Moving to Spookytown for reals

Today I signed a lease for a teeny tiny wee little apartmentlet in Spookytown proper -- I'll be moving in about a month. While HippyDippyville has its charms, I am currently 1.6 miles from the nearest metro and the nearest commercial strip I can walk to is a strip mall with a Safeway and a Starbucks (the Maye Queen can attest to this). My new place, by contrast, is in walking distance to lots of cafes and restaurants and places to shop and eat and listen to jazz etc. etc. And it's 6 blocks to the metro and once on said metro just 6 stops to "work." (It's the endless and unbelievable bureaucracy motivating the quotes there this week.)

On the other hand, not only am I trading in some space (I'm going to have to put some furniture out on yearlong loan and am doing other "lightening the load" tasks, like finally getting rid of my 80s cassette collection -- anybody want the complete Smiths on cassette?), I'm also trading in my voting rights. That's right, just 30 days left to sign all the petitions and call all the congresspeople I can, because as of September 15 I am going to be entirely without federal representation. I thought it was a joke when I first moved here and saw Spookytown license plates, which read "Taxation Without Representation," but I soon realized that people were deadly serious. I'm so used to being filled with bourgeois entitlement that this oppressive state is going to take some getting used to, I think.

To celebrate not having to endlessly apartment hunt for the rest of the month, and in honor of young Stovie's birthday (it's today - happy birthday!), I cashed in a frequent flier ticket and am heading to SF tomorrow. Best of all, from Sunday to Friday I will be at a zen and yoga retreat, learning meditative techniques (that will hopefully help me through the stress of the fall, which is going to be my final job search season) (as in either I get a job that I want or I leave the field) and soaking in hot springs and hiking in the mountains a few hours inland from Big Sur. How happy am I? (Answer: pretty damn happy.) This retreat has if not no, then almost no electricity, and is apparently lit by kerosene lamps. My point? Yes, not only should I have excellent star viewing and practice for astronomy class, but also I will not be writing any postings for the next 10 days or so. Just so you don't think I've fallen off a cliff (which apparently I might, actually, since the 14-mile dirt road to the retreat is said to be super-treacherous and filled with sheer drop-offs -- wish me luck!).

Long-lost relatives I didn't even know existed

People, I am so excited that I don't know what to do. I was about to head to bed, wiped out from astronomy class (telescope optics are cool, but my brain = not so loving of physics), when I did the perfunctory final e-mail check of the night, not expecting anything in particular. Little did I know...

Now yesterday was an interesting correspondence day -- out of the blue, I got an e-mail from someone who apparently recently found me on a genealogical website. Last summer on my trip to southeast Poland, I visited the shtetls of my father's mother and father (this was meant to be summarized in a travelogue here months ago, but I haven't gotten around to it yet -- it was a stressful, deeply emotional, and moving experience, especially as I was the first person in my family to walk the streets of these towns since 1940) and upon my return, I posted photos and information on this website. I had downloaded useful, if really bare-bones, information from the site a week or so before my trip, and so wanted to share my findings and help the next person heading out on a roots journey so they would have more information and a better sense of what they'd find. I also have been hoping for a while to find my long-lost Argentinian cousins, whose grandparents stopped writing to my grandparents after a money-related family feud back in the 30s, and I figured that listing myself on this genealogical website would be a good start. Anyway, yesterday, almost a year after posting my information, I got this surprise e-mail in my inbox from Ms. Potential Relative: she had found me on the site, her grandfather had the same last name as my grandmother and had been born in the same small town (but had moved to Berlin as a child in the 1880s), her family knows that someone (a cousin?) had moved from Berlin to Northern California (perhaps this was my branch?), and did I think we might be related?

Now very few documents regarding my paternal grandmother's family have survived (this, of course, because both family members and town documents were destroyed during the war), and the generation of people who might have had a real grip on oral history are now all gone as well. My father's generation is now the oldest generation around, and as I understand it, their parents tended to not talk much about their families, especially once it became clear that everyone who had stayed behind had been killed (Galicia, the part of Poland/Ukraine/the Austro-Hungarian Empire (depending on year) where my dad's parents hailed from, was the starting point for the solution to the "Jewish problem" and almost no one made it out of there alive). So I had no idea if I might be related to Ms. Potential Relative -- none of the family names she gave had any meaning to me. I wrote back and said that I currently didn't know enough to know, but that it seemed likely given the smallness of the town (even though the name is a pretty common one), and that I had passed along her e-mail to my dad and uncle and maybe they would know something.

