Lonesome, Despite the Warmth

Walking along Cannon St. in Poughkeepsie and ducked into a wine bar with the Mrs. attending a parent’s mixer for my daughter’s school.  There are many interesting people to meet.  Mid conversation it dawns on me how different this sort of event always was at our kid’s school in Beijing.   All of the conversations were international in their own way.  But none of them had anything to do with China.  Nothing about the evening really, had anything to do with China.  I faced no challenges whatsoever speaking as all conversations were in American English.  I suppose this made me lonesome, despite the warmth of the evening.

One gentleman asked if I knew about Italian Poughkeepsie.  Yes, I do; I thought.  But it is through the lens of my Irish American grandmother.  I looked outside the basement window and imagined that young lady walking along these streets one hundred years ago.  Cannon St. must have been brimming with industrial and commercial activity in the twenties.  There wouldn’t have been any wine bars and there wouldn’t have been the wounded sense of partial recovery from urban decay that defines downtown Poughkeepsie today. 

When she was young, she walked through the Italian neighborhoods of Poughkeepsie, against her will.  And as she did, she was, as she explained, revolted by all the tomato’s drying in the windowsills and the garlic smells that permeated the neighborhoods.  What is so familiar and homogenized as “American” today must have been confrontationally other and Old-World to her and these impressions forged a life long repulsion to one of the world’s great cuisines.  No marinara sauce or garlic ever, in her kitchen. 

My mind returned to the present.  One of the parents wanted to know if I was familiar with the great Poughkeepsie humorist, Josh Billings.  A pal of Mark Twain’s it is apparently from him that the phrase: “He’s just 'Josh-ing' you" comes from, and he’d play down at the venue near the rail way station.  My grandmother’s grandfather apparently used to run a tavern down there and I imagined this satirist sharing a drink with my imagined great, great grandfather, but didn’t bother to mention any of this as it was all too far away. 

Thursday, 02/20/20