July 29, 2006: Newton & Cape Cod

When Janine and Benjamin heard that we hadn’t yet been to a beach on this trip, they quickly decided there was nothing for it but to spend the day on Cape Cod. They very kindly offered to drive so that we wouldn’t have to, which was a welcome respite. Yet it seemed that everyone else in New England had had the same notion. The road down to Plymouth wasn’t too bad, but beyond that point, approaching the Cape, we crept for over an hour through traffic as thick as Beantown humidity.

In his car, Benjamin and I entertained the boys and tried to keep Eliana from punching her elder brother. We also discussed the abysmal condition of the roadways, aggressive drivers (“shmucks,” Benjamin called them), as well as the lack of road signs. “If they can spend $15 billion on the Big Dig,” he griped, referring to the infamous Boston boondoggle, “why can’t they spend a few million dollars on signs?” Why indeed? “It’s a mentality. ‘If you’re not from around here, screw you.’ It’s very insular.”

The Big Dig began in 1985 with a cost estimate of only $2.5 billion. Controversy, mismanagement, shoddy work, engineering hurdles, and other factors caused the price tag to balloon a nightmarish sixfold, making it the most expensive single highway project in US history. It’s been much in the news of late: a ceiling section of one of its tunnels collapsed, killing a motorist, closing a major thoroughfare, and triggering an ongoing criminal investigation into substandard construction materials.

In Janine’s car, Debbie got caught up with her friend, talking about what they’ve been doing and what they’d like to be doing. Since she quit her job at the Environmental Defense Fund, Janine has been writing short stories with a view to writing a novel. She’s been taking a class on novel-writing and reading a lot to learn about novel structure and conventions.

We finally reached Orleans, in the “elbow” of the Cape, which is where the freeway ends and the Cape Cod National Seashore begins, a very long stretch of sand dunes, salt marshes, and scrubby forests that stretches to the north. A quiet place most of the year, it’s overrun with tourists in summer.

As Benjamin and Janine tell it, the teen and party scenes are most pronounced along the south coast, while families are drawn to towns like Orleans and the southern part of the Cape’s eastern coast. The farther north one travels, the older and wealthier the crowd becomes. At the northern tip of the cape, Provincetown is a magnet for gays and lesbians, many of whom arrive on the ferry from downtown Boston.

We spent the afternoon at Marconi Beach, a very pleasant strand in the middle of the National Seashore with a gentle breeze and a three-foot surf. Everyone had a great time.

We waded and swam and dug and built and snacked until about 6 p.m.

Each of the kids got to be buried in the sand at least once: theirs

and ours.

Even Debbie got into the act.

We had dinner and ice cream in Orleans and drove home much more easily and quickly than we had come. Cape Cod will be the most easterly point we reach on this trip.

July 28, 2006: Milburn & Newton

More signs of the North:

• Toll bridges (e.g. the George Washington Bridge)

• Terrible traffic (e.g. I-95 between New York and New Haven)

• High prices

• Density

• Ivy League universities (today we drove past both Columbia and Yale)

• Friendly’s restaurants, where we stopped for ice cream (It brought back memories for Debbie of her college days at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, which we also passed through. From time to time, she and her fellow students would walk to the Friendly’s close by their residence and treat themselves to a dish or a cone.)

At nine o’clock this morning, we went to a bris for the son of Debbie’s cousin Miriam and her husband Matt at a synagogue in Milburn, New Jersey. Miriam is a researcher and faculty member in the Department of Child and Family Studies at Montclair State University; Matt is a gastroenterologist and surgeon.

Neither Debbie nor I had ever been to a bris before. It was a brief, joyful ceremony with many friends and family in the sanctuary. Miriam’s sister Elisheva sang with their father Michael,

Miriam and Matt read their dedications, and the rabbi and mohel performed the ritual surgery. The baby cried relatively little and settled down quickly. Our boys were intensely interested in an explanation of the procedure, so we later gave them one (an explanation, I mean).

Afterwards the baby, named Joseph, was cuddled by his proud grandparents, Mina Jo and Michael. Mina Jo is holding Joseph’s big sister Eve.

