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 It's Saturday morning and Joe is about to start Torah study from home on Zoom with people from our temple. This is the week of Breishit, "In the beginning," as the annual cycle of reading the five Books of Moses begins anew. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was yesterday, as it was on Friday, October 26, 1962, the day before my bar mitzvah. That was after  my "regular" calendar birthday; this year, it's before. 

There was an article last Sunday in TheWashington Post, a review of a book about the times we were close to a nuclear war. The review started "October 27, 1962, was the most dangerous day in history." I remember reading about the Cuban missile crisis, which was happening that week. It was my first "bargaining with God" moment, where I asked God to put off the nuclear war until after my bar  mitzvah. My wish was granted, or maybe the diplomats worked everything out- it's hard to say. 

Once again, life on Earth is at a turning point. There is an election in a short space of time, and there is a lot riding on it. The current President won't commit to stepping down if he loses. He has been infected with the coronavirus (as his current wife and youngest son have been) yet he continues to hold big rallies, appearing maskless, despite the best public health advice. He and his toadies are pushing through a Supreme Court nominee who might vote with others to invalidate the election, cut off healthcare for millions of Americans, ban legal abortions or attempt to invalidate my twelve-year marriage. As I've pointed out, my marriage was with clergy in our denomination, a vow made in front of family, friends and God, so it can't really be invalidated. No court has that power.

In West Virginia, the pandemic is getting worse. And today, October 17, 2020, West Virginia University's football team  is playing Kansas University at home, with the stadium at  twenty-five percent capacity and the bars in town open. Our City Council has retained the ban on large house parties in student-centric neighborhoods, with my approval, but  there is still lots that could go wrong. Joe said, and I agree, that even if we don't contract  this virus, we may not survive the pandemic.

I finished my project to find a new city, with sixty-eight possibilities. I now fully realize that it's completely a fantasy. I don't see Joe and I going anywhere, even as many of our friends in Morgantown go south for the winter. I don't see us splitting up, although renting an apartment for myself for a month in the winter in Los Angeles or Fort Lauderdale is tempting. At least this year, I'm still on City Council, so I guess not. 

Effective Wednesday, I will no longer be seventy, but past seventy. As Werner Erhard said "THIS is  how your life  worked out." 

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.

Labor Day Weekend

 In my last post, I talked about visiting my sister at the end of August, and going to the cemetery in Owings Mills, northwest of Baltimore, to visit my parents' grave.  We did that  and a few other  things, like having  lunch at Lenny's, which I guess is where people go for Jewish-style deli food, now that  Suburban House in Pikesville is  gone. I last visited my sister in December, before our trip to New York. Someone at  temple died  when  I was there, and I came back to  Morgantown  for the funeral, instead of going  on to Harrisburg, Dauphin  County, Pennsylvania, which was my ninetieth county to visit. 

Summer  has dragged and until today has been too hot. I don't see anyone other than Joe, and  I don't feel close to people here in Morgantown. City Council has been trying, with a string of executives leaving, the pandemic, what to do about the bars in town, about WVU students gathering in parties, sure that they won't get sick, and the homeless encampment. Nothing has been easy, and I've snapped at people (usually in writing) rather than being  diplomatic. 

Today was the Gay Pride picnic, online. I was able to see part of it, but not participate without setting up  a new identity and password. It said I could use Facebook, but that didn't work. I know that my friend Ash and others tried to make a go of this, and I'm grateful for that, but it didn't seem to work for me. Tomorrow, we're recording the service for Yom Kippur day. We've completed Rosh Hashana and the Yom Kippur evening service. It was like being on a movie set: mostly boring, getting things set up, a few retakes (not many) and a lot of time. I'm not good spending a lot of time on things. Joe has written a prayer book on his own, and done most of the singing. I love his hard work and dedication.

Nobody knows what will  happen this fall and winter. It's possible that  the current President will win the Electoral College again, by hook or crook. I'm one of those who thinks that would be the end of  our  country, at least  as a democracy with any claim to morality. And I read today that some are predicting that the number of deaths through the winter will be twice as many as have died so far from the pandemic. 

I have it good, and I'm depressed. Times must be much worse for everyone else. Part of me wants to run away from home, but there's no place to go. Another part of me thinks we all need (men of that persuasion) a giant jerk off party, online, of course, to lift our spirits. At seventy, I wouldn't be invited, anyway, and I'm married to clergy and an elected official. The second quarter of my life would like  that.

