On a forgettable weeknight recently, I decided to get some Klondike bars. Klondike bars. It’s not that crazy deep, but the first thing that came into my head was how I used to eat them with Herman. And I do love Klondike bars.
I got to thinking recently how food is connected to so many core memories of ours. When I went to Florida recently (longer entry TK because I need to wrap a narrative around my pictures) I had to have some Krispy Kremes. Ok 12 to be exact. I even posted a survey on my Instagram about what the highlight of my summer trip was, the salt flats or the 12 Krispy Kremes. The Krispy Kremes won. And before you write me a long diatribe about how I shouldn’t be eating donuts., I really only eat them in Florida, despite living LITERALLY across the street from a Dunkin Donuts. The commonwealth demands that we all live within 200 feet of a Dunkin Donuts . This is the way.
Krispy Kremes are kind of special to me for a bunch of different reasons. A dear friend of mine grew up in Pensacola, Florida or as he has given me permission to call it, the Redneck Riviera. My friend lives in New York City and is the friend who is better at being a New Yorker now than I am. There are three Krispy Kremes in the city and I must inject some Krispy Kreme goodness into my bloodstream. To me, the Krispy Kreme is a unique treat. My friend sold Krispy Kremes to fund his childhood baseball team, so he fails to see this is a rare delicacy.
A lot of our time too at church is spent talking about food. I always joke that the Baptists got me in the door of a church with the cute kids and the food. The first night of this thing called Community Group that I attended in 2017, not even being sure what I was getting myself into, we sat there and talked about food forever. That nights ice breaker was “what is a food you don’t like that other people like?’ I’ll never forget this. We sat there and riffed on different kinds of food all night. I remember one of the other people at the community group said he didn’t like pizza and we all sat there describing every single pizza slice we had ever eaten. Of course I had to talk about the New York City pizza slice experience, where you walk down the street and wait for the pizza smell to envelop you and you go in and get that pizza slice on a paper plate. There probably won’t be seating and the spices will probably be attached to the counters in some way. I once saw a place with the parmesan was basically chained to the counter.
I think about that conversation a lot, that first night in the community group. It was a bunch of people, sharing their personal experiences with food. Food is fuel, but a lot of the time, it’s connected to core memories in our lives. I could not believe this was supposed to be bible study.
We eat this Polish salad on Christmas and Easter that has a really original name. It’s called…salatka. Mini salad. Even the ingredients, hold a core memory. I saw this HILARIOUS video recently made by these two guys who kind of explain Polish things to people.
The Poles are… specific. In the video, one guy sports the classic Polish dad look, with the full head of hair, bushy mustache and resting Polish uncle face. I have a theory that Lech Walesa, my dad and Bela Karolyi met up in like 1978 for a short meeting where they all agreed to keep the mustache and the full head of hair into old age. I’m thinking it was about a five minute meeting, given the talkative nature of that population bracket. Don’t believe me??? These are three different people. No really. They are. I would include my dad but he’s shy about media coverage. And Wrong Side of the Camera is a multimedia juggernaut. No really. We get like tens of views.
Again, these are three different people:
Unkie Roman is one of these three people above, but I’m not telling you which one. In the video, Unkie Roman talks about the greatest time of the year, the kiszenie of the cucumbers. For those who are not Polish, which I assume is probably most of you, Polish people brine the cucumbers to produce the single greatest thing on earth, the Polish pickle. Well, brined cucumbers. The video is deeply Polish, which includes Unkie Roman reading Krzyżacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz to the pickles. I mean BRILLIANT. At the end of the video, Unkie Roman’s compatriot Janusz has a pickle and says — it tastes like Poland. And these wonderful little gourds are a key ingredient in the wonderful Christmas salad.
The thing though is that I’ve shared the Christmas salad with other people and they think it’s a fine salad but aren’t as crazy about it as we are. Obviously, those people are wrong. A very dear friend, my beloved pastor, our fearless leader, does not like pickles.
To backtrack here for a second, I need to provide a little back story on Sienkiewicz, how he’s connected to the title and to show that he has one of those magnificent Polish father or uncle mustaches. Sienkiewicz is kind of super specific to about 40 million people in the world, so I need to explain him. Sienkiewicz is a kind of iconic Polish author. He was an itinerant wanderer, in the style of Mark Twain. And he wasn’t just a member of the bushy mustache club. He was likely its founder. Sienkiewicz, in all of his bushy mustached glory:
Sienkiewicz wrote a book called Krzyżacy about the defeat of Prussian Teutonic knights by the Polish-Lithuanian army. How this is connected to the kiszenie of the cucumbers is anyone’s guess. Maybe it helps the kiszenie along or something. I found this part of the video extremely funny but when I tried to explain the whole thing to my overwhelmingly non Polish friends, it kind of drew a blank. That’s when I thought about how to translate this to my audience. I thought — what if you went to Krispy Kreme and read Faulkner to the donuts rolling off of the conveyor belt when the “hot donuts now” sign is on. I guess this helps the donuts. This is the way.
The other thing I discovered of late is that crepes are fancy. Oh and that the people in my church community love them. The big debate among us is that I am firmly of the belief that crepes require no toppings. Our family ritual is standing around the stove while they are getting made and eating them right off the plate. I mean you have to try the first one and then the next one to make sure the batter is done right. And then all the crepes are gone. If you eat them as you cook them, no toppings needed. This is a core memory for me, a little ritual we always engage in.
The debate about the crepe toppings got me to thinking about what a core memory this is for me. The crepes fresh off the pan, us arguing about whether or not the batter needs more salt or milk. Emotions connected to food.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended this thing called Fluff Fest in Somerville. It’s a completely Massachusetts-esque type of event. The MC is a guy wearing two mismatched types of plaid and a fedora. He presides over an array of completely inane challenges, culminating in Fluff hairdressing. He mentioned something about his time teaching at MIT, which for Massachusetts, it tracks. I love marshmallows and anything sweet because I have the palette of a 12 year old. The whole thing was rip roaring good time.
It’s funny though that I don’t have a deep connection marshmallow fluff like I do a lot of other food things. It was something I bought with my little paycheck from my first job to make the occasional fluffier nutter.
Somehow the Instagram algorithm sent me an account for a podcast called “Explain Boston to me.” The podcast is hosted by a Massachusetts transplant that aims to explain our unique Boston and New England ways. In time for the fluff festival, she had on a guest named Sarah Dudek on, who it would seem explores all of the intricacies of native New England cuisine, with a special focus on…. Fluff. It’s a really funny episode, with the guests concluding that Fluffernutters are just a part of the core New England experience.
Well, congratulations. You’ve read down this far, so as a reward, you get to see Wrong Side of the Camera’s wall to wall coverage of Fluff festival. No need to thank me. And as a bonus, the tap dancing stylings of the Yellow Shed dance company.
This summer, I pointed my vehicle towards various destinations. Some involved water. Some involved massive, castle like structures. All of them involved lobster rolls.
One weekend, with, as I am now fond of saying, I had little to do and few shekels in my pocket, so I pointed my vehicle towards Falmouth, Massachusetts. A ferry to a place called Martha’s Vineyard leaves from there. GPS said it would take an hour and a half to get there. Boston summer cape traffic thought otherwise. Three hours later, I arrived at the ferry, to find out parking was somewhere else, that they only took cash. Luckily, this being New England, they waved their hand and told me not to worry about catching a ferry that was leaving in approximately five minutes.
The ferry ride was thickest New England. Next to me sat Francis, a four legged fellow passenger of unknown provenance wearing a bow tie and embroidered lobsters on his leash. Francis, a Martha’s Vineyard canine through and through. I pointed my camera at Francis and he did not like that at all, so you’ll have to use your imagination about him.
I decided to go to Oak Bluffs. The vineyard has three main towns. There’s Vineyard Haven, Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. Vineyard Haven is a bit of a tourist trip. Edgartown is thickest, thickest of New England. People SUMMER there. Ground zero for chinos with little ducks embroidered on them. Oak Bluffs though had the most hustle and bustle, I mean as much as you can have on an island that you can cross in a car in about an hour.
Live, laugh, lobster roll was sort of the theme of the day. I dragged my usual knapsack of camera gear with me. I was solo, so I wasn’t annoying anyone by photographing a single flower for a half an hour. I did a turn around the island, all of it culminating in an above average lobster roll and a below average soft serve cone.
Being out there, I recalled my last visit to the island in 2014. At that time, I was teaching at my professional home of almost four years at that point. That job was insane, an environment where anyone could walk into the place, any day of the week and they did.
On day, a very nice young woman from Mexico came to my class. I thought nothing of it, other than she was nice. A day later, one of the teenage girls in the class ran up to me and said — do you know who she is??? She’s FAMOUS!!!!
It turned out she was a famous actress from Mexico. It was funny because I just carried on teaching her as if I didn’t know this.
One day, we were in class and we had an exercise on dream jobs, on what we would do if we could either choose a career or choose a different career. She said she wanted to be a florist.
