two of those were in Monongalia County. In District 51, which includes Morgantown and most of the rest of the county, and has five delegates, five Democrats were elected. Our Democratic U.S. Senator was reelected, a mixed blessing. He was better than the Republican candidate by far, but many were put off by his vote for Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court, the only Democrat who voted that way.

Joe and I were able to travel together this year. In March we attended my nephew Evan's wedding in Key West. Joe officiated. My sister Robin got us tickets to Yayoi Kusama's exhibit in Cleveland, our first time there, in June. And later in the summer, we traveled to Buffalo to see Joe's cousins, then moved on to Toronto, where Ryan Wallace, a City Councilor, and his wife, Christine, a native of the city, showed us around. We were in Memphis again for Thanksgiving, and Joe's aunt's eightieth birthday. We planned a week in Maryland based at my sister's house over Christmas, but came back early due to a death in the congregation in Morgantown. I visited twelve counties, alphabetically from Charles, Maryland, to Clinton, Ohio, two in February, then one every other month. I'm writing this Saturday night, December 29. We are at the Omni Bedford Springs Resort, a grand old school hotel 104 miles from home, where Joe is performing a wedding tomorrow. We get around.

We also paid off the six-year car loan on our Suzuki, Joe's student loans from Hebrew Union College, and the two-year payments for our cell phones. I insisted that we trade in our 2001 Honda Civic, which ran fine, only I didn't like it, and it needed body work. I did lots of research, and we bought a 2015 Honda Civic SE.

Joe and I both taught at  OLLI (Osher Life-Long Learning) in 2018- two classes each. People were angry that our spring classes were at the same time, great for us, we could carpool, but many people wanted to take both classes. As it was,we both had a full roster. Joe taught "Dysfunctional Families of the Old Testament" and 'Old Testament Miracles and What They Mean."  I taught "The Great Hits of 1965," the sixth class in this series of pop music years, and "Burt Bacharach Is 90!" my favorite class ever at OLLI, covering Burt's career from the early 1950s to the present. Check out Karima and Mario Biondi with Burt, singing "Come In Ogni Ora" live for a taste. The videos for that class are organized under "Burt Bacharach is 90! Week 1" to Week 6 on YouTube. Check it out!

Healthwise, all the numbers are good. I had a sinus infection which turned into flu in January (yes, I did have a flu shot) and an ear infection in November from which I don't think I've fully recovered. My energy seems to be flagging in my last year in my sixties.

I do plan to run again for City Council from January to the end of April. I like having some say in what happens here, and I've made friends. It's frustrating when people online lie about me or call me names, and hurtful when I feel others on Council don't take my ideas seriously or try to sideline me. I plan to speak up more in my second term, should I have one, and ignore the "haters" who are out there. I did arrange a meeting with the Morgantown and WVU Police Chiefs and representatives of the Jewish organizations in town after the shootings at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, and we were able to exchange ideas and make plans for greater security.

People in West Virginia often say that Morgantown is not the "real" West Virginia and that people like me and Joe, a same-gender Jewish couple who grew up in the Urban East Coast and spent decades in California, don't have "West Virginia values." I don't know exactly what that means. Still, we have both become aware of how we have distanced ourselves from our communities of choice, mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and how few real friends we have here in Morgantown.  Tree of Life in Morgantown has many members who grew up elsewhere, and don't really "fit in" and Morgantown generally, as the big college town in the least educated state in the nation, is full of "real" West Virginians who don't fit in in their hometowns. In a way, Joe and I represent those people, the ones who choose to live here and create a community in somewhat hostile territory. Joe's contract is up in July 2019 and he and the congregation have both agreed to renew, although the details are not entirely clear. And I hope to be on City Council again, representing the people of this city.

Best wishes to my readers for 2019.

New Year's Day at the Fetty/Anderson Home, Morgantown

Sun and snow in our neighborhood, January

Former Charles County, MD Courthouse (reconstructed), Port Tobacco, February

With striking teaches in Morgantown, February

"March For Our Lives" Key West, March

My nephew Evan and his wife Kellie at their wedding, Key West, FL, March

Our friends James and Tyler at their wedding in April, with their Moms, Tree of Life, Morgantown

The cherry trees in bloom on the Monongahela River, April A planned renovation of the park including removing most of the trees. A big controversy involving City Council this year.

Interfaith Association dinner at our house, May

Interfaith rally at Church of the Brethren, Morgantown, May

Tree of Life service at Coopers Rock, west of Morgantown, May

Havdalah (end of sabbath, a little early) on Lake Erie in Buffalo, June

With City Councilor Ryan Wallace and his wife Christine in Toronto, June

At the Yoyoi Kasama exhibit in Cleveland. Joe, Robin and I are the only people in this pic.

