Wed, May 01, 2019 |
Connecticut’s famous Gold Coast Merritt Parkway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. ‘The Merritt’ is considered to be one of the most beautiful roads in the United States. Its unique overpass bridges are architectural marvels; each bridge is different with its own elaborate designs. The surrounding woods and rock formations are a delight to the eye.
So why wouldn’t any car trip on ‘The Merritt’ be absolute heaven? Why would a trip I took recently be sheer hell?
It was sheer hell because of the number of people traveling out of New York City (from the George Washington Bridge) into Connecticut to visit family and friends for the Passover and Easter holiday. Too many people, as in bumper-to-bumper traffic, stalled traffic that didn’t move for fifteen minutes, or when it did move, it moved at a snail’s pace for miles. Thirty minutes would pass, an hour, then another hour and still the three of us—two biological sisters who are friends of mine-- were still stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, a good 25 miles from our destination, the City of Ansonia.
Ordinarily the trip from Philadelphia to Ansonia by car can be done in 3 hours time but we were going on five hours with no end in sight.
“There are just too many people in the world,” I said. “Or too many people congregated in the same place.”
The Merritt Parkway’s beauty is marred only by its monochrome sameness: because the beautiful postcard landscape never changes the impression you get while traveling on the Parkway, even in low traffic, is that the car you are in hasn’t moved at all.
When we did finally arrive in Ansonia, we stumbled out of the car in a sort of traffic daze, legs cramped up, muscles aching, promising one another that we would never again travel anywhere near NYC on Passover and Easter. “Hell is other people,” the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote, and ‘The Merritt’ was ample proof of that.
We slept like euthanized dogs that first night. I dreamt of traffic scene backups and car accidents one sees in old Jean Luc Godard films. “It’s best that we don’t even see the inside of a car today,” I blurted out the next morning over a home cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs. But, of course, that was not to be. We were back in the car in no time but this time at least we would just be traveling between Ansonia and its sister city, Derby near the Naugatuck River. Little civilized car excursions with no traffic pile-ups do not a stressful day makes. In fact, that first day in Ansonia was quite beautiful.
My friends kept talking about cashing in bottles and then taking a walk in Pine Grove cemetery near their home on Church Street. “What are the bottles?” I asked, thinking of the homeless scrappers along Aramingo Avenue in Olde Richmond. I soon found out when we drove to the bottle-recycling machine that pays 5 cents for every glass bottle, plastic and aluminum can. If Philadelphia had a system like the streets here would be as clean as they are in Connecticut
Ansonia was settled by English colonists in 1652 but incorporated as a city in 1893. Many early immigrants were Ukrainian Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, hence the high number of three bar crosses on the tombstones in Pine Grove cemetery. While inspecting the graves, I took note of the various styles of tombstones and decided I didn’t like the current tombstone fashion trend of slick black marble cut in strange curly cue styles. Many WWII veterans are buried here; most seemed to have died in the 1980s. Our sightseeing was interrupted when we noticed a couple of teenagers walking through the cemetery but they were mild mannered teens not the inviting trouble sort. (Remember, hell is other people).
G, who braved the traffic when she drove her sister and me to Ansonia the previous day, recalled walking into a cemetery at night as a girl with a friend and spotting an open crypt that had been violated by vandals who had also managed to dislodge and open a casket. “We left the cemetery screaming,” she said. But there was no screaming in this quaint Ansonia cemetery.
That evening as we were comfortably watching the Turner Classic Movie channel a friend called me from Philadelphia and asked if I had heard the latest news. He told me that the Flyers—that hockey team which used to appeal only to white people with certain low class tendencies—were upset that Kate Smith had once sung and recorded songs that are currently perceived as “racist.” My friend, who knows everything about old records and cylinders—he can rattle off endless lists of race-sensitive songs so popular at the turn of the 20th Century-- reminded me that Smith only recorded what her bosses at Columbia Records told her to record. He also said that Paul Robeson also recorded some of the songs Kate was being criticized for recording.
“The Flyers want to tear her statue down,” he said. The news hit hard even though years ago it wasn’t uncommon for me to criticize Kate Smith in print for singing “God Bless America” when it seemed that America didn’t deserve to be blessed. But tear down her statue outside the Flyers arena was just another win for the fanatical PC crowd that is doing its best to turn the United States into what Europe is now, a landscape where one can be arrested for thinking outside the box, for using the wrong pronouns or for uttering the “wrong” words in public.
“Kate did a lot for civil rights,” my friend said, and he proceeded to list a number of things she did, including bringing Josephine Baker back to the United States and giving her air time on her show, “The Kate Smith Hour.”
