Midpoints and How It All Began

"I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs."

-Annie Dillard

This Friday marks the halfway point between the first and last day of classes. Tempus fugit.

What have we learned so far?

New York City is far easier and kinder than I anticipated.

Running a law firm spending twenty hours a week instead of forty or fifty is as difficult as I figured. The practice is noticeably shrinking in this holding action. I wouldn't care, but for all these houses and planes and Peg wanting to slow down as well.

Tax school has proven to be pretty tough--these kids are really smart, and the profs are used to teaching extremely bright people. The geriatric in the room spends a lot of time just hanging on.

The things that make this place so notoriously expensive are rent and going to shows. Restaurant meals, groceries, and the like aren't all that different from anywhere else.

I was terrified of trying to drive a car into Manhattan, to the point that we considered parking at a railhead outside of town and taking the train here. Turns out it's no big deal at all---if you've driven Back Beach Road on a Friday in the season, you could handle the Holland Tunnel.

It's possible to be lonely and surrounded by people at the same time. We're so much older than everyone else, I'm so busy, and we're obviously just passing through. Makes it tough to forge any sort of relationship with the folks who live here.

So, from here it's Spring Break and leaning into the home stretch. Then deciding what to do with all of this.

Yesterday we visited the Tenement Museum, a remarkable bit of historical interpretation in a partially restored mid-19th century apartment building over on Delancey Street. One signs up for walking tours in groups of maybe a half dozen to a dozen, and there are several different offerings covering the multiple waves of immigrants who've called that building home. We signed up for the tour entitled "After the Famine--1869", which followed an Irish family, the Moores, comprised of Bridgit and Joseph who came over from the old country in 1863 and 1865, respectively, married, had three girls, and from their first place in Five Points eventually moved into this little apartment a couple years later.

One of their infant girls died here of TB and failure to thrive, and they'd go on to have a total of eight children, of whom only four would live to adulthood, before Bridgit herself died in 1882.

The tour guide approached the discussion from a middle-to-high school level, unsurprising given that they host lots of school groups there. We heard about ethnic stereotyping of immigrants as subhuman, an American tradition that continues to this day.

My ancestors passed through here from Donegal and Mayo and Cork around that time, on their way to work and die in the mines in Pennsylvania, so I reckon your author is one of those bestial creatures as well.

The most interesting voice on our tour was a young man, maybe thirty, from Dublin there with his American girlfriend. When the guide talked about how in the winter the family would sleep on the floor in the kitchen next to the stove because it was the warmest part of the house, he described doing the same thing. When you realize he's talking about 2005 or so, it calls you up short. When she brought up the British genocide in 1845-52, he had a granular knowledge of the event, and you could hear the revulsion at the British bubbling up in his throat. The same for when our guide (a sharp, 30-sh Asian woman) talked out how the depictions of the Irish Catholics as apes was used to divide the Irish themselves, and he recounted the atrocities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the dreaded "Black and Tans", the Protestant terrorist militia that once ran rampant in the north of Ireland.

At that point she moved on to another topic--can't let a guest derail the canned conversation. But having someone there who channeled an felt all the things we were discussing, a century and a half after the fact, brought it to life in a way some drawings and a recreated apartment can't.

As for the Moores, their story had a happy ending. One of their daughters married, moved to a house in Queens that boasted a garden and a yard, and lived until 1935. We saw a photo of her in her old age, plain sack dress hanging over a stout frame, wild gray hair around a bespectacled face. She could've been the twin of my great grandmother Mary Ellen Gallagher--I've seen almost identical photos of her in Harrisburg a couple decades later. The descendants of the Moores have actually returned to the Tenement Museum, and their photo features a group of well-fed, well-dressed folks with good teeth, smiling broadly. Bridgit and Joseph would be pleased. It's why people have always come here, isn't it?

Time to dress, go over notes for today's class, and handle a couple work tasks in the few minutes left before I need to step.