Humor

Song of the Road

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Jacquie and I are still on the longest road trip we have ever taken together. At the end of January, we left our home in Jackson Heights in New York City to drive to Tucson, where we spent the month of February. Then we drove to Santa Rosa, California to undergo a medically-supervised fast at TrueNorth Health Center. My purpose was to overcome the Long COVID that has made me a semi-invalid for three years. So far, it appears to have worked. I will know better when my body finally regains all of its strength in a couple of months.  On the trip home, we stopped in Sedona, AZ. This was where our late son, Matt, took his family on their last vacation together. It was a special place to him. I’ve been writing an essay in order to understand for myself what this trip has meant to me and to us. Maybe I will publish something more about it later. However, in the midst of that writing I wrote about the experience below. It makes me smile. I hope you will, too. 

One measure of the soulfulness of this journey home –a funny one, is that I’ve had a playlist running in my head all through the trip.

– It began at the Golden Gate Bridge with Tony Bennett singing about leaving his heart in San Francisco. 

– Then I heard America (the band, not the country)  singing “Ventura highway, where the days are longer and the nights are stronger than moonshine.”  . .

– That led to Dionne Warwick asking, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” 

– All through the desert from Pasadena across Arizona and New Mexico, I heard the Sons of the Pioneers looking for “Cool water, clear water . . . water!” 

– As we drove across the incredibly flat, yellow-colored plains around Amarillo, I heard Roy Drusky longing for childhood when “the days stretched out before me like a long, long Texas road.”  And also, as we drove across the panhandle I heard George Strait singing, “All my exes live in Texas.” (I’m sure that, if I had any exes,  I would want them to live in Texas — it would serve them right!) 

– Oklahoma brought on Gene Pitney ’s,  “I was only 24 hours from Tulsa.”

– From Arizona through Missouri we kept criss-crossing “historic route 66” as the signs called it. That, of course, brings up the “de de-de dum-dum” of Nelson Riddle’s theme from the TV show and Nat King Cole singing, “You’ll get your kicks on route 66.”  (Or, as one billboard put it, “You’ll get your kitsch on route 66.”) 

But, as we entered Missouri, the music stopped for awhile. As Jacquie said, the landscape from here on east is familiar. Indeed, until we hit the hills of  Appalachia where we grew up, it is all what I call, “Ohiowa,” where we spent the largest part of our lives. That may be why I heard, “I want to go home. Oh, how I want to go home!” If “Detroit City” is the buckle of the Rust Belt, Cleveland is about 3 punch holes to the right.

But, “home” isn’t Cleveland nor is it Bobby Bare’s beloved cotton fields – it is New York City.

I know some of you reading this don’t even want to visit New York, much less live there. But we are all different. 

New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.”

Della Ephron

That’s me. I grew up on a dairy farm about as far from New York City as you can get geographically and culturally and still be in New York State, but every time I walk in the streets of Jackson Heights, the world’s most diverse neighborhood, I say (as Jacquie will attest) “I love it here.” As we left Ohio yesterday morning, I heard Frank Sinatra singing: “Start spreading the news! I’m leaving today! I want to be a part of it, New York, New York!” 

Perhaps the purpose of pilgrimage, as T. S. Elliott, G. K. Chesterton, and so many others have said, is to come back to where you began and to see the place for the first time.

Or, as Dorothy Parker put it: “When you leave New York, you see how clean the rest of the country is. Clean isn’t enough.”

Burden or Anchor?

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When we were first married, we had nothing. One day, my Mom took Jacquie and me to yard sale. Mom spied an end table blackened with old varnish and asked how much it was. The person said, “five dollars.”

Mom said, “he’ll take it.”

I was a little taken aback by the way Mom was spending my money and started to object as the owner went to get her money box to receive my five dollars.

Mom said in a whisper, “It’s solid cherry.”

It was. She refinished it. It was beautiful. It became an anchor for us. It was one of the first things that Jacquie and I owned together. It was ours, instead of mine or hers. When we bought other furniture, it dictated our taste. Our first really big purchase was a cherry bedroom suite. Not many years ago, we bought a new dining room table and chairs, also cherry.

Mom refinished that end table half a century ago. It probably needs refinishing again.

Someone else can do that. It is not going with us. We are deeply grateful for my mother’s discerning eye and her hard work. We are also ready, as we approach our 50th anniversary next year, to ask ourselves what we like.

Things change in the second half of life.

What used to be an anchor can become a burden. As we let go of our old anchors, we gain the freedom to sail into whatever is next on life’s journey.

That’s the way Jacquie and I feel as we let go of so many things in order to move from our four-bedroom house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio to a small apartment in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City. We would not be going on to this next chapter if we hung on to things that cost us a lot of money. or that have deep sentimental value, or just seem like the things that two people our age ought to have.

In some ways, my mother is my model for this. When my Dad died, she had a house jam-packed with so many things she had refinished. She had a barn full of things (especially chairs, for some reason) that she was going to refinish. She had never lived more than 15 miles from where she was born in Western New York. But she left almost all of it behind to move to a retirement community in New Hampshire, near my youngest sister. As the Alzheimer’s progressed, she moved from her large independent living apartment to a smaller assisted living apartment. She eventually shared a room with another patient in the memory unit and died owning a bed, a chair, a dresser, and a small bookshelf. One shelf was full of Agatha Christie mysteries. She said the great thing about Alzheimer’s was that she could read them again since she couldn’t remember how they came out.

Someday, even our old bodies that have anchored us to this earth for so many good years will become burdens that we will need to lay down, too.

I hope that when we do, we will be able to sail away to whatever is next.

Fillmore

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Because you read The Life of Andrew Jackson, you might be interested in this biography of . . . 
 