At our "Aunt" Shirley's 95th birthday, with my sister and Shirley's three sons, my "brothers." Naples, FL, August

Looking east to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Clarke County, Virginia, August

With our friends Matthew and Sharon at their annual pre-Labor Day party, September, north of Pittsburgh

Tappuz our cat helping me learn Torah chanting before Rosh Hashana, September

Demonstration against Brett Kavanaugh, Monongalia County Courthouse, October

Vigil at Woodburn Circle, West Virginia University, after the shootings at Tree of Life, Pittsburgh, October

Arbor Day in Morgantown, November

At the outlet mall in Mississippi during our trip to Memphis, with Joe's sister Martha

Chanuka at Tree of Life, Morgantown

drainage channel near overflowing in our neighborhood during heavy rains, December

The Radio Interview

I always wondered what I would do if asked to work for Fox, or asked to do an interview on Fox News. I  thought I wouldn't do it. Then I got a call from Sunshine Wiles, one of the hosts of the morning talk show on our local Fox affiliate radio station, WAJR, owned by the same people who own our local newspaper, The Dominion-Post.

What people told me is "You have to do it . Everyone listens to them." So I agreed to do it, and we set up Monday, May 2 at 9:30 for a ten-minute interview, no phone calls. I could have called in the interview, but I really wanted to see the hosts, Sunshine Wiles and Kyle Wiggs, in person, in the studio. They interviewed two other candidates that morning before me: John Lucas and Barbara Evans Fleischauer, the only Democratic incumbent.

We were a bit late getting started. I was there early due to a leftover L.A. paranoia about being held up in traffic forever. That could happen here, too, even though Morgantown is tiny in comparison to Los Angeles.

I thought the interview went well. My voice sounded awful, as if I had asthma and acid reflux both destroying my vocal chords. Still, I felt confident about talking off the top of my head. The hosts asked good questions, and gave me time to answer. They were surprised that I would end up in West Virginia after living in so many other more interesting places. It said that I came here because Joe had a job here, and I said that I'm happy here. What I thought but didn't say, is that I was too old, poor and married to stay in L.A. We couldn't have bought a house there, we don't care about bars at this point in our lives, and the rapid gentrification of our old neighborhood in West Hollywood, including tearing down the Trader Joe's on our corner for million-dollar condos, was going to help make Los Angeles unliveable. We both miss our friendships of many years in San Francisco and L.A., I miss the film festivals and the good theaters. I've stopped going to movies at all, because when I read about a movie I like, it's not playing in Morgantown. I keep busy here, but we don't have the network of people and places we had. It was my choice to come here with Joe, and as I said in the interview, I insisted he apply for the job here. I don't regret moving.

I talked about diversity. There is a new Hindu temple in town, a mosque and a synagogue. It's not like the rest of West Virginia. I went so far as to say "People here should understand that everyone in Morgantown is not a straight, white Christian." That might have been over the top.

They interviewed three other Democratic candidates for legislature in our district Tuesday, and the last two Wednesday. I only listened to Barbara and John Lucas. I'm starting to appreciate Donald Trump, saying outrageous things to get attention and having his ratings go up. Last election, four of the five Democrats lost. I felt that people didn't vote for them because they were too cautious, afraid to stand up to the Obama-hating Republicans (which at that point included the United Mine Workers) and embrace liberal values like choice, LGBT rights and guns.

I'm clearly the odd man out, the one with the least experience and lacking any kind of organization. Stiill, I have my fans.

Last week, I told someone in my writing group about what happened in the senior center (see previous blog post). Someone else in the group overheard it, and, enraged, wrote me a note about how awful I was to say that. The gist of it was that he has been polite to me (against his real feelings, apparently) and knows enough people in town, being a descendant of one of the founders of the town in the 1700s and knowing everyone, to cause me real trouble.

I sent back a note apologizing for my rudeness and explaining that my ancestors were not in the United States before 1886, and that my European relatives were all murdered, which is why that guy's stupid comment got under my skin.

What I saw from the note writer is how white privilege works even against other (more-or-less) white people, and why my fellow candidates will talk about being an 11th generation West Virginian. Not important to me, but I guess it is to someone. I'm less important because my ancestry is not here, and if it  were, and they were slaves, we would still be less important than the White people here.

I got a note also from a prominent person in town, Jewish, but never seen at temple, who read last week's post and said that he has heard similar anti-Semitic remarks, and is still considered an outsider after more than forty years in Morgantown. Baltimore was a little like that, but in Los Angeles, someone called me "an old-timer" after three years there.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but attendance at my OLLI class Tuesday ( The Top 40 Hits of 1961) was down from twenty-four to fifteen.  Maybe they heard me on the radio.

