The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel

   

Live in Paradise!

Like countless millions of other Americans, I was airborne over Thanksgiving weekend, traveling what a few decades ago would have been considered vast distances to visit family and friends. In my case, I was one of many staring at those TV screens aboard Jet Blue winging myself down Florida way.

When heading toward baggage claim at Palm Beach International Airport, one is met square in the face with a giant billboard and mannequin display urging new arrivals to “Live in a Postcard,” that postcard incarnate being Palm Beach County – replete with ubiquitous palm trees and abundant sunshine. They actually want you to join them in paradise and not just for a visit.

Notwithstanding some of the unseasonably warm November weather up here (and thank heaven for that – last October and November seemed like we were living in Minsk or Pinsk) when I gaze at our bare naked trees, reach for that thick sweater or dig into my wallet to pay our extravagant cost of everything, that welcoming billboard in Florida starts to look pretty good.

And they have more than hype to back it up. First comes the extra hour or more of sunshine on any given day. At 5:30 on Monday it still was light out, (twilight, I’ll grant you, but light nonetheless) leaves were still green on the trees and flowers in bloom. And it was 75 degrees. They have highways without giant potholes or unintentional speed bumps and they have roads with as many as six lanes in each direction with speed limits of 65 or 70 mph. They’ve got no state or city income taxes, a strong homestead exemption if you’re faced with trying times, lower real estate taxes, little to no inheritance taxes and lower sales taxes. No “millionaire’s tax.” No toll bridges or tunnels and generally available free parking.

Housing – yes, you can still spend more than a million on a home there if you want to, but you can also find pretty decent digs for well under $300K. There’s a new development in West Boynton Beach called “Canyon Trails,” with brand new houses starting at $260,000. Condos can routinely be purchased in nice areas for under $150,000.

Food – We have everything here in The Five Towns that you might possibly want to eat – but we pay for it. Go into any Publix supermarket in Florida and you’ll be floored to find that where we take it for granted that a box of cereal will be $5.49, that same box in Florida is $3.89. A case of bottled water here for $6 is $3.99 there. Beer and soda? About 20 percent less. Even the astonishingly good and highly desirable clandestinely imported Mexican Coke (as in Coca-Cola) made in thick glass bottles with real cane sugar and no high fructose corn syrup is a mere $1.29 a bottle there and $2 here. Want to bring home some flowers to spruce up your home? We’ve had an explosion of floral inflation here, with small supermarket bouquets now ranging from $9.99 to $14.99, while the very same sized and just as pretty bouquets in the Sunshine State are $4.99 to $7.99. Ditto on fruits and veggies.

Gasoline? Also less by about 20 to 25 cents a gallon. Heating oil? No such thing. Winter clothes? Also no such thing, unless you like to go skiing on your vacation. Politics? If you’re a Republican drowning in the deep blue Democratic liberalism of New York, Florida is heaven on earth as it seems everyone is a Republican except for old Jewish New York transplants. Oh, and people are more polite. They smile, say “please” and “thank you” and “y’all have a nice day now!”

While on the beach on Sunday, for the first time I saw large numbers of gray and black New York-style pigeons scampering on the sand, vying with the seagulls for bugs and leftovers – these most assuredly were Northern birds who’ve decamped for warmer climes as they looked wholly out of place in the brilliant sunshine and next to the azure waters. I’m sure the gulls were none too happy about it.

Now, having said all this there are some things that are better here – restaurants – our eat-out and take-out food is far superior across the board. Likewise our bagels and pizza. New York wins by a slam-dunk on culture and the breadth and scope of our intelligentsia and frisson of discourse. Our newspapers are better. TV news is better. Our schools are generally better. Nightlife is more sophisticated. People are dressed better and more stylishly. We have real neighborhoods with interesting, solid houses, not just tract developments and gated communities. We have multi-generational family life with deep roots where people know where you come from and often have your back. The richness and diversity of ethnic and religious life is far superior. There is a bland and bleached, homogenized nature to life there which can be mind-numbing.

