PLACES

 

Dear George, 

In many ways, we are products of the places in which we exist. Our environments shape our experiences, opportunities, activities, outcomes. Having grown up in a rural area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I’m a different person than if I’d spent those same years in New York City or Hoboken. Here are places that have been most important in my life. 

MENOMINEE, MICHIGAN (1937-1955) 

I was born in Menominee in the midst of the Great Depression and lived there until I left for college 18 years later. Menominee was a great place for kids to grow up. Bordered on the south by the Menominee River and on the east by Green Bay, we spent much of the warmer months in or on the water. My family moved from town to the country when I was 9, and the forest became my and my siblings’ playground. I developed a love for camping that persists to the present day. Menominee had all the virtues of a small town. The people were kind, generous, and neighborly. My parents left their beloved home to their kids, and we continue to visit to this day. 

YELLOW SPRINGS (1955-1960) 

I went to college in Yellow Springs by mistake. An Antioch alumnus became so annoyed with my mother’s questions about fraternities and sororities that he told her that Antioch College had formal balls every weekend and that owning a tuxedo was mandatory. Antioch, of course, was home to beatniks and Marxists, far afield from my staunch Republican parents. As students we came to view Yellow Springs as a small piece of paradise. It was home to the Little Art Theater where we watched and tried to make sense of films by Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut. Yellow Springs had two bars, Ye Olde Trail Tavern on the main drag which catered to preppies and Com’s, a black-owned bar where Com tended bar to black clientele on the upper level and his wife Goldie waitressed and baked pizza for college students on the lower level. We spent many hours at Com’s, drinking 3.2 beer and debating the meaning of life. 

NEW YORK CITY (1957-1958) 

I had my second co-op job in New York City, and the city blew my mind. The skyscrapers, the crowds, the ethnic diversity, the cultural attractions. I decided at age 20 that this was the only place I wanted to be for the rest of my life. Steve Schwerner, one of my college friends who had a jazz show on our college radio station, recruited us to go to Greenwich Village jazz clubs on weekends. I spent many wonderful nights listening to Thelonius Monk at the Five Spot Cafe, as well as enjoying Charlie Mingus at the White Horse Inn, John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, and a host of others. We still enjoy visits to our in-laws in Manhattan now and then.

SAN FRANCISCO (summer 1959) 

In the summer before my final year of college I drove out to San Francisco with the explicit goal of deciding whether or not I wanted to pursue fiction writing as my life career. I found a job as a dishwasher at an upscale boarding house in Pacific Heights which didn’’t pay money but did offer room and board. I spent a lot of time in North Beach, home turf of Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and worked on writing in the reading room of the San Francisco public library. home to my favorite author, William Saroyan. I submitted 17 short stories for publication that summer, mostly to detective and cowboy magazines. I got a rejection form letter for every one which effectively ended my aspirations for a writing career. 

ANN ARBOR (1960-66) 

We moved to Ann Arbor for graduate school in September, 1960. Coming from a small liberal arts school, we were very skeptical about this Big Ten public university. However, as students, we got free tickets to Michigan’s football game, and, after the first game, we never missed another one. While we’d been Yellow Springs devotees, Ann Arbor was a fantastic college town with multiple book stores, restaurants, art galleries, and movie theaters. We realized we’d been totally ethnocentric as undergraduates. 

CINCINNATI (1966-present) 

We moved to Cincinnati in 1966, first taking a townhouse at Williamsburg Apartments on Galbraith Road. Williamsburg was over-run with young P&G executives and there was an annoying commute to the University, so we moved to a first-floor apartment in a former beer baron’s mansion on Clifton Avenue. The fanciest place we’ve ever lived. We were initially taken aback by the right-wing slant of the local newspaper and worried about the city’s conservatism, but we soon became enamored with the Cincinnati’s restaurants, cultural attractions, wonderful park system, and many enjoyable neighborhoods. After more than half a century, we’re pretty much natives. 

NEW ORLEANS (1990’s-present) 

Our son J and daughter-in-law K moved to New Orleans in the early 1990’s, and we’ve visited them once or twice a year ever since. New Orleans, in my judgment, is tourist heaven. It has wonderful restaurants and an energetic music nightlife that is accessible to oldies like us. We spend lots of time in the French Quarter, visiting art galleries and antique stores, eating beignets, and people-watching in Jackson Square. The city’s history is told in several museums, the World War II Museum is one of the nation’s finest, the parks are great, and we love the New Orleans Museum of Art with its sculpture garden and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Most of all we love being together with our family who always make us feel welcome. 

