Wedding Weekend

Labor Day weekend away, highlighted by the marriage of my son, who I must say sparkled as he became a head of household.  His friend drove 12 hours at a fast clip to be Best Man and at the reception captured in a paragraph what has made my son special.

Covid-19 took its toll on travel, keeping wedding and airline related appointments left me little leisure time except for a precious two hours touring my old St. Louis haunts as the ladies got their nails prepared and my son and best friend did something secretive.  Our hotel, in a convenient location for the wedding festivities, lost its leisure travel allure.  No pool, breakfast buffet, help yourself to coffee.  Comfortable room but without housekeeping service.  And unrelated to pandemic restrictions, not a lot of drawer space so they probably did not expect people to stay very long.  Minor time zone change but not the reason I felt myself dragging.  More likely that was from impaired nutrition.  No food until we got to St. Louis and spent two additional hours on an interminably inept auto rental line.  Then to Schnucks, the supermarket I gravitated to in the 1970's, to pick up the very munchies that I had successfully avoided bringing into my own house. Plus a bottle of wine that I gave away to the Best Man rather than open for my own use.  Protein malnutrition but not calorie malnutrition.  

Got to tour my medical alma mater briefly, though primarily the main campus, but only drove through the medical campus.  Both have expanded considerably since my days there, not as much since my last stop there five years earlier.  For a Labor Day Weekend with classes in session, students seemed sparse.  The student center, fairly new when I attended but gutted and remodeled since, seemed mostly vacant.  the mini-cathedral across the street had people.  The quadrangles had few people.  Access to the Library was by ID card.  They did not charge me for parking in the garage that morning.  As I drove further South, the area seemed less shabby, even gentrified.  My National Supermarket had become a Schnucks and there was an Islamic enclave with its own mdi-sized supermarket.  Almost no litter, but that was true of St. Louis when I lived there.

Rehearsal Saturday afternoon.  Ceremony on Sunday afternoon.  It being an interfaith ceremony, by chance the Rabbi was a fellow who we knew as a brand new Cantor who did our daughter's baby naming.  He's successfully progressed to Cantor-Assistant Rabbi at a large Reform congregation where he has officiated for about 20 years while he raised two daughters, now both young professors.  He had been a serious athlete, an accomplished javelin thrower, and maintained contacts in the sport as a coach and consultant, to say nothing of still looking fit and trim.  A lot of picture taking, both at the ceremony and later in a park at an adjacent state university.  I really needed to be horizontal and headed back to the hotel to make myself supine once photographic posing was no longer needed.  Then the reception. Interestingly, I kept my entire weekend alcohol free except for sip of my wife's beer at a brew pub.

Return home mostly uneventful, though definitely tired and in need of adaptation time.  

I knew this was not really leisure travel, as it had appointments and purpose but the Covid-19 restrictions would have run contrary to my mindset of vacation.  I would like to take a trip for the purpose of tourism or recreation later this calendar year, probably to fulfill my intention to go to a national park by the end of the year.  However, I got to experience the absence of the things I seek when I travel for my own personal escape.  I opt for a hotel with a pool, even if I am not planning to immerse myself in it.  I usually find time to splash around.  Either the breakfast buffet or restaurant breakfast becomes a day-starting destination.  Of the things absent this time, I may have missed this the most.  Taking what I want, going back for more coffee, watching the weather report of even Fox News or whatever is on the big screen TV.  I rarely have lunch except on a cruise, but take pleasure in dinner with a glass of wine or mug of beer.  Both essentially absent, or really an ordeal to acquire, this time.  

Places that I visit have sites to access, from wineries to historical sites or occasionally a beach.  While not off limits, I have come to expect other people on similar tours.  The people were not there where I might have expected them to be.  Coffee in flight had been cancelled.  Coffee at the airport could be obtained though less conveniently than I expect.  

While I am getting tired of staying home, the new location imposes a different kind of strain, one that keeps it from being that escape and indulgence that makes vacations targeted destinations in place and in time.

Visit to the Bay Area

When I set up my six month projects about six months ago, the family category went to visits with each of my children who have moved onto their own adulthoods.  We made it to St. Louis to see my son this summer but delayed visiting my daughter in Oakland until just before year's end.  We made it.  While the purpose was family visit, each geographic subset of America has its own uniqueness.  Rather than immerse ourselves with other tourists as we have done with prior San Francisco journeys, we included ourselves among the people for the most part on this trip.