One night we went to a Red Sox game together. Before we went, we got to talking. She said she’d started acting because that was kind of the family business. She told me she’d never finished high school because of acting. She seemed to be at a crossroads as well with her career, trying to decide what was next for her.
A few weeks later, there was a day trip to Martha’s Vineyard that we could go on. We went with two dear Chilean friends.
The trip had this lovely calm to it. We rode the little bus around the island. It was raining but no one seemed to mind. My friends made jokes about buying property on the island, which is decidedly out of reach for most mortals. There was something small and humble about us on that island that day, enjoying ourselves and just exploring. Not an intense vibe at all.
I thought of my student, somewhat recognized in other parts of the world, but completely anonymous on this little island. I wondered what that might feel like for her.
A couple of days ago, I saw that my former student is now in a series on Netflix and I made a little post about how proud I am of her. She reshared my post and it got 40,000 views. Suddenly my Instagram inexplicably got 68,000 views in 24 hours. This was not my intent at all. I didn’t even think she would see it. It was nice to that she had.
Last night I sat down and watched the series, which is called No One Saw Us Leave. It’s beautifully made and well acted. Oh and one of the stars is a heretofore unknown to me, handsome sandy haired Argentinian actor whose career I am suddenly very interested in. At end, I found myself with a tear in my eye, not so much about the plot line, but seeing my former student in this beautiful and very successful production brought a tear to my eye.
Now I’m at a crossroads with teaching. I think I would like to continue but also the political climate is such that it feels like the opportunities are drying up. I don’t really know what’s next for me, but days like that, making connections like that does make me retain the love for the job. As Henry Burton says in Primary Colors — stop with this “when this is over, we’re all pros crap.” I’ve gotten emotionally attached here, he adds. I guess that’s how I feel about the job. Yeah, we’re all pros here but as far as work goes, I guess I’m a bit emotionally attached to the whole thing.
Anyway, we veered into my work life and this is ostensibly a picture blog, so here’s some beautiful Martha’s Vineyard to experience, without Francis, aka Sir Barks A Lot. These are all from my lovely Rollei. I love that camera. Almost all of these look exactly like they came out of the camera. Martha’s Vineyard is kind of vintage and these were taken with a vintage camera. So there’s that.
I think a lot about our family history. My grandfather started life in Pechora, in Northern Russia, near the Ural Mountains. He migrated to Poland when he was 12. He spoke Polish with an accent for the rest of his life.
At age 31, my mother migrated from Poland to the United States. I’ve always joked that I needed to go west, to compete our migration around the globe.
In truth, I had always been fascinated by the west. I think a lot of Americans are. Herman had a clock in his office that had the time for Half Moon Bay, California on it. I remember thinking that one day, he would just move to California.
For years, I thought the same thing. Maybe I should migrate to California. Go west. Paradise is there.
But one day, I got bitten by the Charles River bug and well, in Boston I shall remain. As I have said many times, Boston was really the first place that felt like home to me. We were no longer visiting. We were home.
I also found this version of America I liked. I think foreigners look at America as this monolith of Walmarts, F150s, distances measured in miles per freedom eagle and other sundry quirks. But in truth, a Texan and a New Yorker are from the same country, but they have as much in common as a French person and a Dane. Sure they speak the same language, but that’s where the similarities end. In the United States, state to state we don’t learn the same things. A person from Alabama cannot tell you the name of the high school exam a person from New York takes and vice versa.
As for my own experience, I lived in the New York version of America for a long time and quite frankly, it just got tiresome. Endless stupid gate keeping about what a real New York is, how above 125 street in Manhattan is “upstate.” One time, talking to some mullet sporting “New Yorker” I heard that I didn’t understand the big city ways because I lived “upstate.” I was in college at the time but my parents lived in Westchester. Here we were simpleton yahoos chewing on our hay, not understanding the ways of these grand city slickers. Give me a break.
Somehow New England was just more welcoming and a lot easier to deal with. People in Boston are mean but kind. Honestly I don’t think they are mean at all, but the bar, it is low. There’s a documentary called on Netflix about the Boston marathon bombing and right at the beginning, a Boston police chief says that in his mind, there are no finer people in the world than the citizens of the city of Boston and every time I watch that, it hits me right in the feels. Every single time.
The New England version of things, to me, is to make things available to everyone. Wachusett isn’t elite level skiing but it’s available to everyone. I don’t think any other cities that boast a ski resort available via public transportation from the city for $10. The city is walkable and comfortable.
It is a very Euro version of things. Boston looks like Europe and there are these egalitarian ideas floating around. Are they always executed well?? Not really but there is some kind of effort to make Boston a livable place.
Somehow though, I still get the itch to explore other places. I spent years criss crossing Europe looking for something I eventually found in Boston. Like I wrote on this blog about a year ago, I got it into my head a year ago that I should spend a day in Salt Lake City, Utah.
What drew me to this location in particular? Well, they have some of the best skiing in the world and if you ski, inherently, you must have at least one screw loose. The normies stay inside on days when it’s negative 20 degrees outside. But the few, the proud, the skiers, we head directly into that, propelling ourselves up and down a mountain until our entire bodies feel like jelly and then sign up to repeat this the next weekend. I’ve legit booked a ski trip for the next weekend on the return trip from the other one.
So I guessed that a state full of people who probably do this on a larger scale must be ok to visit. And somehow I fell in love with it. There was just such a different vibe to the place. New York and Boston, I mean that’s basically Europe. Salt Lake City, that looks like it was built yesterday.
I got back after my trip last year and did a deep dive into the history of the state of Utah and well, of the Latter Day Saints. A couple of my friends said I was off to join their church, but honestly, I like coffee too much, they take considerable liberties with accepted biblical doctrine and it took the Baptists 40 years to drag me kicking and screaming through the doors of a church.
A Baptist I shall stay.
Unsurprisingly, the very wise couple who run the church I attend said it best. The pastor said that of course I was fascinated by the American west being the history freak I am. Pioneers, manifest destiny. What’s not to love??? I mean I mentioned visiting the LDS in Salt Lake and the pastor told me to sign up for a year long course about the Bible he was teaching. He assured me these two things aren’t related. His wife also assured me that there was nothing wrong with exploring the history of the LDS, to realize that there were faiths out there that again, stray from accepted doctrine.
Still my deep dive continued. I watched Under the Banner of Heaven and this slightly off kilter documentary called Murder Among the Mormons, about a forger named Mark Hofmann who use all kinds of dastardly means to create documents related to the founding of the Mormon Church. The “mild mannered family man” turned sinister when someone he sold documents to threatened to expose him. I heard someone say once that you have to be aware of the quiet ones, like Hofmann. See a guy like Fred is just about the least likely person to ever be a serial killer because the guy just openly hates everyone. A guy like Fred, he’s never suspect. But a “quiet, unassuming family man.” Yeah. Think twice. The documentary is also chock full of interesting characters with these old fashioned sounding accents. Many of them have this earnest Mormon look about them. Clean cut, trusting. Perfect marks for someone up to no good.
My favorite figure in the documentary was a guy named Gerry D’Elia. Jerry introduces himself as “an undesirable” who had been thrown out of college with a .6 GPA. He’d moved to Utah to ski. He described himself as a skier who happened to be a lawyer, not a lawyer who happened to ski. He wasn’t a native, so he enjoyed an adult beverage here and there, by his own admission. I like to joke and there is a ring of truth about this, that I’m a skier that happens to be a teacher, not the other way around. I would say this is how I would describe myself. I work to have the means to go do my hobbies. Anyway, Gerry seemed like a really fun guy to hang out with. I googled him and it turned out he had passed away not too soon after the documentary came out. What a wonderful character to have had in your life.
YouTube is also full of people talking about the LDS and I watched an embarrassing amount of those videos. Some were people who had left the church and were critical of it. Other people found the whole spiritual environment in the state interesting and wanted to explore the LDS as an exercise in comparative religion.
I think I approached all of this from the perspective of a person who is fascinated by how different America is in every way. Like I said, I’m a Baptist and I love my church and the people in it. Still, I wanted to go back to Salt Lake City.
It struck me how there seemed to be this western version of America. Boston and New York are basically Europe. Florida is wildly colorful in almost harsh way. The west though, that really is pioneers and manifest destiny.
I asked around with my friends to see if anyone wanted to join but I really thought that I have to go alone, so be it. I decided to attach the couple of days out west with a trip to Florida I now make every year to see dear friends who are basically family at this point. Salt Lake is on its way to Florida, right???
I booked the plane tickets and right up to my departure, I wondered what I was even doing. I booked a four day stay at what is rapidly becoming my favorite hotel on the planet, the Little America. I planned one day of itinerant wandering, one day of church/museum going and one grand adventure. Then onto Orlando to sharpen my Spanish and have fun with my beloved abuelas.
My first stop was O’Hare in Chicago, the first city we lived in when we came to America. Then onto Salt Lake City for I don’t know, vibes??? I sat at the gate to board my flight and still thought — what am I even doing???? What if this is just super weird???
