Pause and Reflect

Pause and Reflect

It’s Saturday morning and I am finally back in the hot tub after what seems like a month of toing and froing. What a hard life, right? Not so much hard, but life is certainly more challenging than normal for everyone and that means that pausing and reflecting is an even better thing now than normal. What exactly is so challenging?

Let’s start with a family review. To begin with, as Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore and Annette Bening learned, The Kids Are All Right. They are back in NYC doing what they do, getting on with their lives and checking in once in a while by phone or FaceTime. Just to pause for a moment, do you remember when we all thought it would be so cool to have videophones? I even bought a half dozen of those crazy AT&T devices that had mini video screens that would allow us to video phone one another (they rarely worked and became just a bigger clunkier phone that has long-since been thrown away). 2001: A Space Odyssey got us all excited about video phones back in 1968 (Jesus, that was 62 years ago!!!). I remember seeing it in Rome at an English movie theater and thinking I might someday make a video pay phone call from the moon. And while no one’s invited me to the moon yet and pay phones are gone like Dodo birds, FaceTime is with us and all but an occasional ho-hum app on our iPhones…one that we do not pay extra for and barely have to pay for line time. But its still nice to occasionally see one another and feel a bit closer that a phone call allows. What has really warmed my heart this summer is that two of my three kids have really gotten a much needed escape from NYC and the COVID confines by being able to go up to my Ithaca house for an extended stay and been able to relax in the countryside and beautiful calmness of Ithaca.

Ithaca is one of the things that I most enjoy when I sit back to contemplate life. I grew up not having a home base. My mother was a rolling stone that truly gathered no moss. From Ithaca, she ventured forth to Latin America, to Los Angeles, to Wisconsin, to Maine and finally to the pinnacle of her career in Rome before retiring to Las Vegas. Ithaca was always her home base even if she only touched foot on it infrequently. Having no better spot to call home, I adopted Ithaca during my five years of schooling there and it stayed with me. At the first opportunity I set down added roots both in town with my home there and with the University by donating time and money to become a “Foremost Benefactor and Builder” of the University and forever have my name tied to the great center of learning that is Cornell. I even spent a decade on the faculty so I can say that while Joni Mitchell has looked at clouds from both sides now, I have looked at Cornell from all sides now. I managed to influence the majority of my offspring that it was a special place that deserved special consideration and that seems to have stuck with them. As for the third child, well, he is more connected there by virtue of his wife than he seems prepared to admit, but as they say in bowling, you can’t roll all strikes and still have it be a real game.

As for other members of the family, there are some hits and some misses when it comes to trying to stay close to them. I have definitely stayed closer to my sisters by virtue of this move to California, and, by extension, my nieces and nephews. Kim is the glue that keeps a lot of her family together and while she talks to all of them daily and works hard to stay on good terms, I seem to be a bit more problematic in that mix, but I keep trying. About the only people we have convened with over the past six months are local family members. We are hoping that more of them will figure out how to get comfortable traveling to enjoy our hilltop with us, but everyone has to get to their own comfort level in these trying times. We ourselves are contemplating a trip back East (to NYC and Ithaca for sure and probably stops in Kim’s Wabash, Kansas City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake CIty and maybe see some friends in Vermont). Time and COVID will tell.

We’ve done better than expected with friends. Some have come to stay with us for a weekend of for weeks. Some have borrowed our Ithaca house for a weekend or weeks. And some we just make a pointed effort to call and FaceTime with to stay connected. I think this pandemic is causing us to be more conscious of the need to stay connected to all those we care about and not take connectivity for granted. We have set up our guest “wing” such that anyone who wants to stay and wants to be extra COVID safe can do so. We genuinely, more than ever, hope that our friends and family will take advantage of this offer of hospitality because it is, more than ever, the best available form of entertainment to see friends with whom we are being COVID-estranged.

The summer heat is somewhat hard for me to fathom. This is cactus country up on this hilltop. It is technically called high chaparral that is dryer than the coastal area just a dozen miles away and ten degrees cooler on average. By the same token, with a clear visual of the Ocean, we do enjoy the hilltop breezes that help keep us on this hill ten degrees again cooler than the inland high desert. So far, there have really only been a few weeks of what I would call hot weather. The daily lows are still in the high 60’s even when the midday temperatures creep into the 90’s. But I can’t tell given that I am a first-timer as a year-round resident. It’s been a hot summer in NYC as well. Average NYC summer temperature has been about 83 where San Diego is 75 and Escondido (we are warmer than the coast) is 86. From what I can tell, Hidden Meadows, the enclave we are a part of runs a few degrees warmer than Escondido, but I suspect that our breezy hill is several degrees cooler. All I know is that there is plenty of sun out here and so much so that I seem always to be looking for shade, which also implies that I like being outdoors here. All in all, the weather is as good as I thought it would be.

And last on the reflection list in 2020 is our political climate. I am ignoring the COVID situation because we know we need to be careful and thoughtful and we also know it is not going away. In other words, we just have to muscle through it and be prepared to adjust our lives as needed. BUt the political landscape is a much bigger deal. Kim and my friend Steve have expressed despair and concern about the risk of Trump winning again. What I feel they are expressing is how hard it has been to soldier on for many of us who feel we have suffered under this crazy administration. I have expressed to them that I am an optimist because there is literally no downside in this case from optimism. Nothing could cause me to feel I should side with Trump under any circumstances, so I will be an anti-Trumper no matter what. In that case, I see no reason to be other than optimistic. Positive thinking may or may not influence outcomes, but it cannot hurt them.

As I pause and reflect I always have to remind myself about how fortunate I am. I am fortunate to have been raised well by my mother and to have the right feelings of social justice. I am fortunate to have three wonderful children who are healthy and more or less happy. I am fortunate for having met Kim fifteen years ago and for rounding out my life in such a pleasant way. And I am fortunate to live in a country where opportunity exists in abundance. My obligation for the rest of my life is to remember all of this good fortune and to share as much of it as I can with family, friends and those not so fortunate as me.