Debbie’s cousin Daniel, here with niece Margolit, attended from Seattle. He’s an activities coordinator at Hillel at the University of Washington. A busy man, we still haven’t had him over to our home. He was recently in Israel and is bound for a two-week project in Nicaragua, but we insisted he come for dinner as soon as he can upon his return.

Debbie’s cousin Brice, a concert booker, and his wife Dina, a cosmetics representative, came from Brooklyn for the ceremony. He told us about a trip they had taken to Washington State and British Columbia, and we likewise invited them to visit us the next time they’re in the Northwest.

We also saw Jonathan’s parents Harold and Phyllis, who live in Maplewood, New Jersey, near Miriam and Matt, but they left before I could take a photo of them. Harold hurried off to teach a class at Rutgers. I was able to take a picture of Debbie together with her many cousins.

The rest of the day was devoted to a long drive through New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts to Newton, a suburb of Boston, where Debbie’s high school friend Janine and her family live.

Janine grew up in Seattle, where her parents still live, and went to Lakeside School with Debbie. She got her doctorate in forestry at Yale and worked for the Environmental Defense Fund, first in New York and then in Boston. Her husband Benjamin, a Harvard grad, works as a computer scientist in the Information Technology Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

For dinner, Benjamin barbecued chicken on the deck outside, despite a brief storm that soaked him as he was finishing. Thunderstorms have been our frequent companions on this trip!

Little Jacob was scared by the noise and hugged his mother throughout the meal, but in a little while he was his chipper self again.

After supper, the three older boys played the Harry Potter DVD game with Benjamin. His son Isaac, the resident Hogwarts expert, was the winner, though Tommy and Danny acquitted themselves well.

Eliana pouted a bit, feeling left out. Four boys to one girl – it’s not fair!






Janine, Debbie, and I discussed a variety of topics: our travels, the health of our children, the contrasts between Jewish and Christian and Buddhist beliefs. The cicadas buzzed loudly outside, part of the soundtrack of our summer.

July 27, 2006: Virginia & Washington DC

And now for some signs of the North (Turnabout is fair play, don't you think?):

• Terrible traffic (e.g. the Capitol Beltway)

• Toll roads (e.g. the New Jersey Turnpike)

• Ambiguous or absent signage

• Never-ending road construction

• Ivy League universities (we passed by Princeton this evening)

• Ethnic and linguistic diversity

We thanked our hosts for showing us a splendid time and departed Alexandria this morning. Before leaving Virginia, though, we first stopped in Falls Church, which is the next town over. There we had lunch with Jonathan, a distant cousin of Debbie’s by marriage. He's quite a contrast to yesterday's lunch date.

Jonathan is a neurologist and Army colonel who used to live near Seattle when he was based at Madigan Army Hospital at Fort Lewis. His father is on the medical faculty at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey; they recently wrote a paper together on the prevention of Parkinson’s disease using calcium and vitamin C. The areas of Jonathan’s expertise include medical responses to chemical, biological, and radiological warfare. (Note the subversive sign that Tommy is flashing.)

We spoke about various family members, about his new job as an aide to a two-star general, about his conservative political views, about how little affinity he has for the Beltway culture, and about the musical retreat he attends every year at this time in Bennington, Vermont. Jonathan’s a talented classical pianist and violist. Since Debbie plays the violin, he suggested we visit him in Bennington, but I explained that as delightful as it sounded, such a diversion would be too ambitious even for this already-ambitious trip.

We revisited Washington as the boys hadn’t yet seen any of its many monuments commemorating the defining events and leaders in American history:

the Vietnam Memorial,

the Washington Monument,

and the Lincoln Memorial,

where we contemplated Lincoln’s melancholy, avuncular visage,

and read the idealistic words of his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address incised on the walls beside his statue.

We're wilting in this photo. The heat and humidity, which had let up for a couple of days, returned with a vengeance today.




We crawled through the rush-hour traffic north of Washington, drove to New Jersey, and checked into the Kenilworth Inn, a few miles from the special event we’ll attend in the morning.