The Afterlife

The range of early hominids was small: probably a 3 miles radius. My own territory here in Geneva isn’t nearly so large. In the cold weather especially, it becomes a series of interiors: the house, the car and Wegman’s supermarket, punctuated only by the cold, wet walk to the bus stop in the morning. To be fair my Brooklyn range was probably even smaller since most places we went were within walking distance. Still, the sheer numbers of people we encountered made it seem bigger. So it is that our world has grown simultaneously larger and smaller.

For a long time, the daily trip to the supermarket was my lifeline. 
I became one of the regular early luncheon crowd which mainly consist of retirees arriving in advance of the more youthful lunchtime rush at 12:30. I didn’t cotton on to the senior aspect until I complained to my neighbor about the lack of parking. Evidently, if I were a native Genevan, I would know that between the hours of 11:00 and 12:00 it is the custom for the local seniors to shop and have Italian Wedding Soup in the café; the parking lot is jam-packed.

I too have the soup – and with great humility. But for the grace of L’Oreal I would disappear into the silver crowd. And as the big Five-O draws nearer I become annoyed with disparaging comments about seniors like those I overheard from two Abercrombie and Fitch employees at the Eastview mall. They complained loudly that so many people in the Starbuck’s queue were “like, you know, old”. It was 20 degrees outside. They were wearing shorts.

I examine my roots in the mirror and picture myself as a grey-haired Boudicca hurling insults and spears at the Abercrombie and Fitch employees. It’s a darkly satisfying image even though it’s unlikely anyone would follow me. Shouting curses is rude and anyway, letting them shiver half-dressed in some dark and throbbing retail cave for minimum wage seems like divine retribution.

When not indulging in warrior queen fantasies over Italian Wedding Soup, I try to imagine what it must be like for Wegman’s two full-time sushi chefs.

Wegman’s Supermarket has a seemingly unshakable faith in the potential for sushi to go mainstream. The sushi station has been poised between the produce section and the café for a year and counting. Cheerful banners announce new creations like Spicy Shrimp Jalapeño sushi or Mango Chipotle rolls (Wegman’s has a “ Sushi Innovation Team”).  Last week they launched “Crunchy Cajun Sushi”. But I don’t see many people buying it.

The sushi chefs try. They jump at any opportunity to explain the boxes on offer or to make recommendations. On occasion I have found myself apologizing for not having the Sushi. “Just checking it out” I stammer in a weirdly shrill voice. They smile politely. I avoid their eyes and imagine them crying themselves to sleep.

Are they Sushi evangelists by choice or worried for their jobs? The display overflows with colorful boxes of nigrizushi and California rolls, but it’s unclear whether this is the product of conscientious sushi making or a lack of interest. I search their faces for signs of hidden pain.

But who can read the sushi chefs with their cold steel knives?  Perhaps I am patronizing them by casting them as victims in my own personal melodrama. In doing so am I not depriving them of their basic human dignity?  I feel ashamed and grab a box of Cajun sushi.

The truth is I’m going a bit stir crazy. At first I thought I might be missing the city but as the days grow warmer I’ve realized it’s something else. I am missing the five-hour car journey from Brooklyn to Geneva. It’s as if Spring has awakened some dormant migratory instinct. I badly feel the itch to set off on a ramble.

Who’d have thought that five hours in the car could feel so necessary? In the years before we moved here permanently, The Journey was our escape from the 6:30 alarm, packing lunches and trips to the dry cleaner. Somehow, those long stretches on the highways with their billboards and mile markers gave us a sense of perspective we couldn’t find anywhere else. We dreamed and day-dreamed and talked and argued and laughed and sang along to the music that lives in the car.

First we headed up highway 80, through the Delaware Water Gap and into the Poconos. In the mountains the road carves through the water-bearing rock creating waterfalls or ice sculptures on either side, depending on the time of year. We hit Dickson City on the outskirts of Scranton by twilight.

