Texas – New York
On my last day in Texas, my dad drove me to the town of Palestine for my friends’ (note the location of the apostrophe) wedding. The ceremony was beautiful, though I am admittedly a poor judge, as this was the first time I stayed for the entire event. Continuing a decades-long tradition, members and alumni of the Yale Russian Chorus sang the medieval Georgian hymn Shen Khar Venakhi as the bride and groom were taking communion. I was told we sounded good, though I am not sure whether that was merely said out of politeness.
We left Texas the very next day. As we flew into New York,
my dad pointed out he couldn’t see the statue of liberty – how insignificant
have the monuments to our erewhile ideals been rendered by the modern age!
The next day, we travelled up to Orange in Connecticut,
where I stored my books two years ago. Had someone told me about the
post-apocalyptic world in which I would be picking them up, I would not have
believed them. That is where the real struggle began. To our great
consternation, the two giant suitcases we brought along consumed only three of
the seven boxes of books I had left in storage. On our way from New Haven, and
on our way to Newport the following day, we would buy evermore suitcases to
accommodate my insane library, reaching a grand total of ten pieces of luggage for
our upcoming flight.
We spent the night in Boston, where I saw some more friends
from Yale, and I met up with Kelly the following afternoon in Newport. She was
just visiting the quaint seaside town on a study trip to New England with the
Winterthur program. I joined them on their guided tour of the Touro synagogue:
the oldest surviving synagogue, we were told, in North America. As the name of
the temple indicates, the community that founded it were Sephardi Jews, who had
fled to Rhode Island owing to the state’s religious tolerance. Touro’s major
claim to fame is its correspondence with George Washington, whose letter to the
“Hebrew Congregation in Newport” is viewed (at least in Rhode Island) as a key
innovation to the doctrine of religious toleration, which thanks to Washington
turned into religious pluralism.
We left from JFK airport the following afternoon, giving me
time to catch up with my roommate from college over a breakfast in Bryant Park.
Well, I had breakfast, at any rate. He, having zealously adopted the New York
lifestyle, ‘breakfasted’ on coffee. Despite our ten pieces of luggage, our
voyage back to the Czech Republic went oddly smoothly. I would spend the
subsequent weeks unloading and cataloguing over five hundred books.
Comments
Post a Comment