Today is our day in Brooklyn. We stopped here to see our two granddaughters and my daughter Carolyn and husband John. They live a short walk from our hotel in Red Hook, so after breakfast in the hotel dining room, we headed over with a small suitcase of laundry in tow to do. It was like the prodigal son returning home from college with his dirty laundry, only this time it was the prodigal father on his way to college that was coming in loaded with dirty clothes.
The girls had both already headed off to school and John was sequestered in his home office, arranging mortgage financing for clients. Kim, Carolyn and I headed to the commercial area of Brooklyn on Court Street to do some errands and done shopping. My errand for the morning was to go to an urgent care center to get my lower leg wounds assessed. I have a sore on my ankle that doesn’t want to heal and on which I have kept a fresh self-adhesive bandage for this entire trip. It doesn’t hurt me per se, but not healing is a nuisance and a mild concern. I guess it’s not altogether an unusual problem since it takes several weeks to book an appointment at a wound care clinic to fix such a problem. What an urgent care clinic could do was assure me that it’s not infected, prescribe me a course of antibiotics and advise me to see a wound care center when I get home. The other thing they told me was to stop using the adhesive bandages I had been applying since the adhesive seemed to irritate my skin. Only I could choose a bad bandage. I also had the doctor look at and lance a large blood blister on my second toe. She told me it was harmless and that it was likely the result of all the extra walking I’ve been doing on this trip (I’ve more than doubled my average daily step count over the last few weeks). Once again, only I could find a downside in added exercise.
I am reminded of the famous Winston Churchill comment that he got his exercise going to the funerals of his friends who exercised. Churchill lived to the ripe old age of 90, enjoying his last days either his beloved cigars and whiskey.
After seeing to my medical needs, I waited for Kim and Carolyn to do their shopping by getting a Chinese man to drive his elbow into all the pressure points in my back, making me want to scream in that strange mixture of pain and pleasure. I have missed my bi-weekly Stretch-U sessions and look forward to resuming them next week to keep me limber, but getting a tweak to my back was a good use of shopping time for me.
The rest of the day was spent catching up with a combination of the life events of my 12 and 9-year-old granddaughters and old episodes of Law & Order: Special Victim’s Unit. There is just something about the life of young girls in Brooklyn and SVU that seems compelling to me. We ended the fine day with a delivered Italian dinner to relieve Carolyn of the cooking burdens. Carolyn and her brood love living in Brooklyn with all its apparent constraints. She has learned to keep her family happy in what most of us would consider a very tight space. For what they could sell their duplex for on the open market, they could afford a lovely and spacious suburban home, but that lifestyle choice seems to have passed them by at this point.
Of all of my children, Carolyn was the one I would have least expected to want to live out her life in an urban setting. Both my sons desperately wanted to live in Brooklyn and proclaimed it their place of choice, right until they decided they had had enough of the city life. Roger headed for the Delaware shore for a quieter seaside lifestyle and Thomas opted for Denver, Colorado and the summer/winter outdoor lifestyle that place affords. They both seem happy with their choices, but it’s too soon to tell how permanent that is. By contrast, Carolyn has made a deeply rooted and seemingly permanent life for herself and her family in the modern urban Mecca of our age. Go figure.
With our suitcase filled with freshly laundered and folded clothes and our souls filled with the shining lights of our younger generation, we headed back to our bungalow in Red Hook to repack our belongings for the last stage of our trip. We will drive across Staten Island, through the stinkier parts of New Jersey and up to the Delaware Water Gap to take us through the Poconos and the fringe of tfe Catskills into the finger lakes region where our destination Ithaca awaits. We have about four hours of driving through the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York countryside to get to our destination. It’s a ride I know all too well, having done it more or less weekly for a decade while I taught at Cornell. I actually look forward to the drive, especially on a nice late spring day like tomorrow promises. It’s all a familiar vortex of my life over many years and it holds plenty of memories to keep my mind in in a reminiscing state, preparing for a reunion state of mind.
My granddaughters know Ithaca and this ride very well themselves. They spent many youthful summers in that bucolic setting. While I’m sorry that part of their lives is behind them, and that rather than summering in Ithaca, they now summer with us in San Diego, I’m sure there is a part of their souls reserved for Ithaca (and probably Cornell) since those roots run equally deep in their parents as both are Cornell graduates. I know Kim and I love having them with us every summer. I don’t care where my granddaughters choose to go to college, because I don’t believe Cornell owns the magic of good education. And as for family heritage, I’m just as happy to see them forge their own with a small part of Ithaca and a large part of Brooklyn. From there, they will stamp their life passports with whatever new destinations suit their whims and desires. Life toils on and I’m glad to say that my granddaughters have a clean canvas on which to create their lives with some parts heritage and some parts new adventures and places.