O Scranton! Coal town, Steel town, Steam town, Lackawanna, Shelac-a-wanna. Do you wanna Dance? Home to museums of what you once were. O Scranton! It’s the sushi chefs all over again.

It was our custom to eat dinner at Perkins Restaurant in Dickson City. Perkins is the lesser of the many evils that are American family dining. It’s like Denny’s and Friendly’s but the food is marginally better, there’s slightly less cheese and the vegetables are less obviously microwaved from frozen. It is clean and the service is friendly. Less really is more.

I say “restaurant” but Perkins is desperate to be remembered as the bakery it was all those years ago in Minnesota before it became a chain. Every season is pie season at Perkins. Spring is strawberry, summer peach autumn, pumpkin and winter lemon meringue. The children’s placemats are decorated with the “bakery” buddies: Marty the Muffin, Patty the Pie, Kelly the Cookie, Bobby the Brownie and Jeff the Chef. I find them strangely reminiscent of gangster movies.

I imagine Marty the Muffin is the head of the family. Bobby the Brownie is the Marty’s captain and Patty the Pie is a hit man. Kelly the Cookie is Bobby’s wife and Jeff the Chef is the mob lawyer. When Bobby talks to the feds, Marty takes a contract out on him. Bobby and Kelly go into witness protection but Patty the Pie is headed to Scranton…

In seven years we’ve never ordered dessert, but the waitresses are determined for us to have the big half-sugar, half-chocolate chip mega cookies that come with the kid’s meals. The children are disinterested but still the staff flags us down in the parking lot with heart-breaking earnestness to give us the cookies we “forgot”. So we take them. Sometimes we toss them but more often my husband breaks down and eats them around the time we hit Vestal.

As night falls we continue up Route 380 toward Binghamton where we’ll pickup Route 17. It’s so much darker than the city and the sky so crowded with stars, it almost feels like another world. In some ways it is.

If Edward Hopper were alive today, I believe he would paint the Dunkin’ Donuts where couples absently stir their coffees while watching their ghostly reflections in the windows. Edward Hopper and I are watching from the parking lot.

We break off Route 17 at Owego, sneaking out the back way by the Open Door Mission bound for Route 96A and an even smaller road beyond. This is my favorite leg of our journey.

I watch for milestones and they come. First the lonely pink elephant, the focal point of the miniature golf course with pizza-restaurant-attached. There’s the bright yellow mailbox decorated with the silhouettes of a cat, dog, and a bird. Beneath them someone has stenciled the words “God Bless America”.

There’s the crudely rendered brush sign for Brush and Pallet Auto rising above the mishmash of cars. Like all used car lots, the PT Cruiser is parked in front.

Twenty-eight black bears stand guard in the yard of the chain saw sculptor and a little further on Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe has closed for the season and forever.  Space is available.

Two turns, one stop sign, and one set of traffic lights later we reach the crest of the hill overlooking Seneca Lake. For a moment it’s like taking flight with all the hundreds of twinkling lights clustered down below then we plunge down to Montour Falls, Watkins Glenn and Route 14. Trucks must use brakes.

We pass the marsh, the tire store with its life-sized fiberglass sculptures of The Blues Brothers, Watkins Glenn State Park, and cruise into the quiet downtown. Quiet except for the Rooster Fish Brewery. Then we drive up a gentle hill, past a motel ministry to reach the lakeshore.

Route 14 is all farms, vineyards and wineries. We pass the yellow barn. The last 25 minutes is like a trip to the wine store: Glenora, Herman J. Weimer, Prejean, Red Tail, Anthony Road, Fox Run, Billsboro, White Springs then two left turns and home.

“What are you writing about?“ My husband asks.

“How much I miss the drive up here… and my worries about the sushi chefs.”

