What It's Like Living in Ithaca, NY.

here's what it's like: let's say that you have just had
lunch someplace in Collegetown and you are
on your way to Karl Jaentsch's garage with
your VW because yesterday
you noticed the brakes were beginning to fade

you start down Buffalo Stret hill it
looks like rain now after a sunny morning:
when you slow down for the blinking yellow
light at Stewart Avenue those brakes are
not good

and it get's worse that huge old green
house on the corner of Fountain Place and
then the shiny face of Terrace Hill apartments
flash by you likie the past you feel terror
in your wrists your stomach and you know
those brakes are gone and you won't be able
to stop at the red light on Aurora

where there are several people leisurely
crossing your path: maybe on their way from
the Unitarian Church to Hal's
Delicatessen or they just left their
own apartment to go buy some flowers
or whatever erronds we do all day -
in any case there they are and you can't stop

so this is what it's like: as if your brakes
had failed and you couldn't avoid running
right through that crowd knocking them all apart -
panic broken limbs and screams in the street

well the chances are that on any
given day at least one of those people
would be somebody you had quarreled with
last year and hadn't spoken to since or
a friend you had visited only last week
or even the person you were once married to yourself
who would see just before the impact that it was you
that's what it's like living in Ithaca

photo by Kathy Morris
poem by Dick Lourie
1978




















Buffalo Street Hill, 2009


Marge declaims verse as Nate drums:
















Love, David & Nate

Early Spring in Ithaca

Nate Unschools in La Manzanilla

Before I left to see Nate in Mexico and catch up on what his “unschooling” was turning out to look like, I happened to have dinner with Susannah Sheffer. Susannah was for many years one of the primary advocates for unschooling, and editor of the newsletter Growing Without Schooling. I shared with her my concern over whether Nate was “really” unschooling, and asked her advice.

Her reply was immediate. “He is unschooling, “ she said. There’s no question about that. “The only question is whether it fits your idea of unschooling.”



Oh.

With that very helpful bit of advice, I left for Mexico just to see Nate. He and I had a wonderful time. And we had an amazing, intense week or so. Mostly free of my own idea of what I should see, I got to experience what he was making of being in a little town in Mexico rather than being in his seat in Camphill High School for the first bell at 7:40. He is learning Spanish seriously, and becomes ever-more fluent. He often declined to speak anything but Spanish with me.

I took some photographs of the kinds of “studies” he is involved in, and you’ll find them below. As usual, you can click on the small photographs to enlarge them.

This unschooling, for which my sister, Sylvia, was prime mover, has brought Nate the support of our family and friends in many ways. I felt the presence of my late friend Ivan Illich close to me.

When Nate was a baby coming along to our gatherings with me and his mom, I noticed Ivan leaning over Nate where he was lying on the carpet. He was nose-to-nose with the boy, draping his long hair over him to amuse him, and whispering to him.

Some years later I caught Ivan and told him that I now knew what he was saying to the baby Nate. He was saying:”Don’t let anybody teach you anything!”

Nate must have been listening.

In the meanwhile, another story had been taking place. In the 1960s and early 1970s Ivan had a center in Cuernavaca, Mexico called CIDOC: The Center for Intercultural Documentation. It was one of the primary centers of thinking in the world during that great social ferment. A man named John Holt, a school reformer, traveled there to spend time with Illich and others. After a few weeks conversation he returned to the US as a school replacer. He founded the idea of “unschooling.” Ivan wrote an influential book called DeSchooling Society. Rick Steven’s, Nate’s extraordinary first and second-grade teacher, read the book and decided to become a teacher.

One of the young students around John Holt in the early days was Susannah Shaffer. Through Nate and through Susannah Shaffer I could still hear Ivan talking to me, reaching to me through the years and the threshold of death. Thank you again, Ivan.

Next week Nate is assistant teacher at an English-language course for children held at Michael and Sylvia's.

