That Was Fort Lee

 

I was born in New Jersey.  Apparently, after coming home from the hospital I lived there for all of six months, in Fort Lee, just to the west of the Hudson.  The next seventeen and half years I lived on the east side of the Hudson in New York State.  My father’s family for at least three generations back were all from New York.  My mom’s side from even further back were all from Dutchess County, New York.  Any conscious memories are all of Harrison, New York in Westchester County, till we moved, when I was ten to Pleasantville New York, just a bit further north from the metropolis and then at fifteen to Poughkeepsie, New York, where my maternal grandmother had always resided.  Regular trips were made between Westchester and Dutchess Counties, or down into Gotham around which all the world spun. 

 

Still, when worms come gnawing and they pen down my bookends, they may say he drew his final breath in Gazookastan, but they will certainly say he was born in New Jersey.  You’d have to be a real fan to bother reading along to the qualifying footnote that reminds inquiring minds that I only lived there for six months.  The first six months, where you don’t really know precisely where you are. 

 

Me and Patti Smith.  Me and Buzz Aldrin.  Me and Walt Wittman.  I’m not complaining.   But I just never really knew ya, Jersey.  You were always over there.   If we do away with the artificial boundaries of statehood, I am writing you today from “over there.”  I’m on the west side of the Hudson, in Ulster County New York.  Other-lite, I’ve come to love being on the “other” side of the Hudson, but in some primal, illogical manner it means a great deal that this is New York State and that when I state where I’m residing its clear to all that I have this tribal affinity. 

 

Today we all drove down the New York State Throughway for a meeting I had in midtown.  I say that like it’s all very protean but in fact this is the first business meeting I’ve physically gone to anywhere in six months.  The AI-goddess inside Waze has told me to head towards the Palisades Parkway this afternoon.  She has a view into the entire metropolitan traffic organism, where I have mere human experience.  We do as she says.  And I can see on the map that the mighty Hudson is off to my left, quite near, obscured by summer trees.  This is a “parkway” like the Taconic, probably one of the earliest such responses to the automobile that any urban area ever undertook, but there are no shoulders, there are lots of turns and the speed limit is set at fifty-five. 

 

The exit is coming up and we turn and bang, there it is.  I wasn’t expecting to come upon the ferocious, western tower of the GWB so suddenly.  This must be an excruciatingly slow exit during rush hour, when there isn’t a pandemic, but now, at 2:00PM on a Thursday, it’s unencumbered and are proceed quickly to the upper deck and gazing north and south at the incomparable view of the city.  “That was Fort Lee.”  I told them.  “That’s where I was born.”

 

 

 

Thursday, 08/07/20