“Oh don’t worry about them. When I was there the other night they were selling it hand-over-fist”

When we left New York City, I worried that culture might be hard to come by. Oh the luxury of having film festivals and museums, concerts and exhibitions on your door step! Not that we took full advantage at the time. Still, as Woody Allen says about ordering chinese food in the middle of the night in New York City, it was nice to know it was there.

We do have access to many of those things in the Finger Lakes but further away and on a smaller scale. Not impossible but more difficult, just the realities of small town life. That’s why the vibrancy of the music culture here came as such a shock.

The musicality of Geneva does not announce itself on billboards in the manner of the Lake Trout, who have chosen our town as their “World Capital.” At first glance, the music scene, the concerts and the musicals at the Smith Opera House, the Summer Arts Festival, Musical Moments at the public library and recitals at Hobart and William Smith seem much the same as in any other college town. I am not sure that Genevan’s themselves regard it as anything remarkable. And yet, the more time I spend here, the more I am convinced it is.

My first personal experience of this came in the form of a pale green folder sent home in my son’s backpack. At first I wasn’t  sure what I was looking at. I flipped through page after page of childish hieroglyphics: primitive”n”s and “l”s carefully printed inside apple or heart shapes arranged in rows. It was only at the last sheet, the progress chart, that I realized they were not letters but symbols marking out a rhythm. Apparently my son is “working hard at developing the skills needed to be a musician.” A musician! O brave new world!

Now I realize this may seem like poignantly basic stuff to Very Musical People. But from the perspective those of us who experienced music in the public schools of the 70’s, it is nothing short of a miracle. Even in the days before fiscal vampires fell upon the music programs, sucked them dry, propped up their desiccated corpses and labeled them “enrichment”, the quality of music education has been patchy.

In many parts of the country it mainly consisted of singing songs like “Bingo” and The (dreaded) Happy Wanderer” while a teacher played upright piano or autoharp. Music class was a break from the real work, pleasant enough but not all that important.

Imagine then receiving a note home about the musical instrument “petting zoo” where third graders will have the opportunity to try all the instruments in the band to decide “which one they will play.” Not if they will play an instrument but which one.

My son’s music teacher, Sarah Humphrey laughed a little when I pointed out the wording. “I think there’s a place on the form where you can opt out” she said, (I couldn’t see it) “but most students do play something.”

Now I know there are many kids who learn to play instruments outside of school, and I haven’t exactly been channeling Amy Chua when it comes to facilitating this for my own children, but I am so very pleased to see the audacity of music education in our schools.

I’m not suggesting that the Geneva City School District is hothousing tomorrow’s musical talent, (though given the success of bands like a Gym Class Heroes and Ra Ra Riot it is tempting to make the case). It’s more that there is a certain ease and normality to music education here, as if it was an absolutely central part of the human experience, not something reserved for the talented or the driven. As if music was as fundamental as reading or writing. As if it was worth doing for its own sake, not to wire the children’s brains, to improve math scores or to make them better people.

Elementary school students attend classes twice a week and making music is a part of every school event. Each grade learns its own set of songs which they perform for the rest of the students. There’s a hand bell choir and most kids start playing an instrument in the 4th grade. The school also offers after hours piano lessons to children who wouldn’t be able to afford to take them otherwise.

Finally, they have the opportunity to listen to great music. Geneva Concerts, the organization responsible for booking most of the artists at the Smith Opera House makes sure all students see the performances for free.

Of course, as in most places, music education in Geneva has faced the chop now and then, but as Humphrey explains “We’ve been lucky to have so much support.” People wrote letters to the newspaper and fought to keep the music program intact.” So far they’ve been successful.

It’s quite an achievement. Here is a town of less than 20 thousand people who support a great concert series and a small music academy. Here is a school system where every kid learns the skills to be a musician and where they are trying hard to make sure that every child who wants to make music can.

The music in the schools reflects the deep regard for it in the city. It’s a culture that reaches far back into the past. It is as old as the Smith Opera House which has been hosting musical performances since 1894. It is as old as the grand homes on South Main street where residents staged Delightful Musicales for friends on warm summer evenings and as long lived as the Tuesday Piano Quartette (eight hands on two pianos) which has been going strong for more than 100 years.