First, it was the Rizzo state, now it’s Kate Smith, so who’s next? Somebody is next that much is certain. As a Daily News columnist noted, it could be Ben Franklin, William Penn or even, as I’d like to suggest, Walt Whitman for something that he might have said, written or thought in the past that some witch hunter will discover in the future which will necessitate removing his name from the bridge across the Delaware.
What bothered me most about my friend’s report was that there was no indication that there were protests forming in Philadelphia against removing Kate’s statue. No news of protests, no sit-ins, nobody chaining him or herself to the statue in the name of free speech. Oh , would be Op Ed pieces and enraged letters to the editor decrying the PC culture and the loss of free speech. There would also be a lot of hand wringing and comments like “Isn’t it awful!” but beyond that, nothing. The statue would be removed and that would be that. The Flyers would go on without suffering any sort of karmic “Payback,” (a slap from God) for their insult to a great American icon.
The Flyers will get away with it, just as those ideologue Che Guevara Toys R Us revolutionaries got away with removing the Rizzo statue.
I didn’t mention the Kate Smith fiasco to my friends the next day although I kept hoping that somebody, a group of fans, lovers of free speech, would rally around preserving her statue and that the course of things would be reversed, saved by public outcry.
When a friend of my two friends arrived in Ansonia for Easter dinner, I was charged with keeping him company while my two friends prepared the spread and arranged the table. The new guest, I had been informed, had recently come out of the closet after being married with children. He was a pleasant guy who liked to hold court although his tendency was to monopolize conversations. He wasn’t in the house ten minutes before he started talking about Donald Trump, at which point one of my friends in the kitchen said, “Please, no politics here.”
He was also what I call a full checklist LGBTQ kind of guy, the kind of guy whose opinions all match the position papers of LGBTQ organizations. He talked about his work with the ACLU, marriage equality and a plethora of civil rights issues and then started to throw around the words, “white privilege” (he was white). Other PC buzzwords rained down like confetti until I told him what the Philadelphia Flyers were doing to Kate Smith, and how they wanted to chop her statue off its pedestal and wrap it in a black shroud and then cart it off to who- knows- where in the name of political correctness.
To my delight and amazement, he said that such tactics were excessive and unnecessary and that he didn’t agree with what the Flyers were doing at all.
Here was a politically correct poster guy admitting that at a certain point the extreme Left is just as bad as the extreme Right and that both ends have to be monitored because both can be equally dangerous.
Here, I thought, was a Lefty still capable of independent thought.
We had a great dinner after that.
So why wouldn’t any car trip on ‘The Merritt’ be absolute heaven? Why would a trip I took recently be sheer hell?
It was sheer hell because of the number of people traveling out of New York City (from the George Washington Bridge) into Connecticut to visit family and friends for the Passover and Easter holiday. Too many people, as in bumper-to-bumper traffic, stalled traffic that didn’t move for fifteen minutes, or when it did move, it moved at a snail’s pace for miles. Thirty minutes would pass, an hour, then another hour and still the three of us—two biological sisters who are friends of mine-- were still stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, a good 25 miles from our destination, the City of Ansonia.
Ordinarily the trip from Philadelphia to Ansonia by car can be done in 3 hours time but we were going on five hours with no end in sight.
“There are just too many people in the world,” I said. “Or too many people congregated in the same place.”
The Merritt Parkway’s beauty is marred only by its monochrome sameness: because the beautiful postcard landscape never changes the impression you get while traveling on the Parkway, even in low traffic, is that the car you are in hasn’t moved at all.
When we did finally arrive in Ansonia, we stumbled out of the car in a sort of traffic daze, legs cramped up, muscles aching, promising one another that we would never again travel anywhere near NYC on Passover and Easter. “Hell is other people,” the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote, and ‘The Merritt’ was ample proof of that.
We slept like euthanized dogs that first night. I dreamt of traffic scene backups and car accidents one sees in old Jean Luc Godard films. “It’s best that we don’t even see the inside of a car today,” I blurted out the next morning over a home cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs. But, of course, that was not to be. We were back in the car in no time but this time at least we would just be traveling between Ansonia and its sister city, Derby near the Naugatuck River. Little civilized car excursions with no traffic pile-ups do not a stressful day makes. In fact, that first day in Ansonia was quite beautiful.