Chanie Cohen Kirschner, the sister of my friend Benyamin Cohen, puts up a description of the Torah reading for the week. This week's is blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 26-29. When I tutored bar mitzvah kids, the twelve year olds wanted to read the curses, but Mrs. Kirschener suggests we all look for blessings, like noticing the parts of our bodies that work every morning, getting out in nature, and being grateful for our families. If I were  a better person, I would stop complaining and be grateful for what I have, but  that's unlikely to happen. 

High Holy Days 5781

 The  holidays, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, are  a month  away now. Like all religious denominations, Jewish congregations are trying to figure out how to safely do services. For most Jews, God sends people to tell you how to be saved from trouble. So we take good advice, like doing services online. There was  talk of doing services for the holidays outdoors, but that didn't seem workable. What the board at Tree of  Life Morgantown decided was to prerecord the services, then have them on YouTube at the appropriate time. My husband, Joe Hample, is the rabbi at Tree of Life. I have worked as a cantorial soloist (someone who sings at services but doesn't have a formal certification), so they decided to ask me to sing a few things, and chant in Hebrew from Deuteronomy and First Samuel. I've done the chanting before.

Last Sunday, Joe and I dressed for the holiday and went to the temple, where a congregant who works in tech recorded us doing the evening service for Rosh Hashana. I've been busy with my class at OLLI and Morgantown city council and haven't rehearsed much. I didn't have a lot to do at the service, and it went pretty well, although I was exhausted from getting up early after not sleeping well, and being there for four hours.

I was panicked about how all this would go. People tell me I sing well, but when I last worked, seventeen years ago, I did vocal exercises every day. I don't sing as well as I did. The last year I worked, 2003, was  the  worst year of my life, worse even than 2020. My sister was ill at the beginning of the year, and stuck home. Her son, then eleven, couldn't go out because two people were randomly shooting people in the Washington area, where they lived. My mother had pancreatic cancer. I visited Baltimore, where my mother lived, for her 75th birthday. While there, I suffered a heart attack. My mother died five weeks later.

My goal at the time was to retire from the school district in 2004, and work full-time somewhere as a cantor. I auditioned for a job that came up in August 2003 when a cantor suddenly left his post, and I was hired. My cardiologist had advised me not to do that, but I hadn't yet (maybe still haven't) killed off my closet Type-A personality. I did the job, sixty miles east of Los Angeles, after buying a new car with the first of my inherited money. I have never been so exhausted in my life. It was a hard job anyway, rehearsing with a choir and singing the music left by the former cantor (we sang in the same key, which may be why I was hired). I got  along well with the rabbi there, but not so much with the choir and director. They were talking about hiring a full-time soloist in July, maybe me, but I looked around and decided I didn't want to live in that community. They ended up not hiring a cantor anyway. The whole experience was debilitating and depressing.

When Joe and I moved to Morgantown in 2012, there was talk at Tree of Life of using me as a cantor, which I squelched. I felt like I had closed that chapter of my life. Now they want me to do a few things, not beyond possibility, but still a drain on my not abundant energy. Joe has taken on most of the singing, which was too much for him. He's been working like mad to get it together. The people in charge, like those at most congregations, don't realize how hard it is to do the holidays.

I don't typically have panic attacks, but when I started going over the music, I thought about my mother,  my own precarious health, and what had  happened to my family all those years ago. It wasn't pretty.

I've calmed down now and I've accepted my role, but like most things I'm doing, I keep thinking I won't do it again. I'm still here, well after my "use by" date, my sister is healthy, her son grown up and married. I try to just count my blessings instead of obsessing about the past. Joe and I plan to visit with my sister in Maryland at the end of August, and maybe, as is my custom before the holidays, we'll visit my parents in the cemetery in Baltimore County. 

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.

Elk County, Pennsylvania

Maybe it was a mistake to do this. Last week, June 25 and 26, I did an overnight trip to Elk County, Pennsylvania, about a four-hour drive from Morgantown. Ridgway, the county seat, is roughly halfway between Pittsburgh and Buffalo. This was supposed to be my ninety-sixth county visit, but I missed Delaware, Ohio, Delaware, Pennsylvania, The District of Columbia and Dorchester, Maryland, so it is only the ninety-second. I visited Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, in February, two months behind schedule, because of a funeral in December, and because I was sick most of January. After that, the pandemic hit, and travel was pretty much over.