As we were flying into Utah, I saw this expanse of rocks and sand and mountains and I thought — this is the place. Me and you know, Brigham Young, but I don’t have a beard and a Wikipedia page dedicated to my 57 spouses.
I boarded the Trax green line, which obviously runs from Commonwealth avenue to the Little America hotel. Except this time, a lot of the buildings and streets looked familiar from my self directed YouTube study. I got to Little America and found myself booked into the tower, rather than in the motel looking thing I had been booked into the year previous. I got to talking to the front desk attendant and she it turned out she had lived in Massachusetts for 20 years. I ended up with a BEAUTIFUL room with windows on both sides with gorgeous views of Salt Lake and the Wasatch mountains. I needed rest and I needed food.
This was the view from my room:
The next morning, I decided to start my trek. I decided to walk to the University of Utah. Sure, the locals told me I was crazy for attempting this but I was determined. Let’s just say me and my knapsack of camera equipment ended up in some weird spots. At one point, I ended up in the parking lot of some kind of biotech company. From the parking lot, I saw one of the ten most beautiful views I have ever seen in my life. Imagine working in this place. You drive up to work every day, with the most insanely beautiful view from your parking lot and you head inside to deal with emails and people who use phrases like “getting our ducks in a row” and “circle back” in an unironic way.
The view from a random parking lot in Salt Lake City:
What I realized on that massive walk was that Salt Lake doesn’t boast a ton of crazy architecture but my God, the nature does the talking. A lot of the architecture is modern, probably owing to the city’s expansion in the past 23 years since the Olympics.
I walked around the University of Utah for like vibes or something. Again, super impressive place. Lots of buildings with names like “Huntsman” and “Eccles.” Huntsman I know from the chemicals company but Eccles is a less familiar name. What struck me is that these people seem to have boo coo cash but they give boo coo cash to their alma mater. It struck me that instead of doing stupid things like fly rockets for some strange reason, these people chose to pump money into the university, making it really attractive to potential students and faculty.
Some U of U views:
Oh and of course, some exotic paintings from the U of U Fine Arts Museum:
After endless trekking for hours, I located a Trax train, the cute little streetcar that runs around SLC. I walked for about 8 hours. I got on the Trax train and was back to my hotel in 15 minutes. That’s what I noticed too about Salt Lake. Everything is 15 minutes by car or 15 years walking.
Well but of course we’re going to analyze some of the photos I got from my 18,000 step trek around Salt Lake City:
The next day I decided to visit a church in Salt Lake, just to feel something familiar. I searched and searched for a good church to visit and found one again, a 45 minute walk from where I was staying or 7 minutes by car. I get there and I’m just observing everyone. I hear familiar conversations about community groups and church events.
Now to backtrack here a bit, I’m a part of a church plant in Boston. A church plant is a new, kind of start up church. The married couple who run the church, I’ve been dedicated to them from day one and I really want the whole thing to succeed. And I’ve gotten an extensive education on how church plants work. As I do with most topics, I share these facts with people. Do they want to hear about this? Most of the time, no. Do I share it anyway??? Most of the time, yes.
Still though I’m a bit shy in this situation. I’m unsure of myself but confident it’s going to be ok. In typical pastor fashion, the pastor of the church is going around introducing himself to everyone and greeting everyone. I don’t look like anyone this guy knows but he cordially introduces himself. I go into church plant representative mode and talk about how I go to a church plant and how it’s great they have their own building because our church rents space. The guy pulls out his phone and says — what’s the name of the church plant you attend??? I tell him and he goes — we’re talking about sending some people to help out at a church plant in Boston. I’ve been talking to (a person who is a very close friend of mine). We both start laughing hysterically at this, how we ran across each other. The service was very beautiful, with the same songs we sing every week. Afterwards, there was socializing, where we realized we knew a lot of the same people. Small world, I guess.
The next day though was the reason why I came, to see the Bonneville Salt Flats. Of course after my trip last year, I followed a bunch of pages about Utah and they all featured the Bonneville Salt Flats. It looked insane. A dried up river bed that turns into a mirror sometimes. I bought my ticket for my salt flats adventure a while back and was so excited that I woke up an hour before my alarm.
We were hitting the road at 8am and I kept checking that I had the right day and the right time. Our tour guide shows up and goes — we only have one other person, so it’s just us three.
Again, I’m thinking — oh Salt Flats and then back to Salt Lake and to all of my overexcited bubbling over chatter about how awesome of a day it was to anyone who would listen. And probably to plenty of people who weren’t listening. But in true adventure trip fashion, it did not turn out that way. It was waaaaaaaaay better.
Our first stop was the Great Salt Lake state park, where we saw some incredible nature and I got to stick my hand into the Great Salt Lake. I would have loved to go swimming in the lake, but I guess I’ll save this fun for next year. I have a feeling this is about to become a yearly trip.
Great Salt Lake state park views:
I almost forgot to add the copper mine. This is the Kennecott Copper Mine and the smokestack is the tallest structure west of the Mississippi. The smokestack is taller than the Empire State Building.
We drove down this half apocalyptic highway and stopped at the tree of Utah. Now you gotta understand. There was no trees to be seen anywhere. But suddenly we were there at this apocalyptic looking expanse, looking at this insane tree sculpture, surrounded by broken concrete looking eggs. I was wondering where the apes were and the broken down Statue of Liberty.
Some pictures of the moment when I felt like I had left planet Earth:
My INSANE enthusiasm for this day kept bubbling over during the trip. I told myself I wasn’t going to post anything until we got to the salt flats but I couldn’t stop myself. This was all too weird.
Then we got to the salt flats and I don’t even know how to describe it. It was this white expanse that looked like dried up water, which it was. It just looked super surreal. Just like I like my nature. Weird looking.
Did I take an insane amount of pictures of myself at the salt flats? Obviously. Did an almost 50 year old college professor do a cartwheel on the salt flats? Yes. AND I didn’t break my arms.
Dancing on a dried up salty lake bed. 10/10 experience
Did I take a lot of pictures of the salt flats? How long have you been on this blog??? Of course I took a ton of photos.
Here:
This was this never ending day of just wonder. Next we drove to Wendover, Utah which is actually in a different time zone. I crossed a time zone in a car. Unbelievable. We ate some really good tacos in Wendover and then drove into Nevada for less than 10 minutes. Oh and Fred is expanding operations into Wendover, having opened a supermarket there. I took a picture of Fred’s supermarket and sent it to him. He told me to have a good trip, like the good Boston uncle that he is.
Meet Wendover Will. The most interesting border marker I have ever seen:
Last, but certainly not least, views from the road trip around the state. Mind blowing doesn’t even begin to describe these views:
Now you have to understand. This is pretty much my ideal day. I LOVE things like this. There are people who go on vacation to party and shop and get massages and things like that. That’s my idea of hell. I mean that might be an exaggeration but I love ending up in utterly strange places and looking around and just being amazed by where you’ve ended up. Going to West Wendover, Nevada was just about the funniest thing that happened to me this year. I don’t really like luxury things. I think I’ve realized that. I like simple things, like Krispy Kremes and eating tacos in small towns in Nevada. I can’t explain this to people.
To quote my 8 year old best friend, this was definitely one of the best days of my life. Now my 8 year old best friend said this when he was four years old, that a day before spent eating popcorn and playing with balloon animals and then building a fake staircase out of blocks. There’s nothing like a day like that in your life. He had about 1300 days to choose from at that point, but he chose that day. I have considerably more days to chose from and well, this was definitely one of the best days of my life.
In my eyes, going west really showed me that paradise really was there. It’s my little spot that I enjoy. It’s a spot I hope to visit many times over the next couple of years.
Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sign up for surfing lessons. I found myself growing grim about the mouth. It wasn’t necessarily a dark November in my soul, more like a slightly rainy April. Jamaica Plain doesn’t feature any coffin warehouses and people don’t generally wear hats as commonly as they used to, so the urge to knock one off of someone’s head isn’t that great. Cato threw himself on his sword. I threw myself on a surf board. We are not the same.
All right. The Moby Dick paraphrasing portion of the broadcast is now done. I’ve discovered that if you paraphrase Moby Dick, people think you are smart. I’ve made a career of tricking people into believing I’m intelligent.
Notwithstanding, I am not here to do any literary criticism. I am here though to talk about my recent water adventures and further, my snow adventures, of which long time blog readers will know there are a multitude detailed here on these pages. But today we will be discussing sea adventures and tangentially snow adventures, but mostly water adventures.
Like Ishmael, I have always been naturally drawn to the sea. The two places that shaped me in my life, New York and Boston are both great port cites. There’s just one thing about the water here. It’s cold. Very very very cold. So draw me in, it does not. And I’ve always regretted that. I found a way to slide around on the snow that is at times abundant here, but the water I have yet to conquer. That is until recently.
