I created this blog a few weeks after we arrived in California. We have now lived here for almost five months, and it’s taken me until now to commit my first real post to the ether.
I thought it was worth putting in writing some of my thoughts about my experience as an adoptive New Yorker moving to Southern California.
I’ve written a few almost complete “first posts,” but you only get to write one first post for a blog. The calendar has, however, forced my hand:
Part of the transition of being a New Yorker to life in California is driving. The last time I owned a car was over 22 years ago in London. You need cars rarely living in New York City. Rental cars, and now car shares, were more than sufficient. I even went through a solid six years in which I didn’t drive at all.
Vacations were the exception, during which I drive a lot—especially holidays in Israel.
Israel is a small country. But we have a large family who live all over the country. A two-week vacation can result in a lot of driving.
In the summer of 2016, Amanda and I came to Israel with my parents. They had moved to Canada eight years before that. Consequently, it had been eight years since my mother had seen her siblings. The flight from London to Tel Aviv is four hours. If you extend that distance by the Atlantic’s breadth, the travel time extends to 11 hours.
My father, by this point, was mobility constrained. To traverse an airport’s obstacles from drop off at the curb through to the gate for an international departure, he needed to be pushed through in a wheelchair. None of the challenges involved in this trip were insurmountable. They required planning, they required allowing time for contingencies, and they required patience.
We rented a large two-bedroom apartment for our stay in Tel Aviv. To get about, we rented the largest minivan that one could rent in Israel. It was a seven-seater, which was still a little tight for our needs when we added in a few passengers.
I’m generally not a fan of cars manufactured for consumers in my adoptive country. I agree with my father’s description of the American motorist’s ideal vehicle as a bathtub on wheels. However, for this trip, a Dodge Grand Caravan would have been just right. Instead, we had something slightly smaller. With enough contingency time to make sure that nothing was hurried, it was sufficient for our needs. When we were crammed in with my aunt and one or two of my cousins, it looked like we were in the mystery mobile from Scooby-Doo, and that’s what we call the minivan for most of the trip.
This was, however, despite the need for extra planning and the tight squeeze on the road, a happy trip.
One of the remarkable things about Israel is that although it is a small country, it contains a remarkable variety of climates and terrains. These range from the Negev desert in the south to the beaches of the Mediterranean coast and the brown and green hills of the North. I am actually reminded of that northern terrain every day looking around our new home in Southern California.
My father sat in the front passenger seat during these excursions. Some days, we covered considerable distances.
As his world had become increasingly mobility constrained, my father’s world had become smaller. The infirmities of age had also constrained his world.
He had always loved driving. In the 1950s, when he learned his way around the travel business, he had driven huge distances all over Western Europe. During his time in the army, he had learned to drive large trucks and driven them in long convoys, sometimes consisting of a couple of 100 vehicles.
In the spring of 2000, I went on vacation with my parents to Miami and then the Florida Keys. My father and I took turns doing the driving on the way down and back up from Key West. On the drive back, I did notice his grip on the wheel was not as steady as it really needed to be anymore, and I made sure to take on the larger share of driving. In his late eighties, though, he had stopped being safe behind the wheel and had finally been convinced to stop driving.
His world had narrowed to short trips, from my parents’ condo to my brother’s house, to the synagogue, to medical appointments, to malls and visits to friends’ homes riding only in the passenger seat.
During this trip to Israel, he sat in the front passenger seat and looked out on the open road as we covered distance every day at speed. He looked through the windshield at a big open world. His face was bright and alert. His eyes were wide open, eating up the open road. Despite allowing time for contingencies, we were always overcommitted and running late. I drove on many of those trips with my right foot very close to the floor. I wasn’t entirely white-knuckling as I drove, but I was focused. I did sneak looks to my right to take in my father’s face, to enjoy the transformation in his features and posture and his big, still always slightly boyish, smile as he occupied and enjoyed this larger wide-open world.
The roads and the surrounding terrain here in Southern California are very similar to those we drove through during that trip to Israel. I sit on my own in the front of the car. Yael sits in the back in her car seat, and Amanda sits behind me, next to Yael, in the driver-side rear passenger seat. The front passenger seat is unoccupied. As we drive past the brown hills, every now and then, I take a look over to my right and imagine that look on his face, taking in the big wide open road.
Today is my father’s yahrzeit, the anniversary in the Jewish calendar of his passing. We haven’t found a community since we’ve arrived in California. We’ve been in lockdown pretty much since our arrival. There is no minyan that I could safely join to recite the mourner’s Kaddish. I cannot join a group of ten Jews to sanctify the name of the creator to make up for my father’s absence in the world. It’s also Sunday, so very soon, we’ll go for a drive on some wide-open roads and drive past brown hills with scattered patches of green. I may sneak a look to my right, and maybe I’ll see an alert face with wide eyes eating the big road up and maybe catch a glimpse of that, still slightly boyish, smile.
A Stranger in a Strange Land 