What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
|
|
By any other name would smell as sweet;
|
|
The GPS coordinates of my current residence is
7 Howe Court, off of Howe
Figure 1 Viewed from the pool diving board, the backyard
landscape with Nikki and Marek frolicking in the pool on the foreground. The leaves of grass left of the diving board
is Krystyna’s potted lemon grass.
Road. In and of itself it might not be much to
write home about. But it’s home and it
has its own story to tell in a curiously unique peculiar way.
Admiral
Lord Richard Howe was the commander
of the British Fleet during the American War of Independence. His main mission was to thwart, with extreme
prejudice, George Washington’s primary mission of leading the American
Revolutionary Forces onto victory. The rest, they say, is history.
Before moving into this
neck of the woods, I used to live in the town of Port Washington, last address
on Port Washington Blvd. Don’t blame me
if I
Figure 2 Viewed from the driveway with my favorite lilac
bush in the foreground.
don’t recall the house number. I only lived there. I did not handle much of the meager snail
mail logistics.
Before Port Washington I took up residence in the
Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
My abode was only a decent Sunday morning jog to George Washington
Bridge, the only open sky connection between the North American continent and
Manhattan Island, a.k.a. New York City.
This was an exercise route I occasionally indulged in when the weather
and my appetite for punishment warranted it.
The point was, I was captivated by the legend of George
Washington as the father of the country, the most distinguished of her first
citizens. This came about more than by
direct accounts about George Washington’s exploits themselves but rather by
what I learned of his relationship with Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father
I studied most, compared to the rest of them.
Like me, Alexander Hamilton took judicious advantage of
the generous availability of “other people’s money” to advance his personal education.
Rightly or wrongly, I identified the
Hamilton-Washington nexus as deliciously parallel, albeit in a far more exalted
way, to the Asumen-Miravite
connection [c.f., pp.13 ff http://www.flirtingwithmisadventures.com/orderthebook.htm].
Consequently, among the plethora of personal faults, I had unabashedly and
proudly considered myself as a diehard Washingtonian in ego identity.
Then came the Jihadist events of 9/11/2001 which
shuttered all heretofore extant equilibrium on American political vulnerability,
viewed from my very circumscribed personal prism at least. A week earlier, I secured a three-month
contract engagement with a re-insurance giant at the 104th floor of
the South Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). I successfully negotiated to delay the start
date by a week, to 9/17/2001. Having
just completed a successful engagement with Mercedes Benz USA, I needed at
least a week’s reprieve of “nothing but golf” to recharge my batteries.
The Jihadist Arabs took the towers down along with my
prospects for gainful employment. There
was no way I could muster the nerves or the wits to venture find out whatever
happened to my contract. Compared to the
magnitude of the tragedy my own personal concerns seemed so shamefully trivial
and banal. I just considered myself
extremely fortunate that I was in the Christopher Morley golf course that Tuesday
morning instead of the 104th floor, 1 WTC South in Manhattan. Truth be told, I often wondered if I was
robbed of the chance to be a hero in such an historic event. I confess to have remained grateful to Divine
Providence for having been spared the painful ordeal of finding out whether I
would have turned out a villain, just another by-standing victim, or a hero,
i.e., whether, under baptism of fire, the better angels of my nature would
prevail over the baser devils of my decadence.
As the cliché goes, “he, who fights and runs away,
lives to fight another day.” My personal
version of the cliché would be: “he who pines on what might have been shuns in
vain the wage of sin.”
I was radically and definitively taught by my farm-boy
upbringing that how you come out of adversity defines the character of your
soul. So I invested flesh and soul to
come out of the debacle by subsisting off my credit card liabilities while
trying in vain to obtain my next engagement for a gainful, rewarding employment. My wife, a professional bookkeeper, was also
promptly laid off from her job with an industrial cleaning company whose main
clients happened to be facilities at the John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia International
Airports and the World Trade Center Industrial complex.
Having been schooled in physics and engineering, I have
always been proud to claim mastery of systematic and methodological
thinking. In an effort to reverse my
ever dwindling fortunes, I employed an imminently patentable logical flippant methodology
to get out of my financial bind. If
nothing else but to savor the delicious irony and dwell on its after taste,
this approach warrants delving into in much greater depth and detail.
My abode in Port Washington was accessible from the
rest of the universe mainly expeditiously through Exit 36 of the Long Island
Expressway (LIE), the main traffic artery which dissects the length of Long
Island from the East River to the Eastern Forks. The Northern Fork ends in Orient Point. The Southern Fork ends in Montauk Point.
From the East River which separates Long Island from
Manhattan, to Montauk Point stretches approximately one hundred forty miles of
navigable public road. The distance to
Orient Point is much shorter but the road layout is much more challenging in
the best of weather conditions. Mileage
may not necessarily be a good predictor of trip duration.