To paraphrase an intellectual hero of mine, Milo the Chonk, English accented internet cat, she was heartbroken and broke. Just where I wanted her. Well, earlier in the summer, the inevitable troubles of life yet again encroached upon the peaceful expanse of my existence and I went to where we all go now when that happens. The sea. No. Like I said. Don’t call me Ishmael. I went to Instagram, home of talking cats, ice restocks, foreboding signs of the fall of the empire and as luck would have it, adds for surfing lessons. In New England. Yes. New England.
As all great stories begin, I plunked down the shekels from my purse and off I went to the sea to prove my mettle against it. Well, first we had to put our wet suits on, which let me tell you, was really no fun at all whatsoever. Whatsoever. Did I mention we were in New Hampshire and it was raining? Winter surfing. We had a little practice session on the beach before we got going. Push and pop up. And off we went into the water. Intrepid wanderers, the lot of us.
The wet suits were thick so we didn’t feel the cold. As is my way, I managed to get onto the surf board backwards. As is my way. I manage to somehow end up backwards on everything. But somewhere in the middle of it, I was struck by this feeling that this is as fun as skiing. We’re there splashing around in that water, just having the best time.
The first time out I carpooled with another local surfer. I’m ok with driving. Not like super happy with it, but ok with it but it was a long drive, early in the morning on an unfamiliar highway. Halfway through the surfing class, we took a break. I gathered around the vehicle we had taken with my bulging bag of snacks and sundry other things. We stood and laughed at the magnificent time we were having. That feeling. That feeling you can’t capture. Not the during, but the after.
After a couple of hours in the water, my lingering skiing shoulder injury started to act up, so I exited the water and laid down on the beach with my surfboard sort of tied to me. I laid back and closed my eyes and just enjoyed the sound of the surf. That feeling. Again, that feeling.
Was I tired after all of this? Yes. Were my arms sore. Yes. Did I sign up to do it again, almost immediately? Your are damn right I did.
This time, we were in Nahant Beach. Now to backtrack here for one second, New England never ceases to amaze me and Nahant, Nahant amazed me. Yeah, I’ve seen more beautiful beaches in my life, but my God. This beautiful place just a (relatively) short drive from my house.
Now things can be disappointing when you do them a second time. Not always, but they can be somewhat disappointing the second time you do them and I thought this would be true for the surfing outing. The first time was amazing. I bet the second time wouldn’t be as amazing. Or disappointing. Or just not as fun.
But somehow, it was ever better the second time around. Crazy. This time, the water was colder. We weren’t wearing any booties or anything, so we got hit by the water. The surfing instructor was hilarious. And I stood up on the surfboard multiple times. My fellow surfing instruction group mates wanted to get out of the water early, but me, water baby, would have stayed in a lot longer. As we finished our day in the water, the lot of us headed up the beach to put our surf boards away. I was struck by something. That feeling. That feeling struck me again.
It wouldn’t be a post without at least a few photos. Here’s one of me on the day:
As you can see, my smile is rather big and in an incredible turn of events, I concentrated on surfing, rather than taking pictures. I know. CRAZY. BUT, I do have some pictures I’ve taken over the years of other people surfing.
Recently, I went on a very pleasant three week vacation with my parents to the Cayman Islands. It was a lovely return back to the island, after a trying year. There will be a separate long, thoughtful blog entry about that journey eventually. EVENTUALLY.
When I got back, I found out I had a bit more time off, so I decided to go to New York for a couple of days. The trips always have self imposed guidelines. I have to travel there the cheapest way possible and I can’t spend a ton of money while I’m there. I have to do the maximum number of free things. I don’t get a hotel room. I sleep on my friend’s futon. We do a two day literal marathon through the city. And I have to get the cheapest eats possible. If there is cloth napkin in sight, I am not interested.
I kinda love doing these trips periodically. Sometimes I get back from traveling and I still want to travel a little bit, I go to New York. Every time I go there, I think the same thing. I have such a complicated relationship with that place. So complicated.
I came to a realization on my most recent trip. I really think I am bad at being a New Yorker. At this point, I much more of a Bostonian than a New Yorker. I was in and out of New York for 13 years. Now I’ve been in Boston for 16 years, almost 20 years including the time of my parents living here. Again, I am so bad at being a New Yorker. The city is so huge and overwhelming. On my most recent visit, I got out of Port Authority and I could not get over the lights and the noise in mid Manhattan. Consistently I cannot believe that I actually grew up in the city. It’s wild to me because the city is so big and so overwhelming to me at this point.
To reiterate for a third and hopefully final time, I am really bad at being a New Yorker. This cannot be disputed. I am so used to Boston’s spaghetti thrown against a wall arrangement of its streets, so I get disoriented in the grid. I don’t remember the order of the avenues anymore. I use GPS to get places. Don’t get me started on the subway. There is no way I will ever like taking the subway. I like the T. It has this kind of vintage charm. Maybe because I have so many memories from so many corners of this city with so many groups of people that I have come across here.
I don’t have the same affection for the New York City subway. It smells bad. It is incredibly noisy. In every other city I have lived in, the terminus stations are place names. In New York, they are streets in different boroughs. Living in Boston, I have seen or visited every single terminus on the system. Well, except Bowdoin, but seriously, who has even been to that one? A couple of years ago, I got bored and went to see the station to make sure it was real. But in New York, I have no idea where those places are and it makes sense that the stations are in The Bronx and Brooklyn. Doesn’t make that system any easier to navigate.
I’m something of a connoisseur of public transportation systems in the world. If I am going to a new city and I hear there is public transportation system, I look forward to taking it. New station names, new train types. I love that sense of adventure. As I said in another entry, I was shocked by the fact that I would be boarding a green line in Salt Lake City to get to my hotel. But any sense of adventure in New York really recedes when I get on the subway.
Oh and I had a really funny moment in the city where I compared New York City to Salt Lake City to my friend who I visit in the city. That’s when I really knew I was in “I’m not a New Yorker” anymore territory. I told my friend about how Salt Lake City didn’t smell like gasoline, the way New York did. I told him about how you could see straight to the Wasatch mountains in Salt Lake City. Wow. I am so provincial now. I’m comparing arguably the center of universe to a city 2,000 miles west that was founded by Latter Day Saint pioneers that could not be more different.
In my greatest tourist moment, my friend got delayed at his chiropractic appointment and to paraphrase Moby Dick, having little else to interest me in Midtown and a few nickels in my purse, I decided to go to the top of the Empire State Building. I hadn’t been up there for a while and really hammered home how I need to finally turn in my “New Yorker” card.
I’ve heard so many times, to an absolutely nauseating degree that REAL New Yorkers don’t go to the top of the Empire State Building blah blah blah. Strong eye roll. That is the most iconic skyline in the entire world. Why would you miss an opportunity to see it from above? That has always mystified me.
I paid the money and went up. Of course there were tourists up there but it was also a kind of overcast, cold day, so I knew the lines wouldn’t be too bad. There really weren’t any. Honestly, I felt lucky to be up there and to be able to look at this skyline from above.
As I’ve gotten out into the world, when I tell people I grew up in Manhattan, people treat it like it’s an accomplishment of some kind. But truly, where we grow up in an accident. In our case, truly an accident because it’s where my dad’s boss moved his lab to after it was initially in Chicago. I could have grown up in Chicago, if life had turned out differently. We moved to New York when I was five years old. When you are a kid, you just go where the adults go.
There is no way to describe what growing up in New York in the 1980s was like if you weren’t there. During that time, the first seeds of what we all call modern life were planted. At the same time, so many 1950s things were in their very final days in the city. All of those grand dame department stores still existed, like A&S, Gimbels, Lord and Taylor and B. Altman. Macy’s was almost a poor relation to those grand dames. These were palaces to consumerism and capitalism. Those stores were beautiful inside. Now just Macy’s remains, all the other grand dames shut forever.
Yet though in the 1980s, some mix of forces created an environment that saw the development of what we now call modern life. There’s a nostalgic documentary on PBS called “Trader” about Paul Tudor Jones, now a hedge fund titan, but in those days, a thirty something energetic upstart in red suspenders and an Oxford shirt. And Bruce Willis’s high top sneakers. As he says in the documentary, the man’s a stud. Tudor Jones marked the beginning of the non-commodity based billionaire. Before those days, to be rich, you had to have oil or some kind of commodity, or master something early that no one thought to do. I watch the documentary periodically when I feel nostalgic for those days. I remember seeing those guys in the red suspenders walking around New York, ready to take over the world.
It’s a bit strange watching that little documentary because you see the very beginnings of our lives now. At one point, you see Tudor Jones cross a street with one of the lieutenants from his trading firm and he reaches into his pocket to take something out. We assume with our modern eyes that it’s a cell phone but it’s a very fancy looking calculator or a radio of some kind. So many things are happening in that one scene. They are almost like time travelers from 40 years hence. One day people will have these handheld information portals in their hands.
