This morning, Janine and Benjamin surprised us by telling us that public school systems in Massachusetts don’t generally offer gifted programs (every child in the Bay State being above average, I suppose). It’s a trying issue for them, since their son Isaac has proven particularly precocious in mathematics and other subjects. We're fortunate in Seattle to have an excellent elementary-level public school program for highly capable students, which our sons attend.
We also talked about the psychology of Christian fundamentalism, a phenomenon that really concerns Janine, as it does me, and that she has difficulty fathoming. There are many other things we’d have enjoyed speaking about with them, but the family is visiting Seattle in less than a month, so we’ll have more time then.
(For that matter, I’d liked to have visited downtown Boston, climbed the
Bunker Hill Monument, and toured the
USS Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,” the world's oldest commissioned ship, a three-masted Navy frigate still in service after 211 years. But that would have forced more history on our boys, taken us well out of our way, and required another day. This trip has been much more about people than places or things.)
Debbie did try to reach her mother’s cousin Joe, a freelance writer, and his wife Susan, a schoolteacher, who also live in Newton, but they apparently weren’t home this weekend. Our friends in New Jersey are expecting us this evening, so we thanked Janine and Benjamin for their warm friendship and hospitality, took a few more photos, and were on our way. It would be our first five-state day: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey.
We stopped for lunch in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, a quaint, touristic town full of day-tripping New Yorkers who either drove up from the City or took the ferry over from Long Island. There’s a lot of distinctive New England architecture, nautically-themed shops and restaurants,
and a harbor dotted with sailboats and other pleasure craft.
We noted an aquarium, a maritime museum, a tall yard-armed mast functioning as a flagpole, and an old single-leaf
bascule bridge that hasn’t been painted in many years. (“It looks more rustic than mystic,” quipped Debbie. “Rusty’s more like it,” I shot back.) We stopped at a yard sale, where children were selling lemonade and chocolate-chip cookies, and I learned a new New Englandism: “tag sale.”
On our way to New Haven, gas was $3.29 a gallon, the most we’ve paid yet on this trip, so I only bought a few gallons. I figured this would be enough to get us to New Jersey where, despite the prohibition on self-serve gas and the resultant need to employ more gas station attendants, prices are considerably cheaper. In New York, we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and headed south on the Garden State Parkway. The price at the New Jersey state line was $3.02 a gallon. By the time we reached Highland Park, gas was only $2.89 a gallon, 40 cents lower than in Connecticut.
Our friends Melanie and David have just moved into a restored Craftsman house in Highland Park, a town they’ve lived in for the past 6 years. They’re academics at
Rutgers University in the neighboring town of New Brunswick, and they have two children, Jesse, who just turned 8, and Sophia, who’s 5. Melanie met Debbie in a dance class when they were about 6 years old, so they’re each other’s oldest friends. They attended Lakeside School in Seattle with Janine, where they called themselves “The Triumvirate.”
Melanie got her bachelor’s from Harvard, her master’s from Oxford, and her doctorate in forestry from the University of California at Berkeley. She’s also lived and worked in the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe at various times (a project she was working on was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991). She met David at Berkeley and they got married in 1996. A visiting scholar at Rutgers, she’s doing fieldwork in community forestry. Last night she got back from a two-week field trip to Alabama.
David got his bachelor’s at Princeton and his masters and doctorate in anthropology from Berkeley. He teaches and researches environmental policy at Rutgers, focusing on frontiers in post-colonial societies. He did two years of field work in Zimbabwe, where he studied land use. A
book of his came out this year, which should help a good deal in his quest for tenure. He’s not teaching this summer, but fatherhood, the process of moving, and work on his tenure file are all keeping him very busy. Both Melanie and David are habitually overscheduled – to put it mildly.
After we arrived, our boys were immediately drawn to a computer game that Jesse was playing.
Sophia, a precious and very girly girl, modeled one of her princess dresses for us.
Our hosts grilled salmon on the deck this evening and – miracle of miracles – the sky remained clear! Not a thunderhead in sight. We ate outside, the adults at one table, the kids at another. Our conversation was wide-ranging, from New Jersey’s exorbitant property taxes to the war between Lebanon and Israel, from Melanie and David's old neighborhood, which they miss, to their new neighbors, one of whom we met.
David regaled us with the tale of a misadventure he’d had in December while kayaking on the Raritan River, which runs through New Brunswick. His kayak flipped and he fell out into the frigid water. A passerby saw what had happened but not that he’d managed to swim to shore and pull himself out. Hypothermic, David knocked on the door of a house but was turned away. He ran home, where Melanie put him under a hot shower and went out for a run herself. She saw boats combing the river and a helicopter circling overhead, put two and two together, and called off the search. A policeman paid a visit to the victim and was, it seemed to David, “kind of irritated to find me alive.” Not surprisingly, the story made a Newark newspaper, the
Star-Ledger.
David and I had a provocative politcal conversation. We disagreed on the symbolism of the American flag, which I associate with patriotism but which he associates with nationalism. I tried to define these terms: patriotism, I said, is simply love for my country, while nationalism is a typically militant species of arrogance motivated by ignorance and fear. I told him that I detest how the Right has hijacked the flag, but that they have no right to define the symbol either for me or for the country as a whole.
This led to a discussion of David's vehement opposition to the regressive neocon agenda that has mired us in an Iraqi civil war and his dismay at the willingness of Americans to reelect Captain Ahab in 2004. I concurred with his evaluation of this unnecessary, immoral, disastrous war and its deceitful instigators. The conflict has killed tens of thousands, squandered our treasure, alienated our allies, encouraged our enemies, and there's no end in sight.
But I submitted that the average American is largely unconcerned with politics, thinks very little about the future (as shown by our abysmally low savings rate), and won’t change horses unless he or she sees an immediate upside to a new mount or an immediate downside to the status quo. Most of us don’t fret much about war or poverty or global warming or the national debt or the AIDS crisis or what other nations think of us; these issues are too many and too abstract. Terrorism and high taxes and illegal immigrants are what we tend to think about; they’re specific and concrete and frightening, which is why Bush plays these cards so often.
David, who prefers to call himself a "planetary humanist" (a term coined by
Paul Gilroy, a British scholar of the African diaspora), averred that such thinking is narrow and selfish and contemptible. I said that I saw it as only human and, while unfortunate, certainly not unique to the US.