My friends kept talking about cashing in bottles and then taking a walk in Pine Grove cemetery near their home on Church Street. “What are the bottles?” I asked, thinking of the homeless scrappers along Aramingo Avenue in Olde Richmond. I soon found out when we drove to the bottle-recycling machine that pays 5 cents for every glass bottle, plastic and aluminum can. If Philadelphia had a system like the streets here would be as clean as they are in Connecticut
Ansonia was settled by English colonists in 1652 but incorporated as a city in 1893. Many early immigrants were Ukrainian Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, hence the high number of three bar crosses on the tombstones in Pine Grove cemetery. While inspecting the graves, I took note of the various styles of tombstones and decided I didn’t like the current tombstone fashion trend of slick black marble cut in strange curly cue styles. Many WWII veterans are buried here; most seemed to have died in the 1980s. Our sightseeing was interrupted when we noticed a couple of teenagers walking through the cemetery but they were mild mannered teens not the inviting trouble sort. (Remember, hell is other people).
G, who braved the traffic when she drove her sister and me to Ansonia the previous day, recalled walking into a cemetery at night as a girl with a friend and spotting an open crypt that had been violated by vandals who had also managed to dislodge and open a casket. “We left the cemetery screaming,” she said. But there was no screaming in this quaint Ansonia cemetery.
That evening as we were comfortably watching the Turner Classic Movie channel a friend called me from Philadelphia and asked if I had heard the latest news. He told me that the Flyers—that hockey team which used to appeal only to white people with certain low class tendencies—were upset that Kate Smith had once sung and recorded songs that are currently perceived as “racist.” My friend, who knows everything about old records and cylinders—he can rattle off endless lists of race-sensitive songs so popular at the turn of the 20th Century-- reminded me that Smith only recorded what her bosses at Columbia Records told her to record. He also said that Paul Robeson also recorded some of the songs Kate was being criticized for recording.
“The Flyers want to tear her statue down,” he said. The news hit hard even though years ago it wasn’t uncommon for me to criticize Kate Smith in print for singing “God Bless America” when it seemed that America didn’t deserve to be blessed. But tear down her statue outside the Flyers arena was just another win for the fanatical PC crowd that is doing its best to turn the United States into what Europe is now, a landscape where one can be arrested for thinking outside the box, for using the wrong pronouns or for uttering the “wrong” words in public.
“Kate did a lot for civil rights,” my friend said, and he proceeded to list a number of things she did, including bringing Josephine Baker back to the United States and giving her air time on her show, “The Kate Smith Hour.”
First, it was the Rizzo state, now it’s Kate Smith, so who’s next? Somebody is next that much is certain. As a Daily News columnist noted, it could be Ben Franklin, William Penn or even, as I’d like to suggest, Walt Whitman for something that he might have said, written or thought in the past that some witch hunter will discover in the future which will necessitate removing his name from the bridge across the Delaware.
What bothered me most about my friend’s report was that there was no indication that there were protests forming in Philadelphia against removing Kate’s statue. No news of protests, no sit-ins, nobody chaining him or herself to the statue in the name of free speech. Oh , would be Op Ed pieces and enraged letters to the editor decrying the PC culture and the loss of free speech. There would also be a lot of hand wringing and comments like “Isn’t it awful!” but beyond that, nothing. The statue would be removed and that would be that. The Flyers would go on without suffering any sort of karmic “Payback,” (a slap from God) for their insult to a great American icon.
The Flyers will get away with it, just as those ideologue Che Guevara Toys R Us revolutionaries got away with removing the Rizzo statue.
I didn’t mention the Kate Smith fiasco to my friends the next day although I kept hoping that somebody, a group of fans, lovers of free speech, would rally around preserving her statue and that the course of things would be reversed, saved by public outcry.
When a friend of my two friends arrived in Ansonia for Easter dinner, I was charged with keeping him company while my two friends prepared the spread and arranged the table. The new guest, I had been informed, had recently come out of the closet after being married with children. He was a pleasant guy who liked to hold court although his tendency was to monopolize conversations. He wasn’t in the house ten minutes before he started talking about Donald Trump, at which point one of my friends in the kitchen said, “Please, no politics here.”
He was also what I call a full checklist LGBTQ kind of guy, the kind of guy whose opinions all match the position papers of LGBTQ organizations. He talked about his work with the ACLU, marriage equality and a plethora of civil rights issues and then started to throw around the words, “white privilege” (he was white). Other PC buzzwords rained down like confetti until I told him what the Philadelphia Flyers were doing to Kate Smith, and how they wanted to chop her statue off its pedestal and wrap it in a black shroud and then cart it off to who- knows- where in the name of political correctness.
To my delight and amazement, he said that such tactics were excessive and unnecessary and that he didn’t agree with what the Flyers were doing at all.
Here was a politically correct poster guy admitting that at a certain point the extreme Left is just as bad as the extreme Right and that both ends have to be monitored because both can be equally dangerous.
Here, I thought, was a Lefty still capable of independent thought.
We had a great dinner after that.