I love finding things like that that let me relive those days and that bygone time. I also found a documentary podcast a few years ago called “the Just Enough Family” about the corporate raider named Saul Steinberg and his meteoric rise and spectacular fall. His meteoric rise took place when we lived in the city and because my father’s idea of a good time on a Saturday was going to Central Park with two copies of the Sunday New York Times, which we would read together as a family, I remember this very clearly. Saul lived at 740 Park avenue in one of imposing buildings that face the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park. The protagonist of the story we watched unfold in the New York Times was not too far away from us.
Steinberg was, and I dislike this terminology because it is really overused, a force of nature. Some described him as a swashbuckler, which by all accounts is a pretty apt way to describe the guy. He’s the sun all the other people in the family profiled in the podcast turn around. I googled him and his wife, a very glamorous woman named Gayfryd Steinberg and all of these beautiful pictures came up. In particular, I spent a lot of time analyzing a set of photos taken featuring Gayfryd at Malcolm Forbes’s 70th birthday party in Morocco. That might be the most glamorous sentence ever written. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glamorous and cosmopolitan looking set of people in my life. I have a couple of sets of photos that I look at when I’m lacking in ideas or inspiration. That set is definitely among those photos.
I listened to the podcast so many times because it offered an inside view of how those rich people I saw in New York living. Here we were, these people from nowhere whose lives were very circumscribed by our financial situation surrounded by this profligate, over the top spending. The Go Go 80s, right? As a kid, those people looked extremely glamorous. As an adult, having experienced a few things and learned a few things, I realized that all that glittered was not gold.
I also remember seeing those preppy kids running around the upper east side, where we lived. I looked up to them in a way. I crossed paths with them a lot in my gymnastics classes and on our summer trips to Cape Cod. In 1986, the city was rocked by a young woman named Jennifer Levin was murdered in Central Park by a person she knew and trusted. It was called “the preppy murder” and was this murder case that received an inordinate amount of press coverage. A particularly poignant moment in the documentary was Jennifer Levin’s best friend showing a picture of them together and saying what an innocent act taking the picture was, when less than a year later, Jennifer was gone.
Jennifer Levin was almost a decade older than me and I wasn’t even a pre-teen yet when the case happened but it is very strongly stored in my memory, due to it having a connection to the area we lived in at the time. I also remember how she was portrayed in the media, being blamed for this tragic thing that had happened to her. The murderer, whose name I am not writing here on purpose was, in the wise and angry words of Jennifer’s best friend, portrayed as a symbol of white male beauty power money and intelligence. Mike Sheehan, the square jawed gravely voiced police detective on the case said the murderer had been in jail from the time he was 19 years old and is now knocking on 60, had just wasted his life. The voice of reason in a complete circus.
The 1980s in New York was this almost volatile mix of preppies, aspiring Wall Street tycoons, graffiti artists and up and coming hip hoppers that gave the city this kind of magic that it no longer has. What always strikes me on every visit is how every kind of off kilter and fun neighborhood where it was once possible to rent an apartment for a cheap price is now full of those awful empty glass towers where apartments are priced out of the reach of everyone except the most upper income person. You can’t really have magic if you price everyone out. That’s the sad part about visiting the city now. It feels like the magic won’t come back because it’s simply too expensive to try to make it in the city as a creative person.
I wonder a lot too though why I had absolutely no interest in living in the city as an adult. I think about this almost every time when I visit. Why did I have no desire to do life here as an adult??? I just couldn’t see myself living in one of those anonymous high rises and going to Gristedes or Food Emporium to shop. I couldn’t see myself riding that subway every day to some other anonymous office building. I didn’t want my life to be a string of overpriced brunches and loud nights out. None of that really suited me.
I also could not have those same conversations over and over and over again. Yes, I moved here when I was five years old and I went to high school in the suburbs. “Oh so you aren’t a real New Yorker.” I mean I’m sorry that I couldn’t convince my parents to leave Poland five years earlier so I could have been born in New York. There were some really pressing concerns they were dealing with at the time. And I could not hear for the umpteenth time that because we had lived in Westchester when I was a teenager, that I was “from upstate.” For some reason in New York, that’s some kind of an insult. You upstate simpleton don’t understand us complicated city people. No. My dad got a job over there and we moved. In my mind, when people said I was “from” there, they were saying it was ok what happened to me while we lived there. They weren’t saying that but it was really annoying and I just wanted it to end. I just never wanted to have this conversation again. Enough was enough.
When I moved to Denmark when I was 20 years old, I loved it because I was completely disconnected from all of that. No one cared the year I had moved to New York, so they could judge my “New Yorkness.” We talked about other things and life, for a split second, felt normal.
My friends who I visit in New York aren’t natives. One is from Hawaii and educated in Indiana and then New York. The other lived in Florida and came to New York 25 years ago. Both are absolutely better at being New Yorkers than I am. Both know the subway way better than I do, in that they don’t need to use GPS to navigate it. They saw other parts of the world and decided they loved New York enough to make it their home base. I saw other parts of the world and decided I wanted to be somewhere else.
I look around Boston and I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Life has opened up into a phase I had never experienced before. I’m not out chasing anything anymore. I remember thinking recently how my life settled down one day and all of the doors of the houses and apartments around me just opening. I spent years living in places wondering who my neighbors were.
I did spend about 3 1/2 years working in New York as an adult and I found it for the most part to be incredibly disappointing. I wasn’t offered any mentorship or help or anything while I lived there. It always felt like people were off somewhere living it up and I was alone in my sad little apartment. I lived in Mount Vernon, in the Yonkers area of New York. I guess all the “real New Yorkers” can chime in and tell me I wasn’t living in “real New York.” Please. Go ahead. I can’t wait to hear what YOU have to say about ANYTHING. I lived in this building in Mount Vernon and I never saw a single human being open a door or pick up their mail in that building. Not one. I never saw anyone leave for work in the morning, never saw anyone come back. I never even heard my neighbors in their own homes. It was strange, to say the least. I think about that a lot when I’m hanging out with my community now.
There was also a little “downtown” area in Mount Vernon. There was an A&P there and a bakery, I think. I went down there one time, I think. I also did not cook at home very much.
I lived in Mount Vernon in New York for a year before I moved to Boston. I had this on/off phase when I lived and worked in New York of about three and a half years in my 30s. It wasn’t a period for me that was particularly fruitful professionally or personally. Sometimes I feel like that phase was like the low rated seasons of the television show where it had bad writers and almost no one watched. It wasn’t even a period of time when I was taking a lot of pictures. It was just in 2008, when I was living in that desolate building where I never saw anyone. I look around at my life now and think — how is that even connected to that old life? I lived in a neighborhood where I didn’t know anyone??? Now I can’t imagine living in a place where I don’t know half the people in my neighborhood. I could have never pictured in my mind the people I would meet and become friends with.
The other thing that always hits me when I go to New York is how growing up there made me love nature as much as I do. I cannot overstate how happy I am sitting on that ski lift every weekend in that landscape covered in snow. All of these years of skiing have not made that wear off. If anything, that’s sharpened. Standing on that black sand beach in Iceland in 2023 and staring at the Mars-like landscape on Antelope Island in Utah in 2024 filled me with feelings I never had in New York, staring at those glass manmade monoliths. You see the hand of God in nature. You see the hand of capitalism looking at those skyscrapers.
Now I go to New York like a tourist, just like I go to Poland as a tourist. I was born in Poland but I’m a tourist there. I grew up in New York and went to elementary school, high school and college there and I’m a tourist there too. I didn’t grow up in New England and had absolutely no connection to this area before I came to live here but this is home now. And it feels good to finally be home.
Some pictures from my recent visit to New York. Some really touristy pictures:
I almost called this entry “as a Polish person who grew up in Manhattan, I really like nature a lot.” But I decided to go with the Thoreau quote. I’m the creative force around here, so you know. What I say, goes.
I come from a family of city people. My dad grew up in a small Polish city that isn’t a metropolis but is also not rural. My mom and I are from Lodz, the Manchester of Poland. Industrial, decaying and so would say, ugly. Well a lot of people say ugly. A LOT OF PEOPLE.
Growing up, there wasn’t a ton of money around but my parents did try to make it that I got to experience some nature. I remember being on a hiking trail at Bear Mountain in the Hudson Valley and seeing New York off in the distance, rising like Gotham in a Batman movie.
We did go on two trips to Colorado that I really loved. We went skiing in Steamboat Springs, which of course I loved the first time we went. I got on skis for the first time and utterly fell in love. The second year we went to Keystone and Breckenridge. My mom tells how I was disappointed that it wasn’t as easy going on the skis the second time around. But I loved it regardless.
Before we left, we went to this little information center to learn about Colorado. A man in the information center showed me some pyrite, fool’s gold. And he gave me a pin with the Colorado flag on it, which I still have. When I went to Utah last summer, I remembered how much I loved the western part of the US, a love that started with that visit to Colorado.