I visited my regular doctor at WVU Medicine on the twenty-second, and I asked for an antigen test, because what I had in January seemed a lot like a relatively mild case of COVID-19. Relatively, because I was sick enough to not leave the house for ten days, and for not more than an hour the next ten. The test came back negative, meaning I probably had something else, but people in the field told me that many of the tests are unreliable and that the antigens clear out quickly. All that means is that I could get sick all over again.

Pennsylvania has red, yellow and green classifications for reopening of Counties. Elk is green, meaning just masks and distancing. All counties are out of the red category, which was stay-at-home orders. There have been only nine confirmed cases in Elk County, and three probable cases. There are fewer than 32,000 people in the county. In Pennsylvania, new cases are down, as opposed. to West Virginia, where they are going up, mostly in prisons, and among high school seniors this year who visited Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and came back sick.

So Thursday, after our 7 A.M. trip to "senior hour" at Kroger, where many of the staff thought wearing a mask was a joke, we made breakfast, and I packed up. I may never go back to that Kroger. I made a reservation at a non-chain motel just outside of Ridgway, and bagged a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a banana for lunch on the road. Google took me up I-79 to Pittsburgh, through downtown and up PA-28, then on some scary back roads to Ridgway. I stopped half-way in a far northern township of Allegheny County, bought a bottle of iced tea and a bag of baked potato chips at a convenience store and found a park to sit in and eat.

Once in Elk County, I saw there were hunting lodges and resorts for hunters along the road. Pennsylvania has forest land set aside specifically for hunters. I visited Main Street and found the courthouse and the chamber of commerce tourist bureau, where a nice woman loaded me up with pamphlets and maps. I checked into the hotel, where I had to wait for a surly young man, not cute, to greet me. He had me fill out a form and gave me the carbon copy and a key. I thought I was in the last century. The motel was mostly empty, and the room was clean, but unadorned. There was a c.1960 room air conditioner on. I napped for an hour and woke up freezing. Thursday night, I turned off the air conditioner and put on the heat.

I headed back to Main Street to look for dinner. I thought there might be something at the downtown grocery store, but nothing I wanted, and I needed to sit somewhere. There was an Italian place "under new management" down the street. They had moved out half the tables, and the staff all wore masks. Masks are rare in West Virginia. Since I'm not eating meat, I ordered cheese manicotti, which came with a salad and an enormous piece of good bread, of which I only consumed half.

I walked to the edge of downtown, just two blocks, to find a historic house. The owner, O.B. Grant, owned a tannery along the Clarion River in the 1800s, and apparently cut down most of the native hemlock in the area to supply tannin for tanning hides. Near there, along the river, is a rail-to-trails. I walked down about twenty minutes each way. It's like our trail, along a former railroad line by a river, but not paved, even in town. There is lush vegetation, somewhat different from in Morgantown. I was just amazed at how in their short, cool, summer all kinds of plants cover every available inch of territory, intermixed with yellow and purple flowers. There was a sign on the trail to wear orange to protect oneself from hunters. I saw a few other people on the trail, including a woman and her dog, both clad in orange, with the dog illegally off-leash. The dog came over to me and said "Hi," as friendly dogs will do.

Sunset Thursday was at 8:52, one minute later than Morgantown. I headed back to the room by eight, skipping the ice cream parlor on Main. Unfortunately, there was an ice cream place just before the motel, an old-fashioned drive-in. I got some soft ice cream for $2.35. I handed the high-school-age woman a twenty and she rang it up, with the cash register showing $17.65 in change. I fished in my pocket. "Here, I have the thirty-five cents," I said. She was totally flustered. Trying to be helpful, I added "You can just give me back eighteen dollars." She had to go check that with an older woman, maybe her mother, who put. it all into her calculator, and verified that the register would be correct anyway, if she took my thirty-five cents and gave me eighteen dollars back.

I spent some time on the internet and went to sleep with the heat on in the room.

