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