Unfortunately trips like that were a special privilege, which I appreciated. So I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say that Central Park was about as far as we went nature wise growing up most of the time. I frequently tell people I come across that my little elementary school, PS 183, used to take us there and say “look kids. TREES!!!!” One year they decided to teach us about ice safety. I remember watching Everybody Hates Chris, which is the only show I have ever watched that actually portrayed growing up in New York accurately and there was an episode where they start a neighborhood watch and one of the members, played by Whoopi Goldberg, suggests they need it because one of them might go to Florida. Everyone on the neighborhood watch looks at each other quizzically. Chris Rock, the narrator says “Florida???? Most of us weren’t going to end of the block!!!” My elementary school wasn’t quite like that, but pretty much everyone was probably going to stay in the city or move to another big city. Ice safety wasn’t exactly on our minds.
As concerned nature too, there’s the legendary story of how in our class on the East River house boat, we were visited by a guy totting bags of reptiles. Just writing that sentence made a chill run down my spine. I mean some life choices were made when a person decides to pursue a career in herpetology, rather than I don’t know being an accountant or something. But we’re not here to drag this man’s life choices. I’ve spent the last 16 years occupied with things like finding inventive ways to teach paraphrasing and teaching gerunds and infinitives, which should be considered some kind of human rights violation. Anyway, we’re not here to debate our questionable career choices. We’re here to talk about more important things, like why would a person travel with bags of reptiles? Well, this man was doing this because he wanted to show these city kids nature. Poisonous nature. Predatory nature.
So the reptile bag man comes into our house boat classroom and starts talking about snakes. I love that for him. For me, not so much. He started saying that he had a boa constrictor in one of the bags. At this point, I kinda started to freak out a bit. A boa constrictor was about to emerge from one of those bags. So I politely turned to one of the teachers and said I was scared and excused myself. I sat outside with the teachers and I still remember I was given a chocolate chip macaroon. I wondered for years why they did this. Wasn’t the narrative that being afraid of things was BAD, and how we had to teach kids not to fear things? Well, somehow this was welcomed there. Now that’s I’ve been in the classroom for almost two decades, I realized why they were so happy. I prevented there being a crying, scared kid in the class.
Soon after, we sailed directly into the heart of darkness. OK I mean I shouldn’t make it out to be that grim and I still got to experience a lot of nature. A fact that wrestle with a lot with is that our lives before we lived in this place was pretty much erased. I had loved Colorado and skiing and that was gone. Our humanity was taken away from us, replaced by the need to be concerned with the lives of these incredibly mediocre people.
In the midst of that, I did get to visit Zakopane in Poland with my cousins, when we climbed the highest mountain in Poland, Giewont. We took family vacations to Cape Cod, where we visited Monomoy Island, near Chatham at the elbow of the cape. The thing was that I didn’t really appreciate this at the time. We would also occasionally take these nature hikes that to me were incredibly boring. Trees. Who wants to look at TREES????
In college, I had almost no exposure to nature, but during the wilderness years, I got to see a lot of beautiful places on those crazy backpacking trips I took with my cousin and her boyfriend, but again, I had no real appreciation for what I was seeing.
This is my favorite shot I got during that time period. Mind you the guy was talking to us in this sort of Polish-Czech meld language and smoking a cigarette while he was steering the boat:
For a long time, I completely lost touch with nature. For a while, I lost touch with everything.
I remember the exact moment when the nature caught me for the first time. I was skiing, going up the mountain after a great day and I looked over and everything was covered in snow. It was this incredibly surreal scene. Now I understood why people loved nature. Why they hiked. Why this was such an important part of people’s lives.
In a way, moving to Boston made me appreciate nature more. I remember noticing trees on Riverway and thinking that in New York, that would never happen. There would be a concrete barrier, but never a row of trees. I always say that the more time I spent here, the more I fell in love with this place and this is completely true. The more I looked around, the more nature I saw, the more I realized that the people who run this city were actually making an effort to make this a better place to live.
My real desire to see major league nature started with skiing. I remember one day I was skiing at Stowe, and I looked over and saw Mount Mansfield with the snow coming down on it. I could not believe how beautiful it was.
Here’s a shot I captured of it, but in my memory, it is much more beautiful:
Over time, I started to be intrigued by unusual nature. Snorkeling in the Cayman Islands showed me the insane world of under the ocean’s surface. I remember thinking there was science fiction going on under the surface of the ocean. The more nature I experienced, the more I realized its effect on me. It amazed me, it calmed me down. Cathedrals, amusement parks and castles are man made structures, beautiful of course, but incredibly man made. Nature though, somehow just appeared out of necessity, out of climate, because of God.
Here’s some shots I’ve taken underwater over the years. It was incredible the first time I swum around a coral reef. Absolutely incredible.
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I started this entry wanting to write about the set of pictures I’ll share below, but really I’ve sought out some really beautiful examples of nature over the years. I keep thinking this that I spent this day in Salt Lake City in August and I have not forgotten about it, partly because of the beautiful nature surrounding the city. In New York, you look off in the distance and look — more concrete. Don’t like concrete? Here’s more concrete for you. In Salt Lake City, you looked off in the distance and you saw the Wasatch mountains. The city is at elevation, so the air is different than in a place like Boston.
I posted most of my views from Salt Lake City in my massive entry about the massive Latter Day Saints structures I visited in the city. I didn’t post this great view I got at the LDS visitors center that I had to zoom in and crop because that part of the roof deck was roped off.
As I detailed in my other entry, I visited the monolithic headquarters of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Marble everywhere, skylights that rival any Scandinavian airport, a six foot portrait of Russell Nelson, church president who was a turning a century old. I don’t have a joke there. The man is a century old. Props. I did read in the man’s Wikipedia bio that he stopped skiing at the age of 90. Which gives me hope.
I haven’t written about my experience seeing the nature around Salt Lake City. As we drove further and further out of Salt Lake City, everything around me started changing. From city sprawl to a landscape of all of these yellows and greens to a landscape that resembled I don’t know, Mars or something. To say I was transfixed by this is an understatement. Again, it was then when I really understood the power of nature. I also like the feeling when I travel that I am far from everything, that I am in a world that is really different from me. I’ve had this exact experience three times in my life. The first was when I was 20, walking to Red Square the first night I was in Moscow. Red Square looked like a hologram. It felt like I was walking through a post card. Red Square didn’t even feel real. The second time this happened was funnily enough in Gaffney, South Carolina with Herman when we went to the see the Peachoid. I remember the feeling of that really thick grass under my feet, kinda letting me know I wasn’t back east anymore.
The third time that happened was when I was sitting there on Antelope Island, staring out at this Martian landscape. All of it together was so overwhelming and just powerful. I cannot describe it another way. I remember looking out and seeing the Great Salt Lake, sort of off shimmering in the distance, motionless.
Of course I took a ton of pictures, but part of me feels like I’ll never actually capture what it really felt like to be there. Oh and we met some bison. Met in the sense of stayed safely inside our van while the beast itched itself on a rock. They are very itchy animals, apparently. Pretty pictures and fun facts. My favorite kind of trips.
Well, you made it this far. May as well reward you with some pretty photos of the aforementioned Martian landscape of Antelope Island:
This is the entry that really took me the longest to come up with a good narrative to wrap around. Strange given my affection for the part of the world I am going to talk about. The Nordic countries were dear to Herman, as they are to me.
Recently Denmark got a king. I don’t know why but this kinda brought a tear to my eye. The Queen stepped aside and gave her son the big job. I follow the Danish royal family on the social media and there’s a little video of the new King Frederik stepping forward on the balcony at Amalienborg palace in Copenhagen. I teared up a little bit. When I lived in Denmark, almost 30 years ago, Frederik was a big deal. Denmark is a small country and everyone knows everybody. A lot of people seemed to have direct connections to the royal family, and this was true of the group of people I met in Denmark. This is one of the qualities I like about Denmark. No one is really far from the people in power in the country. People have a lot of different connections to the royal family. This might have something to do with the fact that people don’t really drag the royal family. They aren’t perfect people and there are anti-monarchists in the country, but they object to the royal family in their semi-sarcastic but respectful way.
I told some of my friends about this, how exciting this is. But then I realized that most of the people I know don’t have the same connection to the place that I have. It sounds really strange, but I actually feel Danish, but I am obviously not. I think about it how crazy it is that I spent four months in the country in 1997and my entire life changed. There was a period of time before I went to Denmark and after and those times don’t resemble each other in any way.
Maybe all of these things coming together for me recently have gotten me thinking, with taking this trip, Denmark getting a king and me starting to make connections between my past and my present. I really considered why Denmark meant so much to me and what made this such a seminal time in my life. I realized that it was as if life had been reset in some way and it was this flash of normalcy in a sea of just utter confusion.
Growing up, everything sorta made sense until I turned 12. We lived in New York. We would walk through the city all the time. Our house is across from my parents job and my school is across from their job. It all sorta made sense. We went to the park on Saturdays and maybe to a museum. I went to gymnastics classes at Sokol on 71st street between York and First avenue. I would go to one of those famous high schools in New York.
