The Discovery Channel

I bought the current issue of The Atlantic to read on the plane during my emigration to Minnesota and passed the time in flight reading an article by Anne Applebaum about a volunteer brigade from Belarus that’s training to fight in Ukraine. How small the world is, how drenched in history. My grandsons’ paternal great-great grandparents came to this country from Minsk more than 100 years ago. It is not lost on me that I’m hauling all those stories around in my brown nylon carry-on, continuing the westward trek out of Europe and into the American heartland. I arrive wide-eyed with my books and my paintings by friends back east to remind me of where I came from much like my great-grandmother brought her silver candlesticks from Romania.

The first thing I notice about my new home is that when I look over the balcony from the living room, the trees in Wolfe Park across the walking path are very close, right in my face. The ripples in the pond glitter through the trees. It’s not a view. It’s an immersion. The second thing I notice is that the mirrored sliding doors on the closet on the opposite wall reflect the same trees, the same pond. Now it’s not simply an immersion, it’s an embracing surround. The place is extending itself to me, trying its best to welcome me. The sky is massive and high up as skies should be. Space itself feels magnified, giving the impression that I can feel the land extending through the tips of my fingers to the distant horizons, unimpeded by mountains or a density of tall buildings. The people I encounter in stores, in the bank, don’t seem to be jockeying for position, elbowing each other out of the way in the familiar manner of upper Broadway and the east coast corridor where my life has been lived. There is more breathing room here. As far as I can tell, people are not barking. It seems like I’ve experienced more smiling in the past two weeks than in the previous seventy-seven years of my sojourn on the planet.

Photo by Jayden Yoon ZK on Unsplash

I grew up looking over my shoulder and amassing a supply of wisecracks suitable for all occasions. I really have no frame of reference for Minnesota nice which is so pervasive and assumed that the wine store sells bags of Minnesota Ice for keeping your chardonnay cold. My instinct is to be wary of it, as if it’s all just an after school special. But in spite of myself, I’m finding it a balm to my bruised reactivity. I have the intuition that hearing everyone say hello might be good for my health. I’m trying to receive it without irony or condescension, on its own terms. A woman approaches us in the street in the early evening. She’s telling some story I don’t quite understand and I think she might be crazy. This is my go-to response. Turns out, she’s the owner of an organic juice bar who gives away bottles of her product at the end of the day if they haven’t sold. We walk away with carrot/orange/pineapple/turmeric and lemon/maple/dragon fruit, one dark pinkish, the other fiery in color like the foliage. I admit that I didn’t know they had fall foliage in Minnesota. I am learning that I, too, can be a leaf peeper like the tourists in Stockbridge.

I don’t know anyone here besides my son and daughter-in-law and the two boys. Moving to Minnesota has the quality of stretching out on the porch with a new copy of War and Peace, spine unbroken, anticipating days of meeting up with Pierre and Natasha, knowing that it will take weeks, maybe months, for the story to unspool, for Napoleon to be defeated by the Russian winter. All I have to do is take in the cinerama of it, and try not to evaluate every frame, for better or for worse. I found the Yom Kippur liturgy last week hard to digest. Lots of God “out there” having opinions about human behavior, making decisions about one’s future. On the other hand, my son spoke to the congregation about forgiveness, my older grandson, a body builder, lifted the Torah, and the younger one, a trumpeter, blew a shofar that would have brought that toothy smile to Louis Armstrong’s face.

I don’t really know where I am. All I know is that it’s a new chapter and I’m hoping Peace prevails.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.