Things I learned on my summer fall vacation

[I’ve traveled any number of times since 2019, but I last wrote this kind of post in 2019, pre-pandemic. I am out of practice.]

It is possible to pick up Dallas-Fort Worth AM stations in Indiana before sunrise: 820 and 1080.

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“Sturrl”: Texan for “sterile.”

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There is no tax on gum in Ohio.

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It is possible to pick up polka music and doo-wop in Pennsylvania in the afternoon. The polka host avows that the music he plays will put “a hop in your step.”

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“Beechwood 4–5789” is a song by the Marvelettes. An EXchange name hearing.

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To borrow an appellation from the story of Milarepa, the Google Maps lady is a Demoness Equal of Tigers. Once again she promised a faster route and once again she surprised us with US 30, a two-lane road with super-sharp curves, appallingly steep climbs and drops, and runaway-truck ramps that shoot up into the sky. In 2019 we drove it in the dark on the way back to Illinois. At least we were in daylight this time.

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Rural Pennsylvania has some feral folk. A dirty stare (not a mere look) from a driver who wouldn’t let me into his lane. The words DON’T THREATEN ME, upside-down on the front windshield of a Jeep. I wondered if that might be something like a bad tattoo, with the letters upside down instead of backwards.

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The Google Maps Lady raises difficult questions about objects in space and time: “There’s a stalled vehicle ahead. Is it still there?”

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A gap of four years in seeing old friends can feel like no gap at all.

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The Great Falls in Paterson, New Jersey, look exactly as they do in every drawing and photograph of them I’ve seen. The Falls and Garrett Mountain: William Carlos Williams’s mythic landscape.

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A bird stood still on a post jutting up from the water behind the Falls. And lo, that post, with a bird atop, appears in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson.

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Hinchliffe Stadium was a home of Negro Leagues baseball. The name is pronounced “Hinchcliff” by locals. The Charles J. Muth Museum, on the stadium grounds, is devoted to the history of the Negro Leagues. I found the display of old mitts (so small) strangely moving. Thank you, Leon B. Moses.

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The Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, like the Muth Museum, is worth a visit even if you don’t follow baseball. Berra was a mensch. I didn’t know that he was mocked in his early baseball years for his looks and short stature. I have yet to find the PSA he did for young people about the importance of writing.

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Garden State Plaza, the ur-mall of my teenagerhood, is becoming a multiuse development.

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George Washington was/is all over New Jersey. In the Dey Mansion, for instance. And at Washington’s Rock.

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The American Museum of Natural History has a new dinosaur, the Patagotitan mayorum, which has a claim to be the largest species discovered (122-feet long). The museum also has a new wing. Among its delights: a huge array of insect specimens, and an ant environment, encased in glass, with an overhead walkway, across which ants carry bits of leaf to their building sites. In the older areas of the museum, the dioramas with human figures are gone (rightly so), but the dioramas with animals remain, dimly lit, with extraordinary painted backgrounds. Very museum-y, in the old way. Not a single button to push.

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The momentousness of New York City no longer seems real to me. For the first time I didn’t feel the usual You are now entering New York and You are now leaving New York feelings.

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But still, the Beresford, at 211 Central Park West, is a mighty imposing building.

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Aldo’s Cucina serves totally great southern Italian fare. Younger eaters apparently avoid Aldo’s because it has no liquor license and, thus, no cocktails. Silly eaters. You can have a cocktail anytime. You won’t always have a chance to enjoy food as good as Aldo’s. And besides, you can bring a bottle of wine.

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Like Aldo’s, Jackie Smalls is evidence for the claim that strip-mall restaurants offer excellent eating (because money that might have gone into rent can go into food). And the restaurant (American and Mediterranean, breakfast and lunch) has a charming logo.

[That’s a chickpea.]

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Green Papaya is an Asian fusion restaurant. Malaysian curry is markedly different from Thai curries. And like Thai curries, it’s delicious.

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Stephen Colbert lives on a grand street. But not on the grander side of that street.

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At Bob Slate Stationer, I asked the clerk if he knew where in Harvard Square it might be possible to find an unbranded baseball cap. (I had left mine in the car.) A bearded customer, hands full of stationery items, exclaimed, “Unbranded!” He showed me his unbranded baseball cap, and said that he had had to go online to find it. And it was cotton, not polyester — because you don’t want polyester on your head if you’re bald. “My brother!” he said. What did I learn? That the possibility of human connection is all around. But I already knew that.

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There’s one public bathroom in Harvard Square: in the Smith Campus Center. There will be a line.

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The Harvard Coop has sunk mightily since I last visited in 2019. Merch, merch, merch, and fewer books. The shelves devoted to fiction now have many feet of space for a romance section. The philosophy section had just three books by Wittgenstein, two of them misshelved (and no great gap where a dozen more Wittgenstein books might have sat). I found Private Notebooks: 1914–1916 at the (unrelated) Harvard Book Store.

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Dumpling House is still in Cambridge, still popular, still delicious.

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Officious has two different meanings: “volunteering one’s services where they are neither asked nor needed” and “informal, unofficial.”

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Life can and does go on. It really can.

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The sequel to Sideways — the novel, not the movie — is titled Vertical.

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If I had been after a Leuchtturm A6 Daily Planner, I would have been disappointed. They were nowhere to be found.

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“As well.” “Of course.”

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“I Like Jersey Best” is a song written by Joe Cosgriff, heard in Pennsylvania on the way back home.

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“We may be lost, but we’re making good time”: Yogi Berra.

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2301 miles : 49.8 MPG : 56 MPH

More things I learned on my vacation
2019 : 2018 : 2017 : 2016 : 2015 : 2014 : 2013 : 2012 : 2011 : 2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006