And then one day that was all just gone. We moved to the suburbs and seemingly it all disappeared, overnight. I got to that school I went to and all of the sudden I just disappeared as a person. I didn’t have a history. I wasn’t a human being. I was this receptacle for all of these people’s racism and xenophobia. I remember one incident where a group of girls I went to school with cornered me in the library and said “were you popular in your old school? Because you aren’t popular here.” Before I had a chance to say anything to these obviously stellar human beings, they were gone from where we were standing. I remember standing there thinking — we had moved 27 miles. Twenty-seven miles. One spot on earth, I was ok, things were normal. Just 27 miles north, and the world had changed, not for the better.
My old school, my old life. Where had that gone??? And what button can I press to just make this nightmare be over?
After that, I went into long term shock. Now as an adult, I realize that my fight or flight response was activated and never really got shut off. I was a shocked kid, surrounded by negligent and uncaring adults. All I could think about was leaving.
Really the shock didn’t wear off until I was about 30 or 31 years old, around the time I moved to Boston. Of late I’ve really been able to put a lot of those terrible memories behind me, but that has been an evolving process.
When I went to Denmark as a junior in college, it really felt like someone pressed the reset button and everything was normal again. At first of course I was culture shocked. My classmates were wealthy, some very wealthy. We were solidly middle class, but not swimming in cash. Life was modest for us, not lavish.
Our program even featured a 1990s American television star from a show called Full House. Being the sarcastic weirdo I was at that age, I told her that I hated her show growing up. I cringe at doing this now but at that age, it was me against the world. And the world, well, it needed to watch out because I hated you. I was one of the students that was on the poorer end. When it came to the travel break we got, the TV star was going to Western Europe, as she informed me during our second and last conversation. Me, I was going to EASTERN Europe to hang out with my Uncle Waldek and his menagerie of animals.
I didn’t really click or bond with my classmates in the program. In a way, I always see myself as a poor person, even if my activities and my life don’t indicate that, but I always see myself as a person who doesn’t have a lot of money. My classmates were from a different social class than me and weren’t shy about letting me know that. I really bonded with the people I lived with in the dorm, as I have talked about up here many times. It just all felt so normal. And again, one day it was over. I had to go back.
One of the things about the wilderness years was trying to figure out what to do with my feelings about Denmark. It wasn’t so much about being happy. Rather it was about getting to a place where I felt normal again. NORMAL. That’s what I wanted to feel again. When I talk about this time in my life, people tell me that I wanted to be happy and not everyone gets to be happy. Excellent advice, whoever you were. That’s the mistake people made. I didn’t think I deserved happiness. I just wanted to feel NORMAL.
I always say that the wilderness years lasted about three or four years, but in a way, they lasted a lot longer. There was a lot of wandering around looking for answers, drifting, not knowing where I belonged. Part of the reason I settled in Boston was because it reminded me of Copenhagen. Maybe I could have my Denmark experience without being in Denmark.
I guess this brings us back around to Iceland. For the past few years, I’ve been part of this wonderful church community. I am quite close to the married couple who run the church, Steven and Amy. During one of the initial conversations I had with Steven, he told me that he’s been to Iceland quite a few times. I asked why and he said that the church here in Boston has a relationship with a church in Iceland. In fact, they were thinking of sending a team from our church to Iceland to do mission work over there.
When Steven said Iceland, I nearly fell out of my chair. It was so random and just insane. I had lived in a Nordic country, felt at home there and had always wanted to go to Iceland. I transferred flights through the country in 2007 and 2008 and always regretted not going out to explore the country.
I started planning Eat Pray Herman very early. I don’t remember what prompted the idea. I think it was just the need to do something. Maybe that’s part of grief. You have to do something. This past summer was really tough on me and somehow planning the trip made me feel a bit better.
Early in the summer, Steven said a trip was being planned to Iceland. As soon as it was announced, I was going. I was GOING.
I put myself on a severe budget last summer to get the money for Iceland. No cute clothes, no makeup and no take out. I installed an app on my phone that tracks my spending. I mean more like sends me little passive aggressive messages to remind me to stop spending money.
If I’m honest, it was the first summer here that wasn’t magical in some way. Most summers here have featured some kind of event, good or bad, that was cataclysmic in some way. People seemingly dropping from clouds into Downtown Crossing. Magical sunsets. Something happening in front of me that I NEVER thought I would see. Opportunities presenting themselves that I never thought I would ever get. Horrible things. A time of shadows and a time of light.
Summer 2023 was a time of pure shadows. It rained almost every weekend. I was exhausted from teaching the hardest class they offer at my job. I wouldn’t say I was depressed per se. It just wasn’t a colorful, magical summer. Until I left for my trip, of course.
The prelude to the trip to Iceland was kind of hilarious. Maybe unintentionally hilarious and a good preview of what we saw on the trip. Yeah, we’re this far and we haven’t even gotten on the plane yet. Hang tight. We’re getting there.
I didn’t grow up in church so I had absolutely no idea what mission work is or what you even did on those types of trips. Would we be working in the church? I had absolutely no idea. Every summer at church, there are a bunch of kids that come from the south to serve a mission at our church. They are very well spoken and they know everything about the neighborhood before they get here. And they are shiny. We always joke about how shiny they are.
So I’m expecting meeting after meeting about cultural sensitivity and exactly how to speak to people in the country and what challenges we were facing. I kept texting and texting and texting everyone and hearing that there was a meeting scheduled. I would JOKE occasionally — so we’re going to Iceland, yeah??? Because if we’re not, I’m ordering a metric ton of take out right now.
A couple of days before we left, I got an email with my plane tickets. I would be going with a group of dear friends who live about a five minute drive from my house and another couple who live about fifteen minutes from me. And me with my four cameras. I’m not kidding. Four cameras made the trip.
I am so immensely grateful to these people, more than I can ever say, so I arranged for us to be driven to the airport by Roslindale crime historian, cab driver and fashion icon Fred, my driving teacher/chauffeur. It was really the least I could do.
The flight was…interesting. I am not a good sleeper. Some people told me about how their head hits the pillow and they fall asleep immediately and they sleep eight angel kissed blissful hours of sleep. What is that like??? Tell me about that, because I can fall asleep on a bed. Sometimes. SOMETIMES.
So the good part was that I had two empty seats next to me. The bad part was that the seats were about as comfortable as sleeping on your average floor. Oh well. We were going to Iceland and it was going to be beautiful.
The other part was that we got to hear these funny announcements on the plane. One of the flight attendants kept announcing that we had to put our belongings under the seat in front of us. But the twist, the funny Northern European twist was that the announcement was delivered in this sing song kind of Scandinavian accent. It was so adorable. I couldn’t help feeling like I am home.
As I mentioned earlier in the entry, going to Denmark as a college junior felt like someone had pressed a reset button and things were back to normal for a split second. In my mind, Scandinavia was normal and it was a normal I kept trying to get back to for years. It wasn’t until I got to Boston, that I found my normal again.
When we landed in Iceland, I truly felt like I was back at home. We got off the plane at 5am and there was a helpful sign in the airport that said “this way to Iceland.” I went and got a cup of coffee and a pastry. I love you so much Boston but that pastry was better than 95% of the pastries I’ve eaten in Boston. Hilarious.
We drove to our accommodations in central Reykjavik. I hadn’t been to a small European city for a long time and had forgotten what they were like. We got to “downtown” Reykjavik. I felt like I was in a gated community. We were really close to the famous church in Reykjavik. But the first mission was a short nap I needed to take. A “short” four hour nap. I kept telling myself “you are in Iceland” but also “you are extremely tired.” We were only going to be there for a couple of days. I needed to drink this in as much as I could.
Around noon, our other guests joined us and I was roused from my deep sleep. We gathered ourselves and started driving around the country. All I did was stare out the window the entire time. My brain was completely overwhelmed by what I was seeing. America can bend into ugly sameness but Iceland, that was something I had never experienced. Most of the places you visit in your life are man made creations, old and new. Iceland seemed like something conjured out of someone’s strange dreams. I was transfixed.
As I mentioned before, we got absolutely zero information about what we would actually do there, and this remained until we arrived. One of my trip mates got a phone call from the pastor at the church we would be helping at. He said we could go and enjoy the country and then meet him the next evening.
The next day was probably one of the best days of my entire life. By then my fellow travelers realized that it would be good to have me sit in the front, given that I take a metric ton of photos on the regular. Two of our trip mates had been to Iceland five times and knew the place really well. We were taking a road trip around the country. My dream.
Now going back to Herman, he had his own fleeting European experience as a young person. He had also been to Iceland and loved it and also had great memories from a visit to Norway. I brought a picture of him to the island to photograph myself with while I was there.
That day we drove around the island all day, where the places we went to kept getting more and more and more beautiful. Again I was transfixed by what I was seeing. These piles of volcanic hills and these expanses of lush green opening up in front of me.
I had this feeling of absolute singularity. These were places I would probably never see again. I remember getting choked up in front of one of the waterfalls we visited. We saw the famous black sand beach that looked like some kind of surreal landscape that no production designer could ever create. The waterfalls were overwhelming and beautiful. In one particular place, we saw an American school bus that had been repurposed into a cafe. I stood there and said to my dear friend — the chances of me standing here again in my life are incredibly remote. My friend said — I also thought that a few years ago.