San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley while contiguous each have their own character.  There was something a little foreign to us mid-Atlantic types, not a trip to the zoo but more one of exposure to a different country.  I still noted same sex couples engaged in some type of courtship or public affection, though much more mainstream than my first time there forty years back.  LGBT exists at home but in a smaller subset of the public and less visibly apparent.  The people seemed much younger.  When I go to shul at home, I am among the youngest there even though I have a genuine Medicare card.  On the BART train in San Francisco I am typically the oldest.  This may label living in the Bay Area as a young person's sport, and maybe it is.  Those uphill walks took their toll on my legs and my lungs.  People my age may still be around, having graduated from public transit to personal vehicles, despite a gasoline price more than I dollar a gallon above what I pay.  Or, worst case, the absence of my contemporaries on the BART may reflect negatively on local longevity.

I always like visiting Universities.  UCalBerkely has acquired international renown.  Even in winter intercession, there were still people around, perhaps disproportionately Asians who are common at major American colleges but might have been  majority here.  Buildings were large, as would be expected for a campus that may be double or more the size of my own large alma mater, and far more spread out than I am used to.  It may not be possible to schedule a chemistry class in sequence with a political science class if getting from one location to the next is prohibitive.  Or perhaps they have a shuttle system during the school year that enables that.  We toured their Botanical Gardens, properly labelled, most enjoyable even in winter.

A lot of travel to nearby places took place by Lyft which has a pretty efficient system, though the price of short trips adds up.  Some of the most interesting people were the Lyft drivers which included a retired Hawaiian engineer whose daughter is a pediatrician at Stanford and a fellow from East Africa who was an airline pilot there but now in training to be an American pilot.  No better short cruise than the local ferry from Oakland to Embarcadero.  Saw an old friend's pottery exhibit.  Ate vegan at a farmer's market far larger than anything we have at home.  Not a lot of big chain restaurants.  Not a lot of holiday decorations.

We went to shul on Friday night, New Age experience with songs and conga drums focused on creating mood.  My daughter observed that I was the only straight man in attendance.  I prefer to be the one telling jokes.

Now settled back into the familiar.  Food from megamarts.  Car to get me where I want to be when I want to go there.  Keurig maker with ample assorted pods.  And I am again the one who tells the jokes.

My Personal Museum

Mice have taken up refuge in our basement.  Each time we have the heater serviced, the technician finds about have a dozen carcasses behind one of the pipes, which we send to a mass grave at the public landfill.  We do not know how they get there.  The annual visit from the termite preventer includes some guidance at control as well.  We place a few spring traps that never get activated, some warfarin that may or not provide lethal intervention when they return outside, but the population seems constant.  A tour of the basement indicates that the rodents like to stay warm near the heater as their terminal event, but they have a more free range into the nooks and crannies where I have not been, and onto some of the benches and shelves where I have been.  The exterminator's suggestion, which makes sense for a lot of reasons:  rid the house of cardboard boxes where things are stored. 

When I moved from St. Louis for the final time, I boxed all my possessions, shipped them by UPS which had limits on how much I could ship to one address so I used three, then gathered them all into my father's basement in Monsey.  They eventually found their way into my basement, unopened since 1977.  They have occupied a far wall in the basement, the best starting point for the decluttering project.

There is a grander purpose, of course.  We tend to be hoarders, a notch or two below the pathological ones of reality TV but enough so that none of our living spaces have an open look.  Many a semi-annual plan has called for decluttering but never materializes.  This time it might but we need to start with by tossing stuff that has no justification for retaining.  Rodent habitats seem like a good way to begin.  And so I schlepped about eight boxes from the far wall of the basement to the two bins sitting in front of the garage door, one dedicated to recycling, the other for the landfill.  Most of the boxes contained my school notes and term papers, largely from high school a few from medical school.  There were favorable comments and critical comments, some in red ink, some in black ink with grades ranging from A- to C.  The high school stuff had report covers so that went into the trash, the notes did not, so those went into recycling.  As my prime productive years have come and gone without accumulating the fame that would give these auction value, none were saved for Christies.  One exception, though.  Part of a single box contained my Bar Mitzvah mementos, unfortunately including a few Thank You notes that never found their way to the mailbox.  Postage was apparently 5 cents in those days.  There was a check with my mother's signature to the synagogue that never went out and three kippot with my name stamped in gold.   A few photos were retained, all in good condition except for one nibbled around the edges.  There were thank you notes and photos from friends' Bnai Mitzvah and an invitation to an aunt's 50th anniversary celebration.  Those do not need auction value.  All fit into a very small box which I tucked away next to my desk in a living room nook.  At my father's shiva, my stepmother handed me some photos, mostly from the World War II era.  The contents of that Bar Mitzvah era box should get similarly distributed at my shiva.

Everyone has to deal with a past, present and future.  High school certainly has some lasting fondness.  Rediscovering some of those people on Facebook and seeing others at periodic reunions should suffice, or at least turn past into present.  I do not need to keep the old term papers in my possession, particularly hidden possession.  The present and hopefully near future will include less cluttered living space with some selectivity over what is left on display.  Even the Smithsonian is selective.