The motel said they had a "continental breakfast."  That wasn't true, so I feasted in the room on the half bag of potato chips and half a bottle of iced tea from lunch Thursday and a couple of prunes from a bag I had brought with me. I went out to look for. a house west of Ridgway, which I was unable to find, so I turned around and drove to St. Mary's, the largest city in Elk County, with about 13,000 people. Ridgway has just over 4,000. I found a historic chapel south of downtown, near a Wal-Mart, lots. of fast-food places and car dealerships. Back in town, I found some other historic places, and walked around a bit. It was sunny and cool, pleasant. From there, I drove north to two towns along U.S. 219, Johnsonburg and Wilcox. Johnsonburg has a beautiful downtown district, completely vacant. There is a branch library across the street. from the historic colonnade, the Brick Block, and just up the street, a smelly paper mill. Nearby is a state park with a lake, so I stopped there for a pic. People were out in boats. I took back roads to Wilcox, a town  at the north end of Elk County. I found a historic house there. I also saw a disturbing number of signs and banners with the name of the current President. A sign on a. business said "A Deplorable Lives Here." I took my picture and headed back to Ridgway down U.S. 219.

I parked on the corner of Main Street, where 219 turns east. There was a Chinese restaurant which I thought had a sign that said "Carry-Out Only" Thursday night. Friday they had a buffet set out for lunch for only $7.00. The person at the counter was a young man, maybe college-age, who spoke perfect Pennsylvania English to me, but spoke to the cook, probably his father, some form of Chinese. They had moved some tables against the wall to provide spacing. I forewent the chicken dishes I usually eat at these buffets, and filled up on noodles with vegetables, egg drop soup and mushrooms. It was enough.

I headed home via U.S. 219 to U.S. 119 just south of Dubois. In southern Pennsylvania, U.S. 119 is a back road, but the highway is a toll road, and I enjoy the scenery. Once you enter West Virginia, you are only seven miles from our house. I didn't take my "water" pill Friday morning, and only stopped once for the bathroom, at a Sheetz gas and convenience store near Indiana, Pennsylvania. While in Ridgway, almost everyone was masked, in Indiana they were not. Traffic was backed up around Greensburg when I came by. This route was shorter by fifteen miles than the way I went up, and took about ten minutes longer.

It's a little scary to be out, to sit in a restaurant, to stay in a strange motel. Pennsylvania has been better about masks and social distancing than West Virginia, and especially in a rural area, I felt as safe as I might being out in Morgantown.

Main Street, Ridgway Historic District

Elk County Courthouse

Ridgway Armory, 1904

A house on West Main Street, Ridgway, with a rainbow flag

O.B. Grant House, West Main Street, Ridgeway, 1870

wildflowers on an empty lot, Ridgway

along the rail trail, just south of downtown Ridgway

Decker's Chapel, 1856, St. Mary's

Downtown St.Mary's with an eternal flame memorial to soldiers from the area

View from downtown St. Mary's

John E. Weidenboerner House, St.Mary's 1881, built by a prominent citizen after a devastating fire in the town

Apollo Theater, downtown St. Mary's

Mural with the paper plant behind it, Johnsonburg

Anderson Brick Block, 1890s, built as stores with apartments above, now completely empty, Johnsonburg

cast iron front building, Johnsonburg Commercial Historic District

East Branch Clarion River Lake, near Johnsonburg

Swedish Lutheran Parsonage, Wilcox, 1901

mid-century modern bank building, Main St. and U.S. 219, Ridgway

My Confession

I thought about my response to the demonstrations and the "Black Lives Matter" movement. But leaders of the movement said we should listen, not talk. An opinion piece in last Sunday's Washington Post said that white people, when confronted with racism, form book clubs. I don't do book clubs, but I do read. I lately finished Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Had Eight Years In Power,  with essays he wrote during the Obama presidency, with new commentary. I also read Matthew Desmond's Evicted, a non-fiction study of housing issues in Milwaukee, and a Pulitzer-prize winner.

I used to feel not guilty about race issues because my family didn't live in the United States during slavery, and although I grew up in racist Maryland in the 1950s and 1960s, my parents were from New York, and therefore removed from all that. Still, my parents got a good deal on a small suburban house in 1953. If you were a veteran, you could buy a house for just over $11,000, one hundred dollars down and seventy-five dollars a month for twenty-five years. The only other condition was that you had to be White. Black people didn't live on our street until 1968, by which time I was in college. The builder of our house was a "liberal." He would sell houses to Jews, when others building in that area would not. We had all new schools where we lived; people I knew in Baltimore City, just a few blocks from where we lived in Baltimore County, went to older schools. Jewish people fled the City as the schools integrated and eventually became all Black. My class at Woodlawn High  had six Black students out of 450. Forest Park High, just as close to our house as Woodlawn, but in Baltimore City, had twenty-two White students in my graduation year. My girlfriend at the time, Seema, went to Forest Park. Her single mother had to move from their rental apartment in Lower Park Heights when the building was sold, and they ended up in a new apartment building near where I lived. Seema would have gone to Woodlawn with me senior year, but chose to pay tuition to finish at Forest Park. I went to her prom, and we had a great time. She was friends with everyone in her class.