I slowly realized that Iceland is a country that absolutely has a sense of humor about itself. I don’t know why people see the Icelandic people as some kind of cold people, because they are warm and incredibly humorous. We passed a sign that said “is James Bond Icelandic?” I regret not having my camera at the ready when we saw this. It’s a slow moving place that somehow runs efficiently.
My reference point for that part of the world is Denmark. Denmark. Where everything is organized. Partying is organized. I will never forget when I first arrived in Denmark and going into a kitchen in one of the other blocks in the Albertslund dorm complex I lived in and seeing a guy with the dark Danish bread, a block of cheese and a cucumber sitting at a kitchen table. Methodically he sat there and cut a piece of cucumber, smeared some cheese on the dark bread and cut off a piece of the cucumber. I remember standing there, transfixed while he did this. From my experience, sandwich making is a messy undertaking and yet this young man made it into a precise, neat experience. As I got to know the Danes, I learned that they were all like this. Neat, but goofy. Straight-laced, but yet vulnerable. Unvarnished and at times almost achingly blunt.
Even that day we spent in Iceland, I realized that Iceland was like Denmark, but life moving extremely slowly. I remember thinking — these are the Italians of the North. But in the best way. I have never met a group of people who absolutely have a sense of humor about themselves. I don’t understand why Iceland and northern Europe has such a reputation for being so cold, when in fact, they are really warm.
As always, these blog entries take me quite a bit of time to write and this one is no exception. This entry has been on my computer for a while and I amend it and re-write it when I can. I stopped writing it because I didn’t know how to weave Herman into the entry. Again I was at church on Sunday and Steven started talking about spiritual hunger and how hungry we all are in our lives for meaning, for satisfaction, for fulfillment. Christianity teaches that you find satisfaction in Jesus and after wrestling with this for a long time, this has become a comfort for me.
I’ve always been this ball of contradictions and big and small experiences, I guess how we all are. I’ve gone to the White House to cover the news and I’ve worked retail jobs at various points in my life. Mostly though, I have always sought out what I had thought would be the most meaningful experiences. I felt empty and alone for a very long time and I tried to fill this emptiness with experiences. I thought I could get rid of this feeling if I just achieved. And achieved and achieved and achieved.
What ended up happening though was that no matter what I did, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the emptiness. I remember when Herman sent me to the White House for the first time. Heady stuff, for sure, especially for a person who had been walking across a stage getting a high school diploma six years earlier. I don’t care what people say. That is a once in a lifetime experience that only a select few in the world get to do. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that, that experience and for sure, this will knock out any other bad experiences still lingering in my brain, but that didn’t happen. That day when I went to the White House for the first time, I left to go back home, literally crossing out of the building on the White House lawn and I thought — I was a loser in high school. To have a thought like that is pretty preposterous when you actually write it out, but that’s how I felt. The emptiness never really filled. In my mind, I was speeding a hundred miles an hour, trying to fit in every possible experience I could to fill the emptiness. But nothing ever worked. I was still empty.
A big part of the emptiness was how I felt about my whole experience in Denmark. The fact that I had to leave so abruptly, made me feel like I was just eternally cursed. I had to leave a place I liked to go back to a place that I really didn’t like. One day it was all just abruptly over and there was no explanation as to why. In my mind for so many years, again, it played into the idea that I was utterly cursed. The thing about that whole experience is that it did fill the emptiness a little bit. I wasn’t weird there. I was normal to those people. But then it ended as abruptly as it had began. And I was extremely bitter about that for many years afterwards.
It really wasn’t until I started going to church that I felt whole. I felt like I was finally satisfied with things. I have so much to be grateful for now, with the community and the friendships.
The day I found out that Herman had passed away, the grief was unbelievable, almost unfathomable. I remember looking around to try to find some relief from it, but there was none. The day after though, people started contacting me on Facebook, who knew him as well, who were in his circle of friends. A dear friend of his, who has since become a dear friend of mine, said that he was always looking for the next big thing, the thing that would make his life better. The thing that would fulfill him.
Herman owned a bookstore in Fells Point in Baltimore right before I met him. It had gone out of business a couple of months before I started working for him. By the time I knew him, the bookstore had become one of those “Herman stories.” Oh the Barnes and Noble in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, I mean the Inner Horrible as Herman always called it had put him out of business. His friend though that night during our conversation that lasted deep into the night said that despite turning the whole thing into a bonkers Herman story, that the bookstore going out of business hurt Herman tremendously and was something that I don’t think he ever really got over.
Painful moments in Herman’s life were usually turned into funny stories. He never really said that the bookstore failing broke his heart and upset him. He focused on how he was living in the room where we made the magazine we were working on together and how incredibly ridiculous this was. Funnier yet still was that he moved out of the office into what he referred to as “the shotgun shack” which was something that was a step above a double wide trailer. One day Herman calls me and joyously says — my landlord committed suicide, so I have to move. The landlord suicide meant the shotgun shack was to be demolished. A bit of time later, Herman sent me a picture of the shotgun shack split into two parts. He then moved into an actual apartment.
To weave this back to Scandinavia, Herman had his own entanglement with that part of the world. Years ago, he had visited Iceland and Norway and in Norway, he had made a lady friend. He spoke of this woman often and she meant a lot to him. In a story that might be of Herman invention, more wishful thinking than actual reality, he thought that he might have a child in Norway. I really didn’t think this was true, but he repeated this often and it seemed to comfort him. Maybe talking about this made him feel whole as well.
At church, we talk a lot about finding wholeness and satisfaction through church and God and Jesus and to sound a bit like one of those “God saved me” people, God did save me and extinguish my hunger and emptiness. The glories of being launched into the world of the super elite, the cream of the cream paled in comparison to being around a group of people who catch you when you fall, help you when you need it, don’t make fun of you and don’t turn your life into a spiral of shame and negativity. Herman and I were very similar obviously, knowing each other as long as we did, evolving together as we did and we both had that entanglement with Scandinavia that we hoped would finally fulfill us and make us feel whole. Neither of us truly found satisfaction in that. Herman never found satisfaction in his life with what he pursued. I found God and the church and my community and I am whole now. I live with the fact daily that Herman was never able to find this.
I guess the Herman part of the story and the Iceland part of the story unite in the fact that when we went to Iceland, we spent the day helping in a church. It was this fascinating place called Loftstofan Baptistakirkja, a multicultural church lead by the exact picture of a pastor you imagine running a church in some guy’s living room. I mean Loftstofan is not run in a living room, rather a music school but the pastor we met was a bearded man wearing the requisite square framed pastor hipster glasses.
Gunnar showed himself to be a warm hearted person with a huge sense of humor about himself and Iceland, just like the other Icelanders we encountered. I started telling Gunnar about how I had lived in Denmark and he found this extremely funny. I came to find out later that the Icelanders have an inferiority complex about the Danes, who they consider to be the mother ship, despite the fact that Denmark, land wise is five times smaller than Iceland. Gunnar said they make them learn Danish in school, which they all hate and he started saying “hi, my name is Gunnar,” in Danish. I started laughing immediately, but my non-Scandinavian language familiar friends were kinda astounded by my laughter.
We went to a morning service in the church and then helped out with a party Gunnar was throwing for the whole church for its tenth anniversary. The church itself was remarkable, drawing in people from around the world. Some of them were in Iceland for work opportunities and some were there coming from places were things weren’t going that well.
During the party, we served the people in the church. I discovered pretty quickly that Iceland does not believe in plastic plates or cutlery. They were serving drinks, so I was in charge of the continual washing and drying of dishes. In a way, this was a remarkable afternoon, in its quiet smallness.
My friends call me “the Rich White Lady.” I have a house cleaner and a chauffeur. Well, a cranky Boston man who helps me with rides whose fashion ranges from nylon athletic shorts “shahts” to gray sweatpants. As horrible as it sounds, I am served by people all the time. That afternoon, I served the people in that church. They were at their church, enjoying an afternoon party and they didn’t have to worry about anything. It was fulfilling in a way that travel hadn’t ever been for me. Not a thumbtack on a map. Something greater.
Herman never found that thing to fill him, really. In the past few years with him, since I started going to church, I talked to Herman about it. He was supportive, but referred quite a bit to the bad experiences he had had with religion. I tried not to push it all on him. It was obvious he was struggling, but I knew what it was like to have things like that pushed on you. Would you place your faith in Jesus? Would you trust God with your future? This is an uncomfortable conversation to have with someone.
In the end though, I feel like Herman never really found true fulfillment. And the fact that I couldn’t help him with this will haunt me for a very long time.
Here I’m sticking in a couple of my Herman pictures from the trip. Sweeping well composed landscapes come after it.
Screenshot
And Iceland and Reykjavik in all of its beautiful glory:
wrong side of the camera 