CROSS COUNTRY #27 Estate of Resistance

Characters:
Dino – my son in law
Natalia – my granddaughter
Billy – their houseguest
Barry – the hero

Action:
    We stroll nonchalantly into the house on the corner described in a flyer as: "Classic 1908 sun – filled home surround by beautiful mature gardens, and updated while retaining the original charm."
    The entire lot is 4750 sq ft. In the absence of Goldie, and in the family tradition, I whisper to Dino: "Not a lot of lot." This reminds me of the Pennsylvania Dutch woman back home who said on doing her wash: "The All is all but all" meaning the detergent was almost used up.
    The single tiny bathroom is devoid of anything on the counter except a vase containing flowers. Likewise the kitchen is almost filled by one bottle of wine resting on the counter. The two bedrooms upstairs share a single walk-in closet. The flyer says this: "could make an easy addition for a second bathroom."
    Wondering why no one has thought of doing this in 91 years, I turn to the agent hovering downstairs and ask: "Where will they have their closet?" He replies something to the effect of on Mars. I agree with him.
    Later Dino tells me he had said: "Armoire." I want to return to ask how they would get it up the narrow stairway but think better of it. Asking price: $329,000. We have arrived in Seattle.

    In other words we have arrived at our destination, basically the end of the driving portion of our trip. Why Seattle? Because of Natalia – our golden haired, 3 year old granddaughter and Jason her 7 month old brother. Of course there are other reasons such as Juliette my beloved daughter, Dino, cousins Margaret and Derrick. (Now if anyone asks me: "Would you exchange
Natalia or Jason for all the Picasso's?" the answer is obvious.)
    On our arrival Natalia hugged me tightly and had to be gently pried off after a few minutes. Juliette had prepared a delicious lunch of baked asparagus and cheese soufflé, olive bread, salad and cheeses.

Goldie (emailing Barry on her brief Seattle recollections)
    Despite mounting anxiety at leaving Barry for the longest period in months, today included one richly fascinating excursion. We visited locks where boats are transitioned between salt water and fresh water bodies which are at different sea levels. Perhaps Barry can explain the technical process....for me it was fascination enough to watch several boats floated
into a lock, packed together like people into an elevator, and to see them lowered beneath us, to continue on into the harbor.
    Unique to this site is a project which, oddly enough, unites in common cause both fish eaters and vegetarians. Since the locks are placed into the path of essential salmon life cycle routes, environmentalists have achieved a compromise which reserves one whole side of the water way for the fishes' laborious upstream commute. Their passage is facilitated by an area called the salmon ladder, where they can connect with the reverse current unfettered by the eddies of commerce.
    Underground windows allow us to view the sleek fish who are just now turning from green to their name-sake color.....by going against the current the water becomes like steps for them, rather than a propellant, a tool for going upwards....only knowing they are designed for it gives me more curiosity than compassion.
    On the other side, by the locks, sprinklers run when ships are not passing through so as to ward off the sea gulls who hover to nab any salmon taking this side route, rendered excessively vulnerable by the waters suddenly made shallow. We are there when the sprinklers cease and watch countless baby salmon fulfill their place in the food chain prematurely.

Barry: That evening, Goldie gave her usual 110 % at a workshop and the following day she left to take care of business in the east coast leaving me to do the important stuff. So, without wasting any time, I visited Boeing field air museum on the way back from the airport. This is as interesting as the SAC museum in Nebraska with more emphasis on commercial flight. In terms of
flying, I'm the equivalent of a teetotaler yet even I was turned onto flying – almost.

    Where would you go to find a huge statue of Lenin from the former Soviet block, a defunct rocket from the cold war, a two ton cement troll lurking under a bridge amongst other things. Why, at the annual Freemont Solstice parade.
    Freemont used to be run down – but it has turned and now calls itself the center of the universe. It's a fun-loving funky arty neighborhood. The parade is a satiric half – assed, tongue in cheek affair. This year there was an issue whether the police would allow the nude bicycle streakers to appear, so of course they had pseudocops chasing pseudostreakers. They poked
fun at the incomplete stadium – the roof of which is incomplete and doesn't work. They spoofed the weather and politicians.
    Nudity was brief, the republic survived, and no police appeared.

