drifting in a daze.....

The phrase "drifting in a daze" is a lyric fragment from an old Richard Manuel song called "Whispering Pines." The song is included in the second album by The Band, the one with the brown cover, which is arguably the greatest rock or folk rock album ever recorded. But that doesn't matter. It's the lyric fragment that matters because it captures as perfectly as anything I can imagine how I've been feeling over the past few days. It has been a long time since my last blog post here, but I have not felt the slightest bit of guilt about not posting since it was manifestly obvious to me that what was going on over the past month was living, whereas writing blog posts are mere reflections on living. And that reminds me not of old Band songs but rather of something that Vladimir Nabokov once said, which is that life is meant to be lived, not to be prepared for.

If I were to try to summarize the past month or so of my life it would start with the eve of a trip, with Scilla, to Australia. We left on May 31, midday, which means we packed the night before. Under the Southern Cross, where things are upside down from the northern hemisphere, I knew that the air was getting colder rather than warmer, but Sydney, Australia is fairly temperate. It's on the coast and there are palm trees, so I doubted it could get very cold. I brought a sweater, but in conformity to my insistence on packing light, I refused to bring anything more than that. What I did realize, however, is that if the plane took off on May 31, it would land on June 2. This meant, in turn, that June 1, my 60th birthday, would not exist. I reasoned that if I managed to jump out of the queue, not only would I not turn 60, but I would not age in all ever again. We'll see about that.

The pretext for the trip to Australia was a conference sponsored by the University of Sydney, specifically its center on American studies. My invitation came via the editor of the center's magazine, for which I have now written twice. I like Australians, and I like this magazine because it pays well and because it is of reasonably high quality also. The editor seems to like what I write, so what is to wonder or worry about? If he gets me free trips to places I would like to go anyway, so much the better.

The actual reason for wanting to go to Australia was largely to see people, especially to see Owen Harries and his wife Dorothy. Owen was my mentor at The National Interest between 1995 and around the year 2000. He traveled to the United States in 2007, I believe, but as it happened, Scilla and I were traveling at the time in France and Bulgaria, so we missed him. I also want to see Jenni Hewett, an old friend, who recently and very unexpectedly lost her husband. And then of course there were also two friends of ours, really mostly friends of Scilla, whom we had met in 1992 in Israel. There were others, too, so it did not seem difficult to figure out how to spend a bit more than a week in Sydney without being bored. And we were not bored.

The arrangements for traveling that I negotiated involved trading one business class fare for two economy class fares, on the understanding that the two economy class fares would be upgradable. I learned that it's possible to buy the same economy seat but pay a higher fare in hopes of an upgrade. What is so odd about this whole idea is that if you buy this class B economy ticket but don't get an upgrade, then you've ended up spending vastly more money for the same seat as someone who pays the absolute rock-bottom price. This just sounds stupid, but it wasn't my money so I didn't complain.

Anyway, as it turned out, thanks to our ignorance about how all this really works, when we got to the terminal in Los Angeles, I asked about the possibility of an upgrade, even though Scilla's research at home via our computer told her that no upgrades were available. The made no sense at all, because the flight was not even half full and there was plenty of room in business class. The problem was that we were flying United and I only had but so many frequent flyer miles on United, those having come from a trip to Brazil in December paid for by the office. We have plenty of other miles, but we had no way to get those miles transferred to where they needed to be on that afternoon. Had we believed that upgrades were possible and had we known how to do this, of course we would've done it. As it was, I was confronted with a choice: who got the upgrade, me or Scilla?

It wasn't really a choice. I gave Scilla the business, so to speak. it was only fair, since the last time we went to Australia, 14 years ago, she flew on Air New Zealand economy with three small children while I flew business class on Qantas. Fair is fair. Besides, I figured that maybe somewhere midway through the trip we might switch, but this was a warrantless assumption. The stewardesses in business class frown upon such matters, or so I was told. On the flight back I was told that in fact you can switch if you only do it once. But this wasn't clear to me on the way over to Australia, and, as one might suspect, my wife got six or seven hours of decent sleep in business class while I got none whatsoever back in economy.

I really enjoy being in Australia. I could live there. One of the highlights of the trip was going to the Great Synagogue, which is on Elizabeth Street downtown, for the first day of Shavuoth. It is a beautiful synagogue, built in the 1870s. For some reason, though it is an Orthodox synagogue, they did not say Akdamut. They had a terrific male choir, however, which sat in a little deck above the ark. It took me a while after hearing voices to figure out where they were coming from. Very clever. There was one young man with a sharp and piercing tenor voice––really very beautiful. Scilla liked it, too, and of course it was within walking distance of where we were staying downtown. No one invited us over for lunch afterwards, but that's not particularly unusual. It is a fairly small congregation, with most of the town's Jewish population having moved out on the fringes of the city.