Perhaps that’s why people here seem to take the importance of music for granted though not, the music itself. Perhaps that’s why when I asked a veteran father of four for his best piece of parenting advice a few years back he replied in all seriousness “It’s okay to start Suzuki at three.” Ah the realities of small town life!

Autumn is giving way to Winter here in Geneva. The leaves are mostly fallen except for the golden topped hardwoods that rise above our gravel road like the arches of a cathedral. I have taken to incessantly posting photos of this route on Facebook: photos taken at dusk and dawn, photos with children for scale, photos of VERY RED leaves. The diminishing “likes” and comments hint at what I know in my heart: there can be too much of a good thing.

Now that most of the leaves are gone, I have ample opportunity to make a study of the woods. I do this mainly on my way to retrieve the Finger Lakes Times, a publication I read, in spite of my unfortunate tendency to fall into an involuntary comatose-like state when confronted with the physicality of newsprint. I read it because, having moved the hell up here, I want to be here.
I am impatient to feel that sense of connection and assuredness that developed over more than a decade in Brooklyn. What mix of small talk with the couple at Art Dry Cleaning, bumping into friends and untold breakfasts at The Purity made it home? I want to know what’s what and who’s who and why. I want to know NOW! The daily journey to the mail box is maddeningly slow like Tai Chi, or turning the pages of the newspaper.

Now that the foliage beneath the big trees has subsided, I have discovered that much of the sloping forest surrounding our house is, in fact, a gothic horror. Our woods are choked with a sinister invader with sooty bark and hideously twisted limbs. If evil were a shrub, it would be Rhammnus Cathartica, the Common Buckthorn.

Introduced as an exotic garden shrub by insane Victorians, Rhammnus Cathartica has infested the country from Nova Scottia to Wisconsin and shows no signs of stopping. It produces shiny black berries with a purgative effect. The birds eat them and duly deposit the seeds hither and yon, complete with a blanket of slimy fertilizer. The buckthorn is so thick in some places near the house that it is nearly impossible to walk in a straight line, without resorting to the machete I carry in my purse.

We have more than our fair share because not so long ago, our land was cultivated. When the farm packed up, the fallow fields provided the perfect habitat for the buckthorn and now there is no end to them. For every dead shrub another four appear at its feet. They sprout, die and putrefy only to rise hydra-like from the forest floor. Nature’s plan has gone horribly awry.

It isn’t supposed to be this way. In a world without exotic species, the forest returns in stages: first the shrubs, the jack pine, the wild rose and honeysuckle, then a few young tree. As the trees grow and begin to block out the light, the composition of the understory begins to change. The plants in the first wave die off enriching the soil and creating the basis for the next succession of flora. These in turn create conditions for the mature forest or as (evidently purulent) environmental scientists refer to it, the “climax community”.

Enter the buckthorn. It just will not go away. It crowds out all the native species, destroying the herbaceous ground cover. Once established is extremely difficult to get rid of.The nitrogen content of its fallen leaves changes the very composition of the soil making it inhospitable to everything except MORE BUCKTHORN.

Mowing merely slows it down. Cutting it back only works in conjunction with the judicious application of Roundup. Burning is very effective until some wretched bird poops more seeds on your parade.

I often think how I would like to do something about the the buckthorn. Some days I fantasize about conducting a controlled burn after which I will swoop in with a truck load of native saplings. This fancy only lasts a few minutes before the image in my mind’s eye becomes a blazing inferno engulfing our house. Other days l picture myself (in a suit of armor) wrenching them from the ground with the big garden fork. The drama appeals and yet, I suspect deep down that there are no easy answers.

