The End of the World
Last night Kim and I went to diner st the house of a friend from business school. I knew John quite well during my eighteen months the Graduate Business School at Cornell (then called B&PA, now called the Johnson School….part of the Johnson College of Business at Cornell….too long of a naming story to recite in full here and now). I think its fair to say that John was the smartest guy I knew in business school. There was this other really smart guy that I haven’t thought about in years, but did so just now. His name was Joe Taber. The thing John and Joe had in common was that the were both graduates of the Ag Economics program in 1974, and they both stuck around to work (at least for a while) in Ithaca. Joe has moved on both geographically and from any awareness I have of his life. John, on the other hand has very much had a life that intertwines and connects with mine in a number of ways, some of which we just realized last night at dinner.
John has been married to Elaine since 1977 and, as I learned last night, had their wedding rehearsal dinner at my uncle and aunt’s restaurant in Lansing. That blew our collective minds, especially when I noted that I flipped burgers at that joint (originally built and owned as a gritty road house by my maternal grandfather) during the summer of 1973 and a bit of 1974. Neither John nor Elaine were from Ithaca. John was a Jersey Shore boy and Elaine grew up in the Philippines in a family that was multi-generationally China-connected and all graduates of Cornell. Elaine’s upbringing sounded more like my global beginnings, but John and I connected both at business school and then at our first job’s at Bankers Trust Company. It’s bad enough boring people at a dinner with old b-school pal stories, but layer on war stories of old business friends from a storied New York bank in the golden days of banking and you have the sense for our evening at table.
But the real connection John and I seem to share is a choice over the years to stay heavily involved with Cornell and Ithaca. The Cornell connections have been obvious and in our mutual awareness for a long time. But learning that they had just had breakfast with my cousin’s wife Nancy at a meeting of the local community foundation (where Nancy is the development head) was news to us both. My ancestral home is in the village of Myers and to get to John and Elaine’s home on the lake, we had to detour around a bridge out over Salmon Creek in Lansing, which drove us right past my grandfather’s house, my grand-uncle’s house, the houses of several cousins down by the railroad tracks, and over a smaller bridge over Salmon Creek where my Aunt Josephine died from drowning during a bad flash flood in 1920. My heritage springs from this area of dramatic glacial moraine. My educational development reached its peak along those same gorges at Cornell. John shared the college years at Cornell with me and now shares the homestead in Lansing with my heritage and my own slice of the rolling hills at my Homeward Bound property.
This week has been a dramatic weather week in Ithaca. A National heat wave has touched us with 90 degree weather. The pattern seems to be lovely warm and humid mornings, followed by strong rain storms in the afternoon and evening. As we drove north the 15 miles to John snd Elaine’s lake house, we could see the darkening skies to the north and west. They formed a veritable wall in the sky over the lake. We arrived just as the front hit the lake and whipped up the water with added rain and high winds. We shared cocktail stories with John, Elaine and their daughter Tina in their glass-walled great room as the tempest on the lake fifty feet away raged. We even discussed how easily cottonwood trees can fall during storms as those same trees bent to and fro under the strain of that evening’s stronger than I can remember thunderclouds. It all had a certain apocalyptic end of the world feel to it, but we just partied on regaling each other with stories of interest and shared connections of out past. It somehow seemed right to reprise our lives as the world came to a glamorous end.
The weather and tale-telling distractions went so far as to cause John to barbecue the lamb chops a strange-looking but wonderfully-tasting charred perfection. We carried on through a lovely meal prepared by Elaine and served at a great round table that they had picked up in their foreign travels. John and Elaine maintain a home in the hills of Central Mexico and daughter Tina lives in Mexico City. Not to be outdone, I reminded them of my parent’s Latin American history and the fact that I have a half-brother of cultural note (he’s a TV soccer announcer of some fame) who lives in Mexico City. The connections keep popping up just like the lightning bolts that flashed out over the lake.
When the bewitching hour came and we scurried away with promises to do it all again somewhere and somehow soon, the storm still continued though with less imminent fury. The power grid in central New York had been strained by the storm and many sections were blacked out as we headed south. Driving conditions were on the perilous side with the combination of continued rain and extreme darkness. When we got to the Salmon Creek detour, I must admit that as I carefully navigated the downslope to the small low bridge where my family lost both their first home and their middle child, I was feeling a little deja vu. On this night of reminiscences and startling revelations, this night of tempest and Godly fury, I was forced to tempt fate and will admit to wondering if the heavens would be sending a flash flood down that historically dangerous creek ravine and wash us away on that selfsame small bridge in the Myers delta where the train tracks run up past John’s home to Milliken Station.
It was a strange and eerie moment that passed. We drove the rest of the way home in peace, but couldn’t help but notice the darkness along the road. When we got to Homeward Bound it was also dark, dark, dark. The power will return sooner or later, but in the meantime, my granddaughters want me to get going to Corning to make some glass menageries. Life goes on and the end of the world as I saw it last night was nothing but a fleeting memory.