David












Some academic subjects investigated:
Conversational Spanish, including current slang
Kitten Rescue and the American Novel (on ipod)
Hydraulics, with an emphasis on Wave Dynamics and surfboards
Landscape Architecture
Mayan agriculture today
Flora and Fauna of The Mexican Pacific Coast
Coastal Exploration
Band
Aunt Sylvia and other forces of nature
Spontaneous Maternal Regeneration
Family Living

The New Palapa in Arroyo Seco

(Click on photos to enlarge)

The tile maestro and his son were putting the last touches on the showers as my sister Sylvia and I sat in the heat of the Mexican day under the shade of her just-completed Palapa. The plumbing maestro was mounting the sink into the newly-tiled counter. The electrical maestro was grinding out channels for wiring. By mañana, whenever that occurred, there would be all of the plumbing facilities needed for the first of Sylvia and Michael’s invited Northern guests. All these maestros made me feel as if I were sitting in the midst of a tradesman's symphony orchestra.

It appeared that they would now be ready for the first of the winter’s visitors to the rural village of Arroyo Seco in which they had entered as the sole gringos. Sylvia and Michael have a evolving vision – in no way a plan - for an open-air garden for friends to stay, to spend their money in the poor village, and perhaps take an appreciative interest in the people. They had no interest in “bettering” the village – only in learning from living there among them. But their presence, their US dollars, and their respectful interest is bettering the place without inadvertently damaging the local culture. Dust is a big problem there – Michael had just come down with dust pneumonia, from which many died in the US dust bowl. Without modern antibiotics, it well could have killed him.

“Improving” a place, as I learned from Ivan Illich, is dangerous business. How to help without ruining things is often a puzzle. I wondered if maybe giving the village enough money to have a local man spray water on the road once or twice day could be a contribution without cultural toxicity. Michael pointed out why this would be far from innocuous. Every morning, he explained, a man turns on the village water for an hour to fill everyone’s cisterns. He rides though the town on a motorcycle, calling out that the water is on. While their cisterns fill, everyone goes out on the street in front of their house with a hose and sprinkles the street. “The 92-year-old grandma across the street waters the street every morning. It is the sole think that she can do anymore. If we sprinkled the street, what would she do?” Michael asked.

Almost no-one ever asks such a question. I am in admiration of their care for this place.

In La Manzanilla, where I am staying with Nate and Beth in Sylvia and Michael’s old rental house, Beth and Nate were roused the late evening before I arrived by a woman, her young daughter, and the daughter’s sick baby – Sylvia’s goddaughter. The local “doc” at the pharmacia had told them to take the baby to the doctor in the nearest town that had a clinic. Since Sylvia and Michael were in Arroyo Seco, they just came to their old house, where they knew her relatives were. So Beth and Nate put them in the car, took them to the doctor, paid for the doctor and the medicine, and brought them back. To become someone’s godparent here doesn’t mean attending a baptism and friendly interest – it entails an obligation to care for the child for life, including paying for the child’s needs. Apparently this extends to the godparent’s family when needed.

This lovely cultural tradition is as natural as the obligation to serve the maestros dinner at the completion of the job, as placing payment for a meal directly into the hand of the waitress, and not on the table, as is the invariable precedence of family matters over business ones. If the plumbing maestro’s family needs him, there will be no plumbing done that day. It will be done mañana.

La Manzanilla, where there are restaurants, is in that happy phase of cultural symbiosis in which all benefit. The local poor village welcomes tourists drawn to the village by their magnificent bayside setting and the beautiful local culture. Sooner or later the symbiosis turns parasitic, as the vernacular economy is monetarized. But for now, it is the best of both worlds.

Having had my cup of coffee at the gringo café, Nate and I are off to Arroyo Seco to body surf the beach, snorkel the lagoon, and sit under the palapa and listen to the maestros play.

Visitors to Sylvia and Michael’s little place will catch the rhythms of Mexican rural village life as surely as catching the waves on their beach. In these rhythms, there is an opportunity to learn how people can live together. We're learning ourselves.

The View from Fall Creek

David B. Schwartz

I was kneeling in the snowy entryway of the neighborhood drug store here in Ithaca trying to use my newly-purchased lighter to melt the fraying ends of my bootlaces . Gusts of wind kept blowing the flame out. As I stood up to stretch, a woman stopped in front of me, reached out her hand for the lighter, and instructed: “Give me that! I’ll do it.” By the time I had mumbled a polite deferral she was kneeling at my feet in a low drift, cupping the flame in her hands. The job done, she stood up, handed me the lighter back, and continued into the drug store.

Since it was Ithaca, I also realized that her name was Charlene and I had once known her.