I will say no more of our trip down under, except that it was a lot of fun again to see the Southern Cross in a clear night's sky. Well, I will say one thing: erev shavuoth we went to friends of friends for dinner, to the home of Geoff and Ruth Tofler. He is an unusual guy. He is a cardiologist, but he is also the inspiration for Australia's only white zydeco band. He owns about a dozen accordions of various shapes and sizes. He also has a guitar, a mandolin, a trombone and several other musical instruments, along with a ping-pong table, in his living room. Strange, you say? Well, maybe, but strange in a nice and harmless way. Turns out he's also a kind of amateur stamp collector but, more important, he is an owner––as is his father, I was told––of a genuine copy of Jewcentricity. In fact, he is a big fan, who, on his blog, had praised the book to the sky. He was unaware that our mutual friends, Vicky and Andy Schwartz, knew me. This was passing strange, but in a very agreeable way.

When we returned to the states, via Los Angeles, from Australia, I again inquired at the check-in counter whether we had some way to transfer at least one of our tickets into a business class fare for the way home. Luckily, we had enough miles for one such transformation, being the miles we had just racked up going to Australia. Again, I gave my wife the business. As it turned out, I was rewarded for this by my having gotten a kind of a bulkhead seat which gave me more legroom than I had legs for. I still did not sleep very well, but it did not matter because the flight was not really an overnight flight coming back and I was very comfortable even though I didn't get much sleep.

I do hate Dulles Airport more and more, however. When we got back it took us more than an hour from leaving the plane to being able to leave the airport. This place has the slowest baggage delivery in the world, and the stupidest arrangement to get a cab on the planet. I hate it; I will never use it again, if I have any choice at all.

We needed the time to recoup and rest because in just eight or nine hours we were scheduled to take off again for Indianapolis, to pick up Scilla's father en route to the great Taylor family reunion in Leelenau, Michigan. We rented a van for the trip and off we went. A multi-hour car ride after a 15 hour plane ride is enough to break anyone's stamina, but we soldiered on best we could. We did sleep in Indianapolis, breaking the trip in two.

The family had rented two houses on the lake, one of which we had also rented for a slightly smaller gathering back in 1988 I think it was. It was good to see that old place again, for it was and remains quite lovely. The weather was good––a little chilly at the beginning of the week but it warmed up nicely. It was colder in Michigan than it had ever been in Australia, but there you go.

The vacation started out really great guns. Just about everybody was there. Howard's brother Bill was not there because his wife Maggie had taken ill and died in New Jersey on the way up from Florida. That was very sad of course, but the real news from the week occurred on Tuesday afternoon, amid the family Olympics, so-called. Gabriel and I were tossing a baseball, just lightly on the side, as a volleyball game was forming. I said to him,"Go ahead and play if you want to." He said, "Okay, just toss me one more that I can dive for." So I did, and he dove and made a spectacular catch that many people saw but, at the same time, managed to hit the ground in such a way as to rupture his spleen. The kid can fall three stories from a balcony and not injure a single internal organ, and so he dives 12 to 14 inches and nearly bleeds to death internally. Go figure.

I saw a strange looking bruise on his chest cavity on the left just near the bottom of his rib cage and I suspected that something was seriously wrong, that he had some sort of internal organ injury, because he was in a fair bit of pain. But we had one registered nurse among us and also a physical therapist of renown and both determined that he had not broken any ribs and thought that there was no reason yet to go to the hospital. They calmed me down at least a little. But when the pain did not subside after an hour or two, and when he began to get clammy, a decision was made to taken him to the hospital. That was good. Scilla and Jessie took him, and no one bothered to tell me or Hannah or Nate that they had gone until well after an hour had passed. I found this sort of irritating, but I understood that at the time the decision was made everyone felt there was no time to be lost with trivial matters.

He heard himself pretty badly. He lost 5 to 7 units of blood. If he had hurt himself a little bit worse and people had waited a little bit longer to do what I wanted to do from the very start, he might've died. But he didn't die and he didn't need an operation and he didn't need a blood transfusion; he just needed to spend the last four days of his vacation in Traverse City in the intensive care unit. And of course much of the time Scilla and I were there with him. What a vacation.

We brought him back to our house. Hillary, his girlfriend, came down a few days later to stay with us and then took Gabriel with her first to the beach and then back to Philadelphia. He's doing fine, on the mend and very careful not to exert himself too much.

But on Friday I found three huge red welts on my left leg, and to make a long story short, it turned out to be a series of tick bites, and with them Lyme's Disease. Scilla found a little black deer tick on Sunday. So I went to the doctor and got the medicine and I think everything will be okay, but I did suffer some fever and some chills and some joint pain. I was sick enough to stay home from work one day.

There is more. There is always more. But enough for now; time for dinner. I am still drifting in a daze. I will return to the kind of blogging I usually do when the haze lifts. Maybe.