Between the north and south shores, on average, the
distance is between thirty to forty miles.
Hence, from this rather pronouncedly elongated geography, the Island got
its Identity-label for being “Long.”
Getting off the LIE at Exit 36, you’d make a left turn
at the first traffic light to head north on Searingtown Road which eventually transformed
itself into Port Washington Blvd. on entering the town proper. You should count seven traffic lights on Port
Washington Blvd. The seventh house from
the seventh traffic light was the house I lived in for almost a decade. This seven and seven part of the route made
it more fun to give driving directions to occasional visitors. It made it much easier to remember, to boot.
Pursuing flippancy untempered with an iota of common
sense can easily usher in the realm of the ridiculous. I contend this was not the case in this
project. But you should be the
judge. To paraphrase Fox News: I narrate,
you decide; and do whatever you please with your verdict. So here goes.
One rule of thumb governing economic reality in Long
Island is that the closer you are to New York City, the higher is the cost of
living. It stood to reason that I needed
to move further away from Manhattan to cope with my new economic normal. Moving too far out east would intrude into
the domain of the rich and famous in the high and mighty Hamptons. Flipping the digits for LIE Exit 36 yielded
Exit 63, ten exits short of the eastern end of the expressway.
So I drove up to Exit 63, turned north at the first
light and counted seven traffic lights after getting off the LIE. I was on County Route 83 (CR83) which connected
the town of Patchogue to Mt. Sinai, hence the name Patchogue-Mt Sinai Road,
a.k.a, North Ocean Avenue. I found myself in the middle of central Suffolk
County. Hereabouts, there simply is not
any one town large enough to need or have seven traffic lights in it.
So at the seventh light on CR83 I turned left and took
the first right onto Howe Road. Why I
turned left instead of right on Old Towne Road was a no brainer. Old Towne Road intersected with CR83 at an
approximately 30-degree or so angle.
Turning right was in the backwards direction of where I was heading,
completely contrary to my quest for going forward.
At the first right turn off of Howe Road was Howe Court
where a “for sale” sign was prominently displayed on the front yard of 7 Howe
Court, the very head of the court, with the phone number of the realtor
marketing the property, standing out in bold typeface.
At first blush I was not overly impressed with the
property. It was dominant as the only
non-ranch structure in the court. I
however found the rooms too small by design and the windows too short and
narrow, reminiscent of a pigeon’s perch.
The off ground pool in the back yard was more of an addition to the junk
that needed to be cleared off the property than an augmentation to its
valuation.
But both my daughter and son-in-law were excited at the
prospect of putting their renovation ideas to flourish. Apparently, they had earlier bookmarked the
property in the internet into their short list of acquisition candidates. So being at the short end of our ropes
financially, my wife and I just went along for the ride and let the younger
generation took unbridled latitude of their moment in the sun.
They promptly widened the main structure by a shade
more than a yard. All the windows were
redesigned to sport a French Provençal ambience. The pool structure in the backyard was
completely demolished and landfilled.
And a new in-ground pool was dug in the heretofore unused and wooded
part of the property. A gas-fired
charcoal barbecue stove and a child’s play shed with slides completed the
backyard additions.
Inside the main structure, a fully finished basement
with separate access from the backyard independent of those of the main house
promises the prospect of separate living quarters with adequate privacy.
Thus it came to pass that by the time the National U.S.
Golf Open was first held in Long Island (Bethpage Black) in June of 2002, we
were fully relocated into this neck of the woods. It was only until then that I realized the levels
and dimensions of the irony that the Jihadist Attack of 11-Sep-2001 had imposed
on my life. It was not until much later
that I mustered the fortitude to count the ways, to wit:
1.
I ended up living in Long Island because I
deliberately refused to deal with the Arabs yet the acts of Arab terrorists
sent me further into the heart of Long Island to better survive the disarray
from 9/11.
2.
The 9/11 adversity had brought my extended
family closer together under one roof.
Pre-9/11 Marek, Krystyna and I lived in Long Island while Renata,
Robert, and Nikki resided in Jersey City.
3.
Pre-9/11
I used to take pride in having my abode associated with a great American
patriarch’s name. Post-9/11 my abode has
become associated with the name of his arch-enemy. I content myself in seeking solace with the Vito Corleone formula that in
order to make your victories more triumphant it pays to elevate the stature of
your enemies with some degree of honor and respectability.
Ironically,
enough it’s on the last count that I deem the reversal of my fortunes due to
9/11 to be consummate and irrevocable.
Although admittedly intangible, it was on this score that the ramifications
were most far-reaching and imposed a longer-lasting impact on the soul.