Millard Fillmore

 
I did read a biography of Andrew Jackson about four years ago. I’ve read several presidential biographies. There have been 44 presidents other than Jackson. Why would Goodreads recommend a biography of Millard Fillmore? 
 
I know the reason and it makes the small hairs rise on the back of my neck.
 
In most rankings of U.S. Presidents, Millard Fillmore is almost always near the bottom. Never at the bottom. That place is reserved for Pierce, or Buchanan, or Andrew Johnson, or Harding. Even on a list of the worst, Fillmore is never the first.
 
Fillmore was never actually elected to the Presidency. Zachary Taylor died 15 months into his presidency. Fillmore, his much-ignored Vice President, served out the rest of Taylor’s term. Fillmore’s own party, the Whigs, then refused to nominate him for a second term. Fillmore was the last Whig President.
 
More than one writer has said that “his very name connotes mediocrity.”
 
And that is my problem. His very name connotes mediocrity.
 
My hometown is named after Millard Fillmore. It’s not a secret. My Facebook profile lists my hometown. I hooked Goodreads to Facebook years ago. Apparently, Goodreads’ algorithm looks like this:
Reads Presidential biographies
+
From Fillmore, NY
=
Wants to read about the 13th President of the United States.
 
Well, I did click on a description of the book. It was the first biography about Millard Fillmore. It was published in the 1950’s, over 80 years after he died. The Buffalo Historical Society had to pay a history professor to write about Fillmore. Their interest? Fillmore also was the first president of the Buffalo Historical Society. Wikipedia lists only three other Millard Fillmore biographies. Compare that to the number of Lincoln biographies.
 
Since I have lived in another state for half my life, I can usually answer the question, “Where are you from?” with a vague reference to a small town south of Buffalo and Rochester.
 
When pressed for the name of the town, I tell them, but almost always follow up with this story:
“In 1850, the town was a collection of stores and houses known as “Mouth of the Creek.” They wanted a post office. They had the bright idea to name the town after the current President. They got their post office.”
 
I don’t know how many times I’ve told that story. How often have you explained how your hometown got its name? When Lancaster, Nebraska, became “Lincoln” in 1867, it was an act of admiration. I want people to know that Fillmore, NY, got its name from political expediency. I explain the origin of the name because the name Fillmore connotes mediocrity.
 
But, the name “Fillmore” is on my birth certificate. The name “Fillmore” is on my high school diploma. When my hometown comes up in conversation,  I handle it the way I handle being hard-of-hearing. I joke about it.
 
Making jokes about President Fillmore’s famous mediocrity isn’t hard. It’s in his biography.
 
Did you know that he began his political life as a leader of the Anti-Masonic Party? The name is self explanatory and, believe it or not, it was the first viable third party in America. Fillmore ended his career as the Presidential candidate of the Know Nothing Party. They got their name because members told people that they “Know Nothing” about what the party stands for. What did they stand for? They hated immigrants and people of other religions. Ireland and Germany were sending their criminals to us. Criminals who went to mass every Sunday. They believed the Pope was plotting to turn America into a Catholic nation. Sound familiar? Somehow, the name still fits. 
 
I handle the name of my hometown the same way that I handle being hard of hearing. If I joke about it, no one else can make fun of me.
 
I learned to use humor that way from Fillmore, my hometown. In 1950, the people of Fillmore* planned their Centennial. Other towns could celebrate their growth, important events that took place there, or important people who came from there. But not much ever happened in Fillmore. So the people of Fillmore chose this as their motto:
 
100 Years of Rigor Mortis
 
True story. You could look it up. Time Magazine reported it.
 
The only other time Fillmore got into the national news was back in the 80’s. The town offered a complete medical office free to any physician who would come there. A doctor took them up on it. People loved the way he talked like ordinary people. After a few months, other physicians in the county began looking into his credentials. They learned that, the week before he came to Fillmore, he was driving a fork-lift in a factory in Rochester.
 
I tell that story a lot, too.
 
Why? What’s the problem? Jacquie’s birth certificate says, “Fillmore”, too.  Most of the people I love best in the world were born there or lived there all their lives. I still have relatives and old friends there. They are good people. The surrounding area is beautiful.
 
Does where you come from matter? I suppose not, But, for some reason, where we come from follows us around. That’s why we often ask each other, “Where are you from?” Sure, not all the stereotypes we carry about people who grew up in the country or the city are true. Not all the assumptions we make about people who grew up in the East or the West or the South are true. Yet, it is true that our place of origin shapes us. And, for better or worse, it becomes part of our identity. One of the tasks of life is to come to terms with that aspect of our identity. Some people run away from where they came from. Others embrace it. Some disparage it. One of the tasks of the second half of life is to come to terms with our origins, because it truly is a part of our identity. 
Before there were last names, many people carried the name of their hometown, Joan of Arc, is one example. Jesus of Nazareth is another. 
 
Jesus may have been born in “The City of David”. King David had also been born in Bethlehem. But Jesus grew up in Nazareth in Galilee, a rural, hilly region, like the area around Fillmore. Nazareth in Jesus’ time may have been about the size of Fillmore. A few hundred people.
 
The gospels refer to Jesus as “Jesus of Nazareth” sixteen times. In the first chapter of John’s gospel, Philip invites Nathanael to meet “Jesus of Nazareth.” Nathanael responds: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
 
We don’t know why Nathanael looked down on Nazareth. He came from Bethsaida, a town near Nazareth that experienced fast growth in Jesus’ time. So maybe that was the reason. We only know that the place Jesus came from was a problem for him. It was something he needed to get past with some people. 
 
I don’t know what that means except, if you come from a place like Fillmore,  you are not alone.
 
 
* We reject the term “Fillmorons.”