During my extensive travels through the years, I've cultivated a private pleasure on long plane flights. That is, I catch up on my unread New York Times magazine sections, as well as any unread Book Review and Opinion sections. At home, we get the physical NY Times delivered every Saturday and Sunday. And I receive the online version every day to my email account. Of course, it's widely recognized that the NY Times is one of the world's best newspapers. It carries an incredible variety of news, opinion, culture, science, technology, and travel features. Reading the NY Times as I travel across the country or around the world puts me in the perfect frame of mind to step off the plane into a different society/culture/"movie" than the one I left behind. Thus, I don't mind long plane flights much any more. The flight time to and from Georgia was not long enough for me to catch up on my backlog.
My old hometown of Columbus
Columbus, Georgia, is the place I spent the first two decades of life, where I attended public school. But my real "ties to the land", my "roots", are actually to the forty-acre "country place" over the stateline in Alabama across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus. It's somewhat bittersweet to visit the place, since the memories of my departed parents are everywhere. But there's still a smell, a legacy, a longing to hold onto the past, that I feel every time I visit, which is only once or twice a year.
Back across the river in Columbus, I have two aunts, one 91 and the other 89 years old. The 91-year-old is fading…again, another bittersweet encounter to spend time with her. I have quite a few cousins in and around Columbus. We had a family gathering last week where we tried to catch up with each other. I had not seen one couple (who live a hundred miles away from Columbus) in over fifteen years. It's really impossible to "catch up" with everything that's happened to each of us in the intervening years. About the best we can do is to renew our personal connections and express our familial love for each other.
Very few of my relatives have a good understanding of my life 2500 hundred miles away in the West these past forty-odd years. I feel like I've gone through many personal changes over the years, but the people who've stayed in Columbus all these years seem pretty much unchanged, with the exception of those I'm closest to, who have lived in other places before returning to Georgia, such as my cousins who were the ones who encouraged me to study in Germany forty-five years ago, which changed the course of my life more than any other single life event.
One event I try to arrange every time I visit Columbus (besides seeing family) is to play a concert-gig with my longtime musical friends. The Loft on Broadway has jazz every Friday. Admission is free, so I can invite all my friends and family without reservations. That event is sort of a "friends reunion," an opportunity to see as many friends as possible at one time. A year ago, a dentist friend with whom I had attended elementary and high school
4 Comments on Georgia: Savannah and Cumberland Island
4 Comments on Georgia: Savannah and Cumberland Island
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