Dismantling a Heritage
When people ask me where I am from, my answer depends on the context of that particular exchange. If I am sitting having a long conversation with someone, I explain that I grew up all over the world and that there are parts of me that started in Venezuela and Costa Rica, wound their way through all of the major parts of the United States from California to the Midwest to the Northeast and even spent a meaningful three years living in Rome, where the influences were broadly European and perhaps completely global. While that is all true, the short answer I give to someone who just asks a casual question and really only wants a quick reply, is that I come from Upstate New York in the Finger Lakes Region. If they know the area, I specify that I am from Ithaca. If they really know the area, I say my family is from the little village of Myers in the Town of Lansing, just north of Ithaca on the East bank of Lake Cayuga. That is where my immigrant maternal grandfather settled and set down roots and where my mother was born and raised. I have my own childhood memories from there as well, but only really lived there for some six months in between living in Santa Monica, California and a two-year stint in Turrialba, Costa Rica.
The bond that connects three generations of my family is the place where my mother made the unprecedented (at least for her family) choice to go to college at Cornell University in the nearby metropolis of Ithaca. I say it is the bond because where one learns most about life and where one sets one’s course for life is usually at college, at least in this day and age. My mother went to Cornell because it was a land grant college of considerable reputation, even though it was only some seventy years old at the time. It must have been relatively inexpensive since she paid for it herself out of her part-time work while living with her older secretary sister. When it was time for my college transition, I was living in Rome and knew so little about college in America that it is scary. I think of my friends from college that grew up in metropolitan New York City and how much they understood about college admissions and think myself a babe in the college-going woods. I wanted to go to Yale or Stanford, not for any good reason, but because they were brand names that I knew and I obviously thought highly of myself at the time. I added Cornell to the list because I knew of the place through my mother and it seemed like a safe school to me. I barely knew what I wanted to study in college, much less what I wanted to get out of college.
When both Yale and Stanford placed me on waiting lists, my natural impatience to get going with my life caused me to accept the offer I had to join the ranks of Cornell engineering students in the Fall of 1971. Like many life-altering decisions, it was a good and logical choice for me since I had at least a semblance of family infrastructure in the area, which as any expat knows, is an important element in the reconnection process to one’s home nationality.
I reconnected with all of America during those years at Cornell, but none more than through the anxious watching of what television, my long-yearning friend who I missed dearly while overseas. If I had to pick a TV show that did more to set my rudder in life, it was that American classic, All in the Family. It was if that show was designed specifically to school me on life in America in the early 1970’s. I also reconnected with my mother’s family via her siblings and my cousins that still lived in the Ithaca area. They provided a far more important safety net than I could ever have imagined needing.
I stayed at Cornell for five years, the extra year to get my MBA in finance, a decision that was heavily influenced by one of my college fraternity friends named Paul, who was business-bound from the start of college while I wandered from engineering to economics and government to finally deciding with his urging to go on to business school with him. Paul was an Upstate New York transplant, being the son of an ex-West Point graduate who had settled in the nearby town of Trumansburg. He was of Jewish heritage and learned by moving from Army base to Army base how to keep and hold his heritage through some pretty non-Jewish surroundings. In some ways, Paul represented the mix that was uniquely Cornell. Cornell has a heavy population of Jewish students from the Metro New York City area and yet it had an equal number of Upstate Ag-oriented students that were more like his Trumansburg persona. Paul married a local Trumansburg girl who he convinced to convert to Judaism, further forging the Upstate/Jewish blend that was so emblematic of Cornell.
My five years at Cornell had given me a decided Ithaca connection and was actually an awakening of what I think of as my heritage. I spent time out at my uncle’s place (even working there one summer) which was my grandfather’s ancestral home. That made my connection to the area far greater than just attending college at Cornell. In fact, my international home gave rise to my staying up in the vicinity of Cornell during the full array of holidays that others used to visit their homes. That all helped to make my heritage and my home Ithaca and Cornell.
When I graduated and went to live and work in New York City, I did so with the expectation that it was temporary…perhaps for five years, after which I would learn what I really wanted to do and where I really wanted to live. As so often happens, five years quickly became forty-five years with three wives and ultimately three children in tow. And along the way, I had occasion to reconnect to Ithaca and Cornell. I did so through business recruiting, reunioning with college friends, and eventually, in 1996, by buying (technically leasing) a home in Ithaca to use as my vacation home.
I established that home as my home base, going so far as to name it on a brass plaque at the entrance, Homeward Bound. It felt like something I needed to cure my wanderlust, a place to call home. I have noted previously that the fact that the town bears the Homerian name of Ithaca just made the decision all that more poignant. I created an oasis in bucolic Ithaca, on the edge of the Cornell campus that my whole family has come to enjoy. The kids are really all New Yorkers, but they all spent a lot of time here in Ithaca as well. I imagine that when they reflect back on where they consider to be most at home, some of them will dedicate some of their heritage to Ithaca.
I am here at Homeward Bound for what will be the last time, the circumstances of which were predictable, but not really fully anticipated by me. In the words of my immortal Kim, it is what it is. I am spending the next several weeks dismantling Homeward Bound as a physical place. It will pass on to some other family in some manner and help them establish their own heritage as it were. But what I am not doing is dismantling a heritage that I have worked hard to create for myself. That will always be with me, with or without Homeward Bound and will always reflect the same image that resides in a favorite item given to me by Kim. It is a map of New York State made of an array of pins in a red board. In the middle of that board right about where Ithaca sits in the Finger Lakes, is a heart shape also made of pins. Those pins are connected to the state outline pins with silver thread. It makes a lovely image and screams that Ithaca is where my heart and my heritage will always reside.