For a million New Yorkers who fled to the Sunbelt over the past decade, they’re happy to put up with life less sophisticated in exchange for life less complicated, life less onerous, life less expensive and life with more sunlight. As I look out at the pitch darkness of 5:00 p.m. in New York, maybe, as Bertie Higgins sung back in ’82, it would be cool to “live on love and the fruit from tropical trees,”  “ease on down to the Keys” and spend “Just Another Day in Paradise.”

The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel

      

How the first Thanksgiving was imagined -- the natives being friendly. Moms bringing out the turkey and football being a major tradition of the holiday.

The Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past

As time marches on, Thanksgiving and other major holidays trigger a stream of memories stretching back over the decades. Invariably the years have a way of painting everything in a kind of Norman Rockwell-esque sepia tone as nostalgia for days and people gone by come flooding back from the deep recesses of one’s memory banks and hard drive.

As a kid, we used to have big Thanksgivings on my mother’s side of our extended family. Most of the people who previously populated these gatherings are, alas, no longer walking this earth. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, some cousins. The holiday used to be an extravaganza of first cousins at the kids’ table running amok and getting into all kinds of mischief. It is hard to fathom that it’s been 27 years since my Great Uncle Si passed away (he used to be our family’s “official” turkey carver) and all the Thanksgivings past that took place at my Great Aunt Gerri’s place on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx, then migrating to my late Aunt Mona’s and then my late Aunt Stephanie’s places on the Upper East Side. The food was almost beside the point. It was more about the atavistic tribal re-bonding of an extended family of striving Romanian-American Jews and the frisson of turbo-charged intellectual and political discourse where even precocious kids could sometimes participate. Debates would rage for what seemed like hours on the relative greatness (or lack thereof) of the late New York Mayor John Lindsay and other saints in the liberal pantheon. These relatives always seemed “so old” to me in those days, yet, I’m probably now about the same age as so many of those mythic figures from my bygone youth and I can well imagine my younger relatives invariably view me from a similar prism now.

Back in my “salad days,” (my late teens and 20s) before I became a full-fledged adult with spousal responsibilities, serious job responsibilities and mortgage responsibilities, the arrival of Thanksgiving weekend signaled a slew of parties which were often beer-infused reunions with friends from high school, the neighborhood, childhood and college with no end of mental transporting to the “glory days” of adolescence. In hindsight, I really don’t know how I was able to capably drive home from places like AJ’s in Atlantic Beach to my parents in Woodsburgh. We drove cars without airbags, shoulder seatbelts, radial tires, anti-lock brakes and often even without rear window defrosters. I can only think that the good Lord was my co-pilot on some of those late evenings.

The amazing thing about Thanksgiving with one’s extended family (especially people you might not see regularly now) is how despite the time and distance, everyone slips effortlessly back into their pre-assigned and pre-determined roles from long ago and grown-up siblings and cousins jostle and tease one another as though it were 25 or more years ago. It doesn’t matter if during the intervening years you’ve become some kind of a big shot or a parent to many, you’re still someone’s little brother or sister or kid cousin and it’s this kind of re-grounding and re-grouping that compels so many of us to trek even great distances, like salmon swimming upstream, to feed again at the wellsprings of our roots.

Today, heavily imbibing in alcoholic beverages on Thanksgiving (which is not to say, abstaining from them entirely) is out of the question for a myriad of reasons including the potential for lethal bodily harm from driving under the influence, DWI arrests and that hangovers, while viewed nostalgically from a long, safe distance, are something our middle-aged bodies really can’t handle and that our personal trainers will give us no end of grief about. Heavy eating is also generally left to the much younger participants who have that fast metabolism and perceived immortality of youth and are able to take that third helping of stuffing or additional ladleful of sweet potatoes with marshmallows without having to pay any price the next day around their waistlines or G.I. systems.

The earth turns and the years pass. Our hair goes thinner or grayer, the leaves are shorn from their trees for the last time yet again, fireplaces are lit, the afternoon sound of football games (just on TV for most Jews, in reality, actually playing on their lawns for many other ethnic groups) redounds and ricochets throughout the house, mixed in with the clatter from the kitchens to form a cacophony of American life that is comforting, embracing and welcoming, telling us all for a day at least, as Dorothy said, “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home” and even if some of your relatives are munchkins, wizards or witches, there’s no place you’d rather be on Thanksgiving.

The Zeitgeist

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