The Admiral and Ian
With what intense desire she wants her home — Austen as Fanny Price, echoing Cowper, Mansfield Park
Yvette. while we were seeking out a gas station, “In a place that has no public transportation, there must be a gas station.”
I am gratified to report that with Yvette, I succeeded in reaching the Jane Austen Summer Program at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on this past Thursday, and returning home again (Alexandria, Virginia), some 266 miles each way; it was 5 hours there (half an hour of semi-lostness finding the Aloft Hotel), and 6 grueling hours back (one very bad accident, and very heavy traffic once we reached Northern Virginia).
Without the GPS lady (reticent as she is) we could not have done either way in such efficient time. Going, I lost my nerve at the place where we had to leave 495 the “beltway” around DC and get onto 95 South, but Yvette was stalwart; however, when the google maps and directions with which the Admiral had provided us when I-85 (the highway) and 15 South dissolved and google maps was meagre, I do think without that GPS lady, it’d have been hours until we found our hotel (Aloft) and then made our way (equally opaque) to the UNC parking lot.
Returning: when we reached near our Alexandra exits, instead of getting off the highway to take the winding streets around Springfield to Alexandra (my impulse) because of the GPS voice (I was depending upon), I stayed on the highway. This is a totally new stretch of highway to me — it demands that one traverse several underpasses where there are these vast spans of brutally-looking cement and steel bridges and twice cross five lanes. I did it all — and going at (for me a terrific clip) 65 miles an hour. So eager was I, I so longed to reach home.
I flew low.
I discovered on this my third trip to North Carolina that beyond a lack of dependable useable public transportation in North Carolina to get you anywhere realistic you might want to go (small systems exist within tiny areas), there is no public life, no public world. Restaurants, malls are (so to speak) hidden away; this is a place into serious gate-keeping. Who would we have asked?
Thus is racism and a rigid class system perpetuated, only done differently than it was in 1962. Black people look better dressed, are better fed, there’s a black middle class of sorts, but it seems to me the vote has done them as a whole little real good if you look at the statistics in who is serving in the local cafeterias, gas stations, low budget stores on the highways — how local community politics have excluded them would take study of each area of the south. I also discovered that throughout the state of North Carolina if your “boss” discovers you are demonstrating on Mondays, you will lose your job. When you go into the demonstration your wrist is stamped with a warning you may be arrested. So while not literally all that far from Alexandria, Va, where I reside, it’s surprisingly culturally far enough that I’m relieved to be back where there is a public life, public transportation and various at least minimally respected civil rights, including the one to vote.
This is the second time in my life I’ve done this (gone thus far in a car) without the Admiral. Previous to it when Yvette was in a child’s chair and Caroline sat next to me with maps on her lap, we did go to NYC to my parents’ house when the Admiral was at a course for his job at the time at the defense department. This was done under pressure from the Admiral who insisted I come to spend the weekend with him. I remember a 6 hour trip where when we got to the place where we diverged from Manhattan into NYC without Caroline it would have been endless being lost. There were no cell phones then, no google. She insists she did not go; but I cannot think I dreamt her presence. She would have been about 8 or 9.
Other trips alone in 44 years: 3 times by airplane to visit my friend, Jill, in Cleveland. The first time the worst, the arriving at the strange airport and waiting for, finding her — maybe this was later 1990s. She sat with me that first time in the airport waiting for my plane to pick me up.
Before this — now we are talking 1969 — I did travel for 12 days to the UK on a boat crowded with students (4 to a tiny room). I really felt I was going somewhere and we sailed up the Channel, a light green body of water and I saw the proverbial white cliffs of Dover. A professor met us there with a car and took us to London and deposited us in student rooms; two weeks later he again took us to Leeds University where rooms were ready and waiting.
Over that year I took several trips and learnt how stressful such trips were for me. I did go, but the anxiety was so great that I’d lose track of what day it was, and was often in a bewildered and puzzled state of mind. I traveled across the North Sea, to Germany by myself (not knowing the language) and stayed 5 weeks in Paris, France (January 1968) where I actually began to speak French and understood it spoken to me, just a bit. I remember how relieved I was to return to England and find the Admiral (then Jim) waiting for me at Leeds Railway station, half-starved, so thin (less than his 128 pounds) and how glad I was to be with him again, maybe it was at that moment he became my home. After that I traveled with friends only: with him to Rome, with a friend, Marlene, to Amsterdam and then again for 5 weeks to Spain and Portugal.
A short trip back to the US in August and then return to the UK to marry Jim within 6 weeks in 1969. And then no more without him until these trips above described.