Now and then I peruse scholarly articles on reforestation. Most of them are over my head, but I did come across one study in New Hampshire that was reassuring the way only science that confirms your own prejudices can be. It was weak, purely correlative and it dealt with the Glossy Buckthorn, Rhammnus Cathartica’s evil twin. But it felt right, if not about the forest then about the trees. It hinted that once newly planted saplings, the dogwood, ash, birch and cottonwood take hold, the buckthorn will probably perish on its own. It just takes Time.

As I walk back with the paper I try to imagine the woods without the buckthorn and wonder if I’ll live to see it. The obituaries and birth announcements are located inside the front cover of the paper. Did Mary, beloved wife to Joe and mother to four know the woods without it? Will baby Louis born to Jessica and Martin walk on an open carpet of color beneath the tall hardwoods?

I study the names, the Irish and Italian ones repeated though the paper and printed on the sides of trucks or over shops around town, the Spanish names of the laborers who work in the farms and orchards, names of Chinese or Indian scientists at the agricultural experiment station. All of them have roots here. I make a mental note to ask them about the buckthorn.

My neighbor, tells me that Ontario County holds a sale each year where residents can buy native trees at a reduced rate. She has already planted some in the brush behind her house. I make a silent promise to the woods that I will do the same. She doesn’t know when exactly. I should just look for it in the Finger Lakes Times.

Park Slope is like the Island of the Lotus Eaters. Decide to leave and it offers up delight upon delight. Suddenly there will be a thousand reasons why now is not the time.

In the dark night of my soul I have already missed Park Slope. I miss the thing I thought I would miss the least: Two Boots. I miss the cob salad, the undersized, over-filled, warm wine glasses and the reassuring thought that it was always there as a last resort, like watching reruns of Seinfeld or joining the French Foreign Legion.

When I told people I know that we’d decided to leave Park Slope, there was a certain degree of incomprehension, especially when I explained it was not to move to Portland, Seattle or Montclair but to the Finger Lakes of Central New York. This is not something people do as a rule. They mainly move to places that are as much like the Slope as possible.

There is a recurring thread on the Park Slope Parents list in which someone asks, “where is the Park Slope in _________? and everyone chimes in with the names of similar communities around the country. There’s even one in the Finger Lakes: Ithaca.

But we did not move to Ithaca. We moved about an hour north west to Geneva, New York, a little town at the top of Seneca Lake that is home to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Cornell’s Agricultural Experiment Station and Red Jacket Orchards. It’s the kind of place where people say “heck” instead of “hell”, thank you earnestly for donating part of your change to cancer research and look genuinely crushed if you don’t.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with other slope-like communities or with Park Slope itself. On the contrary. Winding up in Park Slope after we moved from London 13 years ago felt like winning the lottery.

We found ourselves in the most beautiful neighborhood of the greatest city in the world. And the people – so many talented people! Where else would  parents from two local elementary schools win Academy Awards for best documentary? Some days it seemed like every second person I met was an author, an artist or a journalist. And everyone else was just very bright.

The problem, however, was that the constant work-arounds that are the prerequisites for life in the city began to wear us down, especially after we had kids. By the weekends we were too knackered to do much but sort the recycling and fall asleep in front of Netflix. Moving to Geneva appealed to us for a number of reasons.

The house was one. We bought a modernist barn conversion on five acres of wooded property for much less (obscenely less) than the cost of anything in Brooklyn or surrounding areas. In Geneva it’s hard to find anything over 300k. It has stone floors and a groovy wet bar and a library. It has oodles of room in which to lose the children and a wall of windows that allows us to curl up by the fire to watch the snow fall.

The lower cost of living was attractive too. Almost everything costs less – except dry cleaning. Dry cleaning, or “cry cleaning”, as I now call it is ridiculous. Yoga and Zumba (why is it always Zumba??) classes cost a whopping $5 per session at the local fitness studio. Most importantly perhaps, we are lucky that our jobs evolved to allow us to work from home. The economy in Central New York has been depressed for a long time so local jobs are not always easy to find unless you happen to be a scientist, a college lecturer or a wine maker.