    Nice to have my own pad and not crowd the kids. A member of the local Jewish renewal community, Linda, hosted us the first two nights, and as luck would have it, left town for ten days to visit relatives. So I'm taking care of her cat Lucky and the houseplants. It feels good having the same bedroom night after night! Lucky wasn't to be seen for the first two days, preferring
to hide under the bed. Then suddenly a shift occurred and I couldn't keep him off my face. We now sleep together. So Goldfish has been replaced by cat.

    I took my daughter out on a date. We went to Denny Regrade. It used to be called Denny hill till genius a century ago decided to regrade and flatten the hill destroying what could have been a neighborhood with a spectacular view of the waterfront. We both became a little tipsy on cocktails and had an excellent dinner. We headed for coffee and desert at
Sit and Spin but there were at least forty people waiting in line to get in. This is a Laundromat / coffee shop / restaurant / bar / game room – a clever and creative concept in taking a mundane task to a higher level. A beehive of activity, but no one, I noted, was doing any laundry.

    The main park in Seattle is called Green Lake Park. "Green" because the engineers lowered the lake seven feet and didn't realize that the water couldn't run out, so it stagnated. (They seem to have a thing about lowering lakes and hills.) Seattle through some wonderful foresight by its citizens a century ago now has hundreds of parks.

    Natalia took us to the aquarium. This was the third one I have visited in the past few months, and each time I have been amazed by the ingenious and often bizarre ways that fishes have adapted to various conditions. We did the aquarium thing because of the weather. On our travels we've encountered spring, winter, intense heat of summer, spring again, and now winter. It's gray, drizzly, cold and I'm assured by Juliette that winter does not get any worse than this.

    The real world is intruding.
    Vinnie is up for sale.
    House in Reading is being put up for sale.
    I am beginning to look at what I'll be doing in the fall.

    In the year and a half since we have been married we have traveled to three continents, attended numerous conferences and workshops, I have closed my practice, Goldie has left her congregation, become dean of a seminary, sold her house and moved to Reading. In August she will be traveling to the Ukraine. And now we are contemplating moving to New York, since Goldie's been offered a promotion at The Academy for Jewish Religion.

    It's been quite a ride folks!

Goldie: Perhaps we can put an ad in the newspaper: FOR SALE: AN ORIGINAL VAN GO.

Addendum:
Goldie: We received a number of heartful comments from readers of this travelog regarding the matter of 100 blessings. Felt like a shower of blessings coming at us, wow! Also caused me to reflect back on that encounter with the Viennese psychiatrist. There was another part that was uniquely helpful that went something like this:     Psychiatrist: "Zo, my little rabbi, the reactive depression is a therapeutic phenomenon, ya. It will help you burn through the anger and hurt of this time."

Goldie: I came to think of reactive depression as a smouldering, gradual release of toxins......a slow form of burning the shmutz we seek out and address around the "house" of the "soul" before Pesach. Burning off the shmutz from my life, deeper and deeper layers....decomposing my former marriage, so that the decayed matters from disappointments, losses and discontents, to my surprise, became fossil fuel for building a new kind of life.

Also noticed that the depression burned off my resistence to needed personal change, once the anger and hurt had a good long prior time on the altar.

As Barbara, one of our readers notes, the nice thing about 100 blessings is that this allows the depression its due, without requiring our constant suffering or guilt at indulging in our own wounds. After all, there is a nice Hassidic saying which applies overtly to the physical realm that goes: "A small hole in the body, a big wound in the soul."

Meanwhile NYC looks and feels great to me. I pray the coming year will be as wonderful as its potential appears to be.