Tonight that last perfunctory e-mail check of the night brought in Ms. Potential Relative's response. She had provided the names of a few more relatives and had also attached her grandfather's 1939 Berlin passport photo, and dear reader, now that I have looked at this photo there is no doubt in my mind that Ms. Potential Relative is actually Ms. Long-Lost-and-I-Didn't-Know-She-Existed Relative. Of course the first impression was totally gestalt: I opened the photo, zoomed in, and said to myself, "My god, that looks just like Grandma!" Maybe it'll be obvious not just to me, but also to people who didn't know her (e.g., you). Here is a cropped version of the 1939 photo of my newly found relative's grandfather.
And now here is a cropped version of a 1928 wedding photo of my grandmother.
Look! There's no way they're not related. Look at their eyes! Look at the faint cleft in their chins! The shape of their mouths! It's all the same!!!!! (!!!!!!) He's about 25 years older, so maybe an uncle? I feel like they have to be closely related to look so similar.

My god, I have a whole branch of the family that I didn't know about until just now!! I am WIDE awake, it is all too exciting. I'd better go e-mail some cousins and let them know.

Find me a find, catch me a catch

It all began at the closing reception of my conference in Ireland a few weeks ago. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Mrs. Pescado-Hombre, wife of Dr. Pescado-Hombre, a super-prominent scholar in my field. She and her husband the good doctor have been friends for decades with Dr. and Mrs. FirTree, who are my dad's somewhat elderly cousins (making them maybe my first cousins once removed?), and because of this somewhat remote connection, I ended up chauffeuring them around Northern California one winter afternoon several years ago. Anyway, having spotted Mrs. P-H, I went over to say hello and to see if she needed help getting food or a beverage (Mrs. P-H is a bit on the frail side).

"Of course I remember you!" was her response to my introduction. "Have you started learning Yiddish yet?" After I mumbled my embarrassed "not yet" (tactfully neglecting to mention that chances of my learning Arabic in the next few years are way higher than Yiddish) the conversation wended its way around to our mutual connection. "Nu, I was on the phone with [Mrs. FirTree] the other day," said Mrs. P-H, "and did you know that she's working on marrying you off?"

"Um, I don't really talk to [Mrs. FirTree] all that often," I replied (I mean, maybe 5? 6? times in my adult life). "Are you sure you're not confusing me with someone else?"

"No, it's definitely you," she said, "such a shame all my boys are already married." Luckily, this somewhat horrifying conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Dr. P-H, with whom I briefly shmoozed before he and his wife were wafted away in a sea of admirers.

I mentioned this little interaction to my parents a few days later because I had found it so very entertaining, and also wondered if they knew who Mrs. FirTree was really working on marrying off. They laughed and said, "We have no idea. We haven't heard the first thing about it. And don't blame us -- we have nothing to do with it!" Now we know that my dad is kind of desperate for grandkids, but even in his despair it's hard to imagine that he would turn to his elderly, religiously observant and blind (since her teen years) cousin who lives in a remote section of the Bronx and who he sees maybe twice a year to find me a husband.

Cut to one week later, when I find a voice mail from my mother in which she is clearly convulsed with laughter. "I just got off the phone with [Mrs. FirTree], and I think you should call me." Well, guess what? Mrs. FirTree and her friend the rabbi have decided that I need to meet his son, Mr. Yale Lawyer, Esq. "He's tired of his father interfering, though," Mrs. FirTree apparently told my mother, "so when she calls him on the phone she can't mention either me or his father." I'm going to call him on the phone? But how do I have his phone number? "Let's say she met someone at her conference in Ireland -- we'll call him Bob Roth -- and he gave her the phone number." "I don't know," said my mom, "[Pangea] really prefers to be a bit more straightforward. We'll see." After my mother related the story of the phone call (still a bit stunned, as she never, ever talks to Mrs. FirTree on the phone), we revelled in the many logical flaws in the concocted story. "First of all," said mom, "this Bob Roth character just happened to go to this conference in Ireland with this guy's phone number just in case he met a nice Jewish girl who was also single and lived in the Spookytown metro region?" "Not only that," I continued, "but won't this guy notice that he doesn't know anyone named Bob Roth?" It was all too much.

Now, although I have NO interest in being set up with random Spookytown men, let alone lawyerly types (and, mind you, lawyerly types who have clerked for one of the most conversative and, let's say, harassment-oriented legal minds in the American judiciary), I found this all too much to resist. On the one hand, there is no way in hell I will want to date this Mr. Yale Lawyer, Esq., and not just because we surely have nothing in common -- generally I meet one guy a year that I find really compelling, and I've already met this year's version, who unfortunately is geographically distant (and not in a place I'd want to move) and recently turned out to have a heart that is already encumbered (although I'm like 90% sure that my crush is not unrequited). On the other hand, my regrets in life are almost always of the "I wish I had done that" variety and almost never of the "I wish I hadn't done that" variety. So last week I e-mailed the son of my elderly distant cousin's deceased childhood friend and told him what was going on (without naming names) and we are meeting up next week for coffee (or maybe a cooler beverage because for God's sake people it was 100 fucking degrees today) to discuss the entertaining nature of Jewish matchmaking. I'll let you know how it goes.

Note to self

"Hippies are not competent business people."

This scrawled on the notepad on my desk earlier today as I was talking with the guy answering the phone at the San Francisco Zen Center.