I missed an event yeaterday for the State Auditor Democratic candidate who is the best of the three running. There was a shiva minyan for the mother of a congregant who died out of town, and I met Joe there and accompanied him to his class after. Being busy doesn't excuse one from observing mitzvot or supporting your spouse in his work.

 Tonight, I'm going to see Bernie Sanders here in Morgantown. The city has done nothing about parking, transit or or traffic for this event. The site only holds three thousand people. I'm betting many more come, despite this being finals week at WVU, with many students already gone. It will probably rain all day. Should be fun.

To hear the podcast of my interview, go to wajr.com, go to podcasts all the way down, morning talk May 2. My interview starts at 27:40, or, for comparison, you could listen to the other two candidates.

It wasn't a bad experience for me. I thought Sunshine (her real name, "it was the seventies", she explained) and Kyle were nice to me. They had good questions, and although it looked like it was easy, I know there was a lot of work for them to prepare. Maybe I'll even start listening to their show.

The Greatest Hits of 1960

I've been teaching at West Virginia University's branch of Osher  Life-Long Learning since the fall of 2013, usually one class in the fall session. I started with a two-part class about The Brill Building, based on the book Always Magic In The Air, The Bomp and Brilliance of The Brill Building, by Ken Emerson. He features seven sets of songwriters who worked in New York in the late fifties and early sixties, including Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Jerry Goffin, and Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield.

I've taught six-week classes about the history of Motown and the British invasion in the late sixties. My last class, this past fall, was called "The Beach Boys: Light and Dark." That one made me an emotional wreck. Even I didn't know how much "Dark" there was in their story. All of my classes have been well-received and reviewed. I have something of a following.

I normally don't teach in the winter, partly because classes are postponed if public schools are closed, which last winter was eighteen days out of thirty scheduled. This year they made the term four weeks instead of six so there could be time to make up missed classes before spring session starts. I decided to teach so I could be present during my election campaign. Today is the fourth week, and we have held every class on time. We lost classes early in the week last week and two weeks before that because of snow storms. They are being made up.

I have a book that lists the top 40 songs of every year from 1900 to 1999. The author, Joel Whitburn, has an obsession with pop music, which I suppose I can relate to. I picked 1960, and decided to cover Whitburn's biggest hits at a rate of ten each week. This has been great fun for me.

In 1960, I was in fifth and sixth grade. We had "Pre-teen Center" dances at Campfield Elementary School every Friday night during the school year. It started out being square dancing for kids, but   the kids preferred pop music, so we did some square dancing and then danced to pop music. I usually danced with Margo King, who I think of as my first girlfriend, or Nanette Birmingham, who sat next to me in sixth grade.  Two of the songs I remember were chart hits for Jimmy Jones, now nearly forgotten, in 1960. They were "Handy Man" (later covered by James Taylor) and "Good Timin.'" I also remember the fuss over Elvis returning from the Army. People in the class have their memories, too. One woman, originally from Philadelphia, had posters of local heroes Bobby Rydell and Fabian up in her room as a teenager.

One difference from my past classes is that I am only using YouTube to play music. It seems my vast collection of recorded music on vinyl, cassette and CD is officially obsolete. I don't download music or subscribe to streaming services, but everything you want to hear is on YouTube. (As I'm writing this,  I'm listening to Radiohead's "In Rainbows" from 2008) on headphones attached to an antique portable CD player).

My students are mostly a bit older than I, and we all get a kick out of clips of artists, some looking terrified, lip-synching to their own records in front of a bunch of giggly girls and pompaded boys on Dick Clark's Beech-Nut Hour. The kids are all chewing Beech-Nut gum and wearing buttons that say "IFIC, short for  "flavorific," how the gum is described.

Some of these artists look impossibly young, but Brenda Lee and Kathy Young were fifteen, Brian Hyland sixteen. Some of the artists were already famous, like Elvis Presley, some, like Brenda Lee, Connie Francis, Paul Anka, Chubby Checker and Roy Orbison were just getting started, some, like Dion, changed styles completely after 1960, others like Percy Faith, who had the biggest hit of the year with "Theme From A Summer Place" seemed old-fashioned for the times, yet kept going, doing the same thing, for many years.

I've learned about "The Nashville Sound," having a string orchestra and chorus behind a country music vocalist, a more "urban" sound than one would expect. I've also seen how the separate chart for "R&B" music was about to become obsolete, with crossover artists like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Ray Charles.

It's sad sometimes to watch videos of these young artists, knowing that some of them died in drug overdoses, or car accidents, or that, like all of us, are not the brash young people they were. This class has given us all a chance to go back to "those thrilling days of yesteryear" and remember who we were then, who we idolized, who we danced with, who was our crush, or even how our (mostly late) parents screamed "Turn that noise down!" at us.

I'm teaching a four-week class in April and May on the top hits of 1961.