A Stranger in a Strange Land Comes Home
At the Tycher Library
From the moment I land in Dallas, TX, I wonder how I’d come to such an alien place. Right away, the airport strikes me as strange. It’s a string of short buildings and runways, with at least one old fashioned control tower like the kind at Logan in Boston that used to guide my pilot daddy home to me in the ‘50s, and the whole thing is surrounded by winding parabolas of elevated highway like the landing field of a planet somewhere in another galaxy. I’m told it covers an area larger than Manhattan.
At least my driver, John Lacritz, feels familiar, standing there at baggage collection with a sign bearing my name. A good-looking gent, he answers all my questions about Dallas which granted aren’t very many (I’m tired) and stands by me at the hotel until he’s sure all the arrangements pan out.
But that ride into town. Flat, flat land as far as the eye could see and no vegetation to speak of either. No shade to break the wash of sun. A desert landscape, unfamiliar to this low-country girl whose eyes are filled daily with Spanish moss draping live oak, azaleas, palm trees, hawthorn, wisteria, marsh grass, water. My hotel is downtown but there don’t seem to be any buildings very close to it. It’s twenty storeys high or so like all the structures I see, but sits alone, by itself, in a stand of much higher buildings separated by an unnatural distance. I am disoriented. I think: wide open spaces that I love, don’t fence me in, where am I?
The concierge tells me my room’s on the 17th floor, the executive floor. I say, Oh, please, don’t put me so high up. He says: Oh no. Trust me. You want to be high up. We have the regional cheerleaders’ convention in town. . .
He’s right. I meet a Facebook friend, Carol Burrow Leos, in the bar for dinner that night and the joint is hopping, literally, with highly enthusiastic females of all ages, wearing glitter, somersaulting, legs akimbo, and every word they utter seems to be followed by an exclamation point. Mostly, though, they don’t talk. They laugh. They cheer. Loudly. Where am I, Carol? I think I landed in the center ring of a feminist circus training camp!
By morning, I’m ready for the opening reception at the Tycher Library of the Center of Jewish Education of the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas. I wait in the hotel lobby for my ride over while buses fill up with last night’s cheerleaders who likely never went up to bed and whose pitch is as fevered as ever. God bless the young.
My new drivers are Brenda and Peter Marcus who, despite living in the US for 35 plus years, have not lost their South African accents, which charms me into feeling I really have left my home and inserted myself through some miracle of time/place shift into a foreign land, especially when Brenda tells me she finds my characters Dickensian, which warms the cockles of my old heart right up. Brenda and Peter also run Dallas’ Jewish Film Festival and when I tell them my first novel, Home in the Morning, is in development for film they surprise me with the generous offer of showing it at the Festival and take down my contact info to follow up. Did I say a foreign land? I think I meant fairy land, a place where wishes are granted, dreams come true.
We arrive at the JCC, enter. I find the place palatial, vast and appointed with all the bells and whistles any community could hope for and it’s then I realize I am home. From the organizing librarian, Nina Golboro, a pretty, trim, efficient young woman who has everything in perfect control, making sure the event rolls on smoothly, to the women of the donor reception, and the book club people to whom I make my speech, everyone welcomes me and chats with me in a way that feels natural, homey. I hear a great story I have permission to use in my future presentations from Meyer Denn, the Executive Director of the Center for Jewish Education,and suddenly, I’m reminded why I enjoy the Jewish Book Network tours so very much.
You see, when we lived up North, I lived in a Jewish neighborhood with five synagogues, three kosher butchers, numerous kosher bakeries, restaurants, and caterers all within walking distance. In the old days, Brooklyn, New York had nothing on Brookline, Massachusetts when it came to Jewish life. That changed some over the decades, but still a haimische ambiance was always there, warm and familiar, permeating everything. Since I’d moved South – to an island yet, with my synagogue 30 plus miles away- I’d been happy living in my natural paradise but I miss sometimes the pulse, the comfort of Jews, of Yiddishekeit. And never so much as when I find myself somewhere, even somewhere as new to me as Dallas, in a crowd of Jewish book lovers where I feel quite suddenly, that stab of recognition: here, in this room, I am home.
I present that day to a bright, responsive crowd of about l00 souls. They listen to whatever bit of wisdom I have. They laugh at my jokes. I make up more. They embrace me. I embrace them.
Nancy Seigel drives me back to the airport and its short stack buildings without any departure screens ahead of security so that you don’t really know if you’re headed to the right gate or not until after you’re through. The ride is more of that same flat, unfamiliar network of concrete loops. But I’m with one of my people and in the back is her friend,Charlene Howell, a woman from Charleston, and because of all that, this stranger in a strange land is home long before she gets there.