There are many other places that could be included in this list: Santa Cruz CA, Dixon CA, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Beach Haven NJ, Atlantic City, Miami Beach. It strikes me that people’s lists of personal places are probably quite unique. In doing this task, I realize that I have positive feelings toward every one of these towns and cities, wouldn’t change a thing, and owe them all a big thank you for what they’ve given to us and to many others. 

 Love, 

 Dave

DOMESTIC TERRORS

 
Dear George,  

It started with the big storm. Our son J was here at the time, and, when he went up to the attic, he discovered water dripping through the ceiling. We called the roofers the next morning, and they came and gave us a sizeable estimate (about the price of a new compact car) to fix all our roof problems. Slate tiles, new downspouts, repair the box gutters, new roofing on the porch. Such a shock. Then, at the roofer’s request, we had a tree service guy come and remove an oak tree branch that had collapsed on the roof. The tree service guy said he used to be a roofer himself, and he gave us an estimate of about half of the roofer’s to do the work that he thought needed to be done. I showed him the roofer’s estimate, and he said “Wow!” He added that our house would be good for another hundred years if all that were done. We struggled over what to do and finally decided to go with the roofer and his anxiety-producing estimate (even though we don’t expect to be here for a hundred years). 

Meanwhile Katja had purchased a fancy new refrigerator. I didn’t know why we needed one, but she said our refrigerator was old and she wanted to replace it before it started having problems. (I learned long ago not to disagree with this line of reasoning.) In preparation for the delivery, we took all the food out of our current refrigerator and its freezer compartment. The refrigerator was filled to capacity, and it was a lot of food. The freezer stuff by itself filled a large Coleman cooler, two styrofoam coolers, and half of a large cardboard box. The refrigerator guys came with our new refrigerator and moved our empty old refrigerator out to the driveway. However, our new refrigerator was too tall to fit in the space in our kitchen. (Gasp.) The refrigerator guy said we should have a construction guy come and sand down the wooden bar which was blocking the refrigerator. We put as much food as we could into the new refrigerator, but its freezer compartment was considerably smaller, and so we had boxes full of frozen food left over. 

The next morning the construction guy came, and it took him less than thirty seconds to pull off a wooden bar that was blocking the refrigerator’s access. His minimum charge for the visit was fifty bucks (i.e., at an hourly rate of $6,000 per hour). In the meantime the animal exterminator guy also arrived. The roofers had said raccoons had been up on our front porch roof and had been trying to tunnel their way into our house. The exterminator guy went up to our attic to check it all out. While he was up there, the mattress delivery guys arrived, bringing our newly purchased king-sized mattress. I didn’t know about this purchase either, but Katja said she was worried that we were going to fall out of bed because of our old mattress. She had gotten confused looking at about 50 new mattresses and wound up buying the one endorsed by Tom Brady. In preparation for the movers, I rolled up the rug in the foyer to make access easier, and the mattress guys carried down our old mattress. In doing so, they knocked down the valuable multi-level paper lampshade that hung from our foyer ceiling. Fortunately Katja was standing there and caught it, and I was able to reattach it. 

The animal exterminator finished his inspection and was telling me about it when Katja tripped over the rug I’d rolled up and fell flat on her hip. The exterminator and I helped her up, and, while shaken up, she was able to stand. The exterminator said that he saw only slight evidence of raccoons, but there were dead bats in our attic and holes where they were getting in. He explained that bats can spread a disease that causes blindness in humans. He gave us an estimate of many thousand dollars to get rid of the bats and clean up the mess in our attic. We said we needed to think about it. 

The refrigerator people came and moved the new refrigerator into its space. We have an old freezer in the basement, and, because the new freezer couldn’t hold all our frozen goods, I went down to check it out. Our basement freezer is like Siberia for frozen goods. The basement is dark and dungy, and Katja never goes down there. Consequently food we store there stays for years, some of it seemingly forever. The freezer was jam-packed to capacity and its shelves were covered in ice an inch thick. When I checked, many items were dated between 2018 and 2020, pre-pandemic purchases. My AI Chatbot told me that frozen meat could be kept indefinitely, but the taste begins to deteriorate after 4 to 12 months. We started throwing out frozen food — turkeys, briskets of beef, lamb chops, steaks, hundreds of dollars worth. Our 64-gallon City of Cincinnati trash receptacle became so full of frozen food that I barely could roll it out to the curb. 

The roofers finished up their work several days later, and the refrigerator people finally came and removed our old refrigerator from our driveway. We are sleeping well on our new mattress, eating tasty delicacies from our new refrigerator, looking forward to another hundred years under our excellent roof, and pretending we don’t share our house with bats. The current downside is that Katja is still experiencing severe pain from her fall. An X-ray and a Catscan ruled out fractures and muscle tears, so it’s likely she has a bad bruise. 1% improvement each day. She’s toughing it out. 

Love, 

Dave