Yvette and I had an adventure, we enjoyed some of it very much. I will describe the Jane Austen Summer Program separately (Austen Reveries blog). We lost nothing. I even held onto my headscarf. I did manage some reading towards my Andrew Davies movies project, got into Trollope’s Macdemots of Ballycloran, Yvette and I watched some Vlog (video blogs) of Lizzie Bennet’s diaries on line, and she read some of her books too. We made friends with one woman who took us to a restaurant she said was famous, Top of the Hill (it had a balcony overlooking the city: we got there through a passage in a building, and then up an elevator and then through a monitored door), and there the food was excellent (elsewhere in N.Carolina it is barely edible — sheer heavy stodge).
It was a kind of suffocating heat in North Carolina, the air a lot thicker than North Virginia (I believe furniture would wilt), Yvette was startled to how sprinklers were used where outside people were sitting under awnings; but it is metallically hot here too now. The air conditioning there has its limits. I would not like to live any further south than where we do. It is more comfortable here tonight.
Beyond this personal context for my trip, I’m reporting home-coming and how (as you can see from the photo), Caroline took very good care of the Admiral and the cats. He (the admiral, not the cat) and she were walking 2 blocks a day, and there is now a good pho soup waiting for him on this Tuesday in the hope he will again be able to swallow normally liquids starting that day (no more feeding tube).
Ian did make friends with Caroline. This morning suddenly he made up his mind he’d had enough of staying aloof, and wanted to play with string, get at the offers to food and water and be comfortable once again. Clary is now drinking out of a cup in the living room — beyond the cat fountain to which Ian has adjusted.
Ian reaching out
Ian sits up like kangaroo
She played with string with him. He finds string irresistible.
Now I’m about to answer e-mail and have NPR on, and Yvette’s watching her favorite sports with tomorrow her first day back at work after her holiday.
The Admiral says he missed me. I phoned twice a day, emailed around noon. He wrote back on his ipad.
Reading his ipad
Given my achievement coming back, if I can replicate using the highways via the GPS lady, the trips to Springfield Kaiser (there’s one tomorrow for yet more blood tests for the Admiral) can be much much shorter in time, thus less dizzyness from too much time in my car. And more time for myself, my studies, my writing, once again. I should mention Yvette had set up a play list of music for us to listen to there and back. We had Sibellius, the Swan song I believe the piece from 5th symphony is called, going out; and Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue for our last number as we returned.
We used her ipad as we could not figure out how to listen to the radio at the same time as having the GPS map application working for us.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
I’ve been asked when was I in North Carolina before. We attended a South Central meeting of the ASECS in Asheville, North Carolina. We stayed high on a hill in an enclave of unqualified luxury; I didn’t manage to see many ordinary apartment houses and lower middle housing (and no poorer) during the time we traveled by a chartered bus from The Grove Park inn, to the Biltmore Castle, a fabulous super-rich person’s house from 1905. At the time I did see it as reflective of the truths of American culture and the revealing how equality is a myth.
And the time before was for a day and one-half when I was just 16 (1962) and married there. No where else would probably have allowed me to marry at that age. What I saw was yes much much worse. Appalling shameless racism. Black people seemed to move slower, they drove very slow in old cars, wore old clothes, and I saw bathrooms labelled “gents” and “ladies” just for white and one for all “coloreds” I wouldn’t send my cats to.
Sylvia
I did think about how the vote has been in the hands of minorities and down south black people since 1966 and yet not only so little gained, but so much lost since 1980. One has to account for the inability of the vote to do anything about what has happened across the US in the last quarter of a century. The vote matters or the powers that be would not now be attempting to remove the franchise again and in the 1890s men beat and punish and humiliate and imprison women to stop them from getting the vote, but the vote is unable to deliver serious good change for most people without much more accompanying it.
Much of the change between 1962 and 2013 down south came from various parts of the civil rights act that Johnson signed into law, not just the right to vote, and what I’ve seen in N.C. is how some of the rights in public space, assembly and the like have been avoided by the private property system’s ability to manipulate public space and people send their children to separate private schools.
Further Yvette quip, while we were walking to pizza place off to a side, hard to find: “There cannot be much tourism here. People who come in the summer come for summer family holidays.”
I always enjoy your blog. After reading your comments (I agree with you) I recommend Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name, which intersects many of your topics.”
I’ve looked at
“Taking its title from a traditional African-American spiritual, Tyson skillfully interweaves insightful autobiography (his father was the town’s anti-segregationist Methodist minister, and a man whose conscience and human decency greatly informs the son) with a painstakingly nuanced historical analysis that underscores how little really changed in the years and decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 supposedly ended racial segregation. The details are often chilling: Oxford simply closed its public recreation facilities rather than integrate them; Marrow’s accused murderers were publicly condemned, yet acquitted; the very town’s newspaper records of the events–and indeed the author’s later account for his graduate thesis–mysteriously removed from local public records …”
North Carolina legislature today:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/03-2
Sylvia