I did well on standardized tests, but I was never a good student. If I had been Black at Woodlawn, I might have had a problem. While in college, I took a test for a summer job at the post office. Two of us, both Jewish students from my neighborhood, scored best on the test and got work. The test was hard, like an SAT. People who worked at the post office could not have passed it. If you could do basic alphabetization and filing and had a good back, you could do that job. I was grateful for the work, but even then I knew some poor kid, Black or White, needed that job more than I did. A few years earlier, the post office had moved from a point in the city near the end of several bus lines, to the county, where bus service was scarce at best. I didn't have a car, but I had to drop off my mom somewhere before work, or she had to drop me. The other kid and I were able to carpool sometimes.

Two stories I remember from my mother. She moved to Baltimore at nineteen as a new bride. She took a job selling womens' hats at Hutzler's department store downtown. One day a Black woman came in and asked to try on a hat. My mother helped her with the hat, but after the woman left, her boss came over and told her that Black people were not allowed to try on clothes in the store. My mother was surprised, but she was new in town and didn't question it. In our new house, my mother got a job teaching school, and after a few years, started teaching at the school my sister and I attended. Never one for housework, or staying home, she hired someone to clean the house and watch us kids. Mom told me that she explained to one of these "colored girls" that. she could open a can of tuna or bring something for her lunch. The woman said "Where's my plate and fork?," and my mother said "Just take a plate and fork." The woman said "That's not how we do here. I have to have my own plate and fork." My mother didn't understand at first.

Many of the places we went as kids did not serve Black people. I was fifteen before I saw a Black person in a restaurant, at the bowling alley, or a movie theater. There were businesses on Pennsylvania Avenue and Gay Street in Baltimore for Black people. Price's Dairy, Gwynn Oak Amusement Park and Milford Mill Pool were near us; Black people could not go to these places. Our synagogue used to sponsor special days at Gwynn Oak, where you could get a sticker to go on most of the rides for a dollar. That ended when a five-year-old asked to bring his friend. The friend was Black and the Dad argued with the staff at Gwynn Oak about what harm would come from a five-year old being admitted to the park. The synagogue never went back. Milford Mill was a stone quarry that had filled with water when the workers hit an underground spring. An entrepreneur from Florida created a beach and eventually built an indoor and outdoor pool, and a snack bar with a killer juke box. There were dances on weekend nights. We weren't allowed to go to the dances because it attracted a rough crowd of White kids from the city. School dances in the city were for Black kids by that time. After 1964, Milford Mill said it was a private club. You could get a guest membership for five dollars, and pay a buck every time you went, only you had to be White. Baltimore County didn't have public pools. Druid Hill Park in Baltimore City at one time had a White and a Black pool, but, in integrating the pools, they closed the Black pool, and the White pool became all Black. Lochearn, which was the neighborhood immediately next to ours, opened a swim club, and we thought we would go there, until our parents found out that they would not accept Jews as members. Eventually, there were private Jewish swim clubs, and that's where my parents went. At fourteen and fifteen, I went to Milford Mill, because those were the only two years I could go with friends before I started working in the summer at sixteen.

I understand that I have privilege, and I've used that throughout my life, sometimes unknowingly, other times fully understanding that I could do what Black people couldn't. Even today, I travel around to different, overwhelmingly White counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. I dress down, travel alone, leave the jewelry on my dresser and put on a local accent (not that. different from Baltimore). People have looked at me funny, but when they ask where I'm from, I smile and say "West Virginia," and that's usually enough to put people at ease.

I'm in a position to hold Morgantown's police accountable about racism. We are not like Baltimore, where the police have always been awful. I try to treat everyone equally and I am willing to listen to anyone about the limited power I have.

If you have a Google account, you can comment here, or on Twitter, where I am BarryLeeWendell. My City Council page on Facebook, Barry. Wendell for Morgantown Councilor, Ward Seven, is open. If you are a Facebook friend, we can talk there.