Later that day I was standing in front of the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles down the street, waiting my turn while the employee behind the counter patiently answered a long series of questions from someone over the phone. I presumed that she was ignoring me, in the way civil servants can do everywhere. Suddenly she leaned back, pulled a couple of tissues from their box, and handed them to me through the opening. I looked at her, puzzled. Still talking on the phone, she pointed to the front of my winter coat, where I had unaware dribbled some coffee from my paper “Gimmie Coffee” cup. I wiped it up, she reached for the wet tissues back, and dropped them in her wastepaper basket. Finally, she satisfied her caller and hung up. “Those Gimmie Coffee cups always leak,” she said by way of opening.

Gimmie Coffee is our local roaster. Like many things in Ithaca, it is known beyond the borders of this “five square miles surrounded by reality,” as the local bumper stickers say. For national purposes, it is ranked one of the top ten roasters in the country. For us in Fall Creek, my new neighborhood, it is the “Great Good Place” that is the center of community, in which everyone knows your name. On New Year’s morning, Gimmie pours free shots of espresso to snap open your eyes to the New Year. New Year’s morning I crossed the wintery Fall Creek to the warmth of the café, my fitting first act of a year in which I will be returning to Ithaca after my 25-year sojourn in Pennsylvania. In fact, I am already partly here.



What is most striking to me about this place is the daily evidence of hospitality, of mutual caring, which one encounters in a thousand small ways: in a drugstore entrance, at the motor vehicle bureau, at the café. It is, to use my dear late friend Ivan Illich’s term, rather vernacular. To use a more familiar term, it is tribal. In a time in which human culture, with its customs of connection to each other, celebrations, and mutual care, especially care for children, has been virtually sterilized from the soil, there remain some oases in which traditional ways of being with each other still exist, and can even flourish. Ithaca is one of these rare places.

In all of my years in Pennsylvania, I worked to promote a “retribalization” of society in my public policy work, in my talks and books, in my neighborhood connections. I think that I have made some contribution to some people, and it has been an enriching experience for which I am most grateful. But I was never able to tap into some real experience of community for myself. I was always essentially alone. I mentioned this once to my friend Bob Stuart. “What do you expect?” he said with the bluntness I have come to cherish. “You’re running an Ithaca mission there.”



As I walk out of my house I can see the clock tower of Cornell and I M Pei’s Johnson museum up on the hill above me. On a clear day, which admittedly Ithaca winters are not much known for. At Gimmie, where the tables are lined up with plugs for laptops behind the seats, I have endless interesting conversations. My new friend Peter tells me about article in Parabola that he lent me to read. We talk about another article, on Plato’s ideal forms in the same issue by someone who I once studied with. Yesterday, one of the owner-members of the Moosewood Restaurant, also in the neighborhood, and I had a lovely conversation about commonalities in sane approaches to nutrition and sane approaches to medical practice. At a New Year’s party of people I used to meditate and study philosophy with I met a very interesting professor of video production, who shares my interest in trying to read emotional issues through physiology. We resolved to sit in the park in the spring and look at people walking by and see what we can notice. In the middle of a New Year’s Eve party Gail, in whose home I live, rushed out to deliver a baby, whose arrival in the last moments of the year we later all toasted. We talked about the Buddhist perspective on how children come into the world.

The Dalai Lama’s personal monastery in North America is in the neighborhood, too. We could check with them about the details.

A culture of reflection, for all of you who know me, is as an essential a requirement for my happiness as it was for Epicurus, who founded what may have been the first hippie commune, the “Garden” outside Athens:

“There was much encouragement to think in the Garden, as Epicurius’ community became known. In the common rooms of the house in Melite and in the vegetable garden, there must have been unbroken opportunities to examine problems with people as intelligent as they were sympathetic.”

-Alain de Botton

I do confess to feeling a bit like a missionary returned to London from a life’s work in Africa. At the age of 60, I am getting to make yet one more new start, and it is back at home.

Keep Ithaka always in your heart;
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.

C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933 )

Having made final arrangements this trip to start a new psychotherapy practice here, I intend to move at the end of February, commuting alternate weeks for a while to see my clients in Kimberton, near Philadelphia.

So, my dear friends, I think of each of you as I cast off for one more adventure. Here’s hoping for good winds for all of us. I can’t believe that I have lived to witness the collapse of fascism in the US (at least for a little while) and the advent of hope.

At least, here’s hoping.


Love,

David


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Above Lamoreaux Landing