We Are Visited by New Yorkers

Americans have always been mobile. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Americans picked up and moved with an ease and rapidity that astonished outside observers, and with railroads and then cars that pattern only accelerated. Not everyone moves, of course, and I remember someone once telling me that the big divide in American culture was not liberal vs conservative or even rural vs urban but instead was between those who settled down and those who got out, but enough of us do that the pattern still holds.

I’m not sure I buy that as the big divide in American culture, by the way, but it does give one a lot to think about even so.

One result of all that for me personally is that there are altogether far too many miles between where my brother and his family live, just across the river from New York City, and where I live, here in southern Wisconsin. We try to bridge that gap as best we can with phone calls, holidays, and random visits, but the fact remains we are both a long way from each other and a long way from where we started.

Thus it was a grand and glorious thing that Keith, my niece Sara, and her boyfriend Aiden came out to visit us last week.

They drove out Tuesday and made good time despite the GPS taking them through Chicago instead of around it – driving in Chicago, even just on 90, is a chore. Yes, Keith is used to driving in Manhattan, but still. They made it, we plunked ourselves down in the living room to hang out and catch up, and this pretty much set the pattern for the entire visit. It was pleasantly low-key that way.

The cat immediately decided that Keith was friend-shaped and was happy to spend time with him while he was here. For a cat that ordinarily runs from visitors as if they were chasing her with a cattle prod, that was pretty welcoming. She’s mellowing in her old age. I’m glad someone is.

When they told us they were coming to visit we asked what they wanted to do while they were here and they said “chill” so that’s a lot of what we did. We also ran them around a bit, though, because that’s just how we operate.

For example, one day Sara wanted to see the cheese aisle at our local grocery store so we went over and demonstrated the awesome power of Wisconsin cheese. It’s actually pretty impressive just how much cheese that grocery store has on hand on a Wednesday morning when you get down to it. The ice cream section is much the same. Wisconsin does not mess around when it comes to dairy.

We also went to visit Lauren, which was on Sara’s list as well. She and Aiden actually stayed with Lauren for a couple of nights, exploring the city there. We went out for dinner at one of the classic places up by the capitol, which yielded one of the weirder moments of the current year. “Your meals come with fries or salad,” said the waiter. “Huh,” we all said collectively, after a moment’s consideration, “In the current climate the fries are actually the healthy option, so we’ll go with those.” Strange times indeed.

Afterward we walked over to the bar where Aleksia works because they have bingo on Wednesday nights and you have to love that. I don’t remember the last time I played bingo. It might have been at my grandparents’ house. We actually did very well as a table, even convincing Aleksia to join us for a round where we ended up with an extra card and she won too. We didn’t win every round, of course. We tried, though.

Bingo Rage is a thing, people!

We left the younger generation up there but returned on Friday to collect Sara and Aiden and drop off my car for Lauren for a couple of days. This drop-off involved lunch at a restaurant that served fresh ramen, and you have to love that.

At some point in your life a little switch flips over in the back of your head and you think, “Huh. Genealogy. That sounds like fun.” This happened for me in my early forties, and it has now definitely happened to Keith so we spent a lot of time looking through all of the records that I have amassed over the years – a vast and haphazardly organized collection of documents, stories, random notes, photos, and assorted memorabilia that we had fun digging into. I eventually ended up putting all of it onto a jump drive (a desperately slow process for some reason) and sent it home with him and we’ve continued our explorations since then.

You forget, as a trained professional historian, just what a surreal experience it can be working with primary source documents.

Keith is an intelligent man, certainly my equal or better, and he worked as an editor in broadcast journalism for decades. Won awards for it, in fact. He’s very good at looking at a disparate collection of sources and putting together the story they tell, in other words. But unless you’ve trained for it, the sheer nonsense that you have to deal with in historical primary sources – where the information was put down by people whose standards of accuracy were often rather casual and who weren’t getting paid to care about it either way, where spellings of names vary across and occasionally within documents, where dates float around like doorbell buttons in front of a drunk, where transcriptions and translations were made by people working by ear who either didn’t know or didn’t care about what they were listening to, where handwriting styles varied wildly over time even if the person was actually writing legibly for the day – all of that can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around. That’s the fun part, though, and between us we’re actually making good progress. I do need to organize what I have, and perhaps this will be the thing that gets me doing that for real.

One night by request we dragged out the Hitster game from Christmas and spent an enjoyable evening playing Young Folks v Old Folks or New Yorkers v Wisconsinites and everyone won at least once though the point of those games is to enjoy spending time together and singing along with the good songs. 

Sara and Aiden left a day early to go to Chicago and visit Aiden’s uncles there, so Keith and I spent most of the last day doing genealogy and generally hanging out. That kind of unstructured time is rare after you graduate from school, but it’s the best kind of time.

Keith left on Sunday, picked up Sara and Aiden on the way home, and made it back safely despite the greater New York City area nearly being washed out to sea the day before. We’re back to normal again around here, or whatever passes for it in these parlous times. Not sure that’s an improvement, but here we are, getting though the days as best we can.

Still too many miles between here and there, though.