There But For the Grace
I’m at the Syracuse airport waiting for my flight to Atlanta, and after a few hours layover, I’ll board my flight back to San Diego. I remember that when my son Roger complained a little bit about me moving as far away as San Diego, I smartly quipped that the difference between a five hour flight to San Diego and a three hour flight to Florida was not so great and certainly worth it given the difference between San Diego and Florida. After five years, I think it’s safe to say I was wrong about that. I still vastly prefer San Diego to anywhere else, but I’m not sure touting it in flight time was as good as it gets. Perhaps it’s true if one is going from New York City to either location, but going from San Diego to anywhere else in the US is pretty much an all day affair. I can’t say it would be better from Florida, but it does occur to me that most of my travel has me going from West to East rather than from San Diego off across the Pacific Ocean, I have to figure on spending a full day, more or less, whenever I travel anywhere. For instance, I left Pete and Nancy‘s house in Ithaca at 8:15am, making sure to leave enough time for return of the rental car, and I will arrive home by 8:30pm Pacific time, which anyway you slice it is a pretty full day of 15 hours. That turns my 5 day visit into a full week of travel. I guess that’s just the price of paradise.
I have been reminded that Ithaca is a very unusual place in this day and age of America. It has always been a little bit different like many university-centric small towns can be. Ithaca has not one, but two significant institutions of higher learning with Cornell University and Ithaca College. It means that this town of 32,000 full-time, census-confirmed residents gets overwhelmed by two populations. First there is the faculty and staff which number over 10,000 in the wider community, so approximately ⅓ of the households. If you add to that the non-employees that either attended those fine institutions or directly service them in one manner or another, I suspect it is safe to say that over half of the town is impacted by whatever the Cornell or IC culture may be. The rest of the town is like any other upstate New York town with its blend of professions and jobs and I imagine that population shapes up like many in America with a divisive political view of the world in these turbulent times. This mix of educated liberal folks and staid conservative people is considerably different in composition than we find in most other communities in the United States. This is a town with red signage all around its perimeter in-extremis and yet the Town of Ithaca itself is consistently voted by the Utne Reader (the alternative lifestyle magazine of the granola crowd) as the most “enlightened” town in America. In case you can’t decipher that, it means that this town votes strongly blue and perhaps can even be called activist in nature. I tend to dislike the term “progressive”, mostly because it seems judgmentally biased since progress is sort of in the eye of the beholder, but by most political media standards, I bet they would say that Ithaca is progressive.
I like my cousin Pete and his wife Nancy so much, that I’m not sure it would matter to me what their politics were, but let’s be honest and say that many loving families have already been torn apart by the current political landscape. But for one reason or another, whether it was because Nancy worked in Development at Cornell for many years and now does that for the Community Foundation, or because Pete has spent so much time around me and my family for the last 20 years, or their neighbors on South Hill, Pete and Nancy have come out of their life experiences with a decidedly blue political stance. Pete is still a guy who is very sports and outdoors oriented and has been an avid deer hunter for many years. He has that countrified array of sporting and lifestyle preferences that are more often associated with Republicans than citified Democrats. But that makes him an normal anomaly of American life. Nancy has two American flags in her front planter and tends toward grumbling about the fact that flying the American flag has become such a questionable indicator of political orientation, whether flown upside down or right side up. That says to me that she is as patriotic as any of us and like so many that still want to fly the flag, feels the need to justify it so that, God forbid, she not be judged by others as a conservative, or worse yet, a MAGA.
Pete is the oldest son of my cousin Patty, who still lives in downtown Ithaca in the same house she has always lived in. Pete was one of four kids, three of whom are still surviving and, indeed, living on South Hill (one older sister, Lisa, and one younger brother, Mike). But wait…Pete sort of has another brother who lives with his mother. That would be our mutual cousin, Geoff, who we jokingly call, Patty’s favorite son. The truth is that with Patty approaching 90 years old and afflicted with several maladies like emphysema, Geoff, who is unmarried and healthy in his mid-to-late sixties, is more able to care for and be a companion for Patty than any of her children. I do not know the political orientation of Pete’s sister Lisa, but I imagine she is relatively blue. As for Geoff, and by extension Patty (who’s ear is near Geoff’s every thought), his many years in the backwoods of Myers and, worse yet, rural Arkansas, have left him very red. Worse than red, he is also very opinionated and sure of those opinions. His mother, my uncle’s wife was also always never wrong and always certain about that. That apple did not fall far from the tree.
While Pete and I were going out last night for our take-out Thai food, we got to talking about his brother Mike, who has driven for FedEx for many years and lives three houses away from Pete and Nancy. It is so strange to me that where Pete and Nancy have become such close family friends to us over the past two decades, that his siblings have not really entered our lives much. Lisa and I have seen each other occasionally and we exchange holiday cards but that’s it. Mike is so distant that I don’t think I would know him if I bumped into him. And yet, I have been staying three doors down from him this past week and even inadvertently saw him walking his dog once. Pete tells me that Mike, who is his business partner on several properties, is so red as to be extreme MAGA. For some reason, that intrigues me. I won’t say it bothers me because we have no point of contact and there would be no point in wasting energy on that. Perhaps it tells me that I picked the right cousin to get close to because I am truly not sure I could get close to someone so distant from my life ideology. We break bread with people who live in that realm, but I am unclear I can say we are fast friends. What all of this has reconfirmed in my thinking is that there but for the grace of God go any of us. We are all the product of our environment. I had a very global, very liberal mother and could travel down no other path than what I have. Pete and Nancy have their own paths as does Kim. I’m not certain any of them had parents who influenced them as mine did, but they certainly had something in their lives that drove their thinking as it did. There but for the grace….