Is There Life After New York

I grew up outside of Averill Park,  New York, a town about ten miles east of Albany, in an 1860s farmhouse that was about a quarter mile from the next neighbors and across the road from farm land that grew corn during the summer, served as our ski slope in the winter, and led up to a hill where I could express adolescent despair during the other months.  I lived there from the time was 5 in 1948 to when I went to college in 1961.  The town was nearly 100% Republican and extremely conservative-- one might say they were Urteapartyites.  The few Democrats were very very quiet and very very old.

Max Bucholtz, the local butcher, was said to have belonged to a Nazi bund during WWII, with meetings held in the Berlin (yes really) mountains, which rose east of town toward the Vermont border. A schoolmate announced in our history class that all Jews were communists because her father worked for the post office and had access to the commie list, on which every single person was Jewish.  The Rosenbergs and Silbergs, the only Jewish families in town, were well liked, however, and apparently either forgiven or exempt from the Red taint.  My girlfriends and I had terrible crushes on Billy Rosenberg.  Our local handy man was known to be gay, and I heard my father and other grown men giggle in stupid ways when they talked about him. As far as I know, though, he was never threatened and everyone used him to fix things.  

Church and state were closely knit.  We held a nativity pageant in school every Christmas.  The Catholic kids needed to go to church school every Thursday afternoon, because there was no Catholic school in the area.  So in the interest of fairness, the Protestants  were bussed to the local Presbyterian church on the same afternoon, where we read the bible and acted out stories from the old Testament. Charlie Rosenberg, Billy's brother, was lumped in with us, since the school didn't know what else to do with him and probably figured that if we stuck to the Old Testament it would be ok.

Our junior year history teacher stated that no President should be an atheist, and when I wore my hair straight that year -- 1960 -- my friends called me a beatnik and wouldn't talk to me.  I was saved by three events:

• My father's "conversion" to Unitarianism when I was thirteen, allowing escape from the dreary, claustrophobic Methodist Church in town and getting us into Albany, where we heard sermons on Emerson, Channing, and Thomas Jefferson, and, yes Virginia, there were liberals.
• Going to New York by bus on my 16th birthday with my friend Clare, where we saw West Side Story, had a Tadd's steak for the remarkable price of $1.95 (cheap even by Averill Park standards), and was hit on by some guy there who said he worked for a newspaper. I was blown away by the crowds, the noise, the theater, everything I saw, smelled, and heard.  
• The election of JFK in 1961 and it's celebration by our smart cute history teacher, Mr. Hogan, who lasted only a year at our highschool, but who transformed my political and social beliefs forever.

I went to Bennington College, and I spent summers and my work term in winters in Manhattan, living on nothing and living in tiny spaces.  I never went back to Averill Park.  Except for five years as an Air Force wife, I have lived in NYC for almost fifty years.  I never thought I'd leave and I never, ever thought I would end up back in upstate New York.

So this blog is about that. I raised three kids in New York City and retired this year after a very satisfying career publishing, writing, and editing medical information for patients and docs.  Michael, my husband and I, are now testing out Hudson, New York, where we bought land about 10 years ago and have been renting an apartment in a barn across the road from friends, who are also city weekenders.  We will be deciding whether we should build on our property or move back to our apartment on 20th street, currently being rented by our two sons.  We can't afford both places, so it's do or die here.