Finally we liked that it wasn’t Park Slope in the Finger Lakes. It was less predictable, not just shades of blue, but red, blue and all the sometimes surprising shades of purple in between.

Of course I should admit that most of this rationale emerged after we bought the house. We embarked upon our journey to the center of New York in a frenzy of emotional impetuousness that took nearly half a decade to settle into a coherent plan. I spent most of the first few years of our adventure apologizing to people in Geneva for parachuting in and to people in Park Slope for disappearing to the Finger Lakes on every significant weekend. My standard line was “we’ve done this crazy thing…” and then I’d twitch and mumble something about liking Geneva and being used to the drive. It was almost a text book example of how not to do things and yet it had its advantages, chiefly that it got us out of the Slope.

Park Slope is like the island of the lotus eaters. Decide to leave and it offers up delight upon delight. Suddenly there will be a thousand reasons why now is not the time. Leaving in Spring is out because you’d miss the cherry blossoms and the baseball parade. Summer won’t work because Celebrate Brooklyn has THE BEST LINE UP YET.  You couldn’t possibly leave in Autumn because it is – hands down – the most exquisite season of all. Who would willingly miss the trees ablaze with color, the nip in the air and the crunch of leaves on bluestone.

You could move in winter of course, except that would be insane, and you’d never get out anyway because they don’t plow the streets. Add to these concerns to the specter of losing your parking place and it’s a wonder anyone ever goes at all.

On the flip side of all the attractive things about the slope is the fear of trying something new. There’s always the risk that it won’t work out, that it will all go horribly wrong that you and your family will be miserable. Let’s face it, nobody wants to be one of those unfortunate families who move to New Jersey only move back a few months later, wiser but poorer.

It’s no wonder some people suffer a failure of nerve. One couple I know backed out at the last hour even though they had offers for their apartment above their asking price and another family own a house in New Jersey they can’t bring themselves to move into!

Rushing head-long into buying our house forced us to be some place else, to see different people and made the prospect of leaving more imaginable. We still felt the fear of course. When bears started passing through town a few years ago, my fear became a bear stalking my children. I began casually watching episodes of Hunter and Hunted on the National Geographic Channel just in case.

I have wondered about this fear, which became more intense as our moving date approached. Perhaps it’s only natural to fear change? Maybe anxiety about moving increases exponentially with age, children and real estate added to the mix. Or maybe it has something to do with the times we live in, when Americans have balkanized into communities of commonality and lifestyle which make the distance between Portland and Park Slope seem less than the gulf between Park Slope and Staten Island.

Then again, perhaps its not fair to draw comparisons between leaving New York City and anywhere else. I remember the feeling of elation when I moved here back in the 1980’s. I could barely make my rent, and there were weeks when I lived on not-so-famous Ray’s New York oily pizza slices but I loved every thing about it. My heart beat faster every time I walked to work. I loved the way steam rose from the grates. I loved the sour smell of hot summer sidewalks and the tongue-singeing heat of over boiled deli coffee in blue and white cups. I still do.

I lived in Park Slope briefly then too. I’d walk around the neighborhood at twilight stealing glances into the windows of the brownstones on 3rd street imagining what it would be like to live in one. In that sense, leaving is not so much moving house as ending a love affair.

I would never want to be in the position of arguing that people should leave Park Slope or that one place is better than the other. If I won the lottery today I would split our time between both places (and London – but that’s another story). Still, It seems to me that really great loves stay with us where ever we go and it would be a shame to miss the beauty of the forest because of a few bears.

In the very early morning while the rest of our household sleeps, I like to slip out on our side deck with my coffee and scan the woods. The big cotton wood tree sounds uncannily like the ocean when it sways in the wind. Cardinals and yellow finches dart and swoop and call. No bears yet.

Nancy McDermott, late of Park Slope lives and works in Geneva, New York.