Wisteria, and Party, Time

I attended a party in Bergen County today for my Aunt Mae's 90th birthday. That's the Irish side of the family. My mother was actually half-Irish and half-German, and so is my Aunt, who was my mother's sister-in-law, not sister. Different Irish, different Germans. Moreover, it turns out that Irish-Dutch marriages (like my parents') are very common in the extended family.
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In looking thru hundreds of family fotos for old pix of my Aunt, I came across some distressing pictures of my father's antecedents.
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By the way, people, if you have family fotos you might want to leave to your kids, IDENTIFY them on the back! Don't use anything like a marker that might 'bleed' thru to the front, but write something, in ballpoint or even pencil (which worked very well and provided much-needed information decades later), clear ID's like "McFarland Family, May 12 [or "Spring"], 1941, Thisplace, California: (Left to right and back to front) Mae, Hughes, Pete, Pat". Is that too much to ask? I have HUNDREDS of fotos with no ID's whatsoever, and I haven't the foggiest clue who the heck some of the people portrayed might be! If you send pix to friends or relatives, don't just write on the back, "Thought you might like to see this!" but add "Here's little Jimi (Hendrix, that is, Sue's married name) pretend-playing the toy plastic guitar we got him for his 4th birthday. Isn't that cute?! His father is sure he's going to be an accountant. Boy, will Jimi be embarrassed if he sees this in 30 years!"
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Not everyone on the Irish side was goodlooking, mind you (I made the perhaps-too-candid remark to my cousin Nancy that one of our mutual relatives looked like "an unfortunate version of my mother"), but jeez, you should see my father's maternal grandparents. 'Twould make you shudder! I found a foto of my maternal grandparents that didn't look too hot either, tho. I had never before seen a foto of the guy who passed to me the gene for baldness — thanks so much, Grandpa Joe — but these old fotos make me wonder if everybody nowadays is better-looking than their ancestors were.

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Wisteria climbs the metal supports of the roof over my porch in the Vailsburg section.

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The more intermixing there is, the more chance there is to flatten the extremes of particular features and move toward a golden mean. Researchers have found that the more averaged-out facial features are, the better-looking people are perceived. When a man with a big nose and big ears marries a woman with small nose and ears, the result in their children is likely to be a compromise. Do this often enuf, over enuf generations, from the gene pools of different nationalities, and you're likely to get very agreeable-looking people. I see this in the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and, yes, even great-great-grandchildren of my Aunt. Some of these kids are really beautiful. I won't show you pix, out of respect for their privacy, but they are an unusually goodlooking bunch. Whether they stay so as they age remains to be seen. I'll be checking over the course of coming years' family get-togethers. One attendee of the party said to my Aunt as she was getting ready to leave that she'd see her on her 100th. I chimed in, albeit uninvited, "It's a date".
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After I left the party, I took the scenic route home, stopping to see the house Aunt Mae and Uncle Jim occupied when I was a child, to see how close it was to the railroad tracks. I had remembered it wrong. I thought that the fantastic steam engines roared past their property just beyond a hedge, but it turns out that the tracks actually were a short block, then undeveloped, beyond their property line. When you're a tiny kid and an enormous, noisy locomotive approaches, then speeds past, spewing thick smoke in rhythmic spurts as drive rods move back and forth, and wheels spin round and round, and the clickety-clack of steel wheels hitting the gaps in steel track adds to the clatter, it is pretty darned exciting. Kids today have no idea how exciting trains used to be.

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Wisteria is like a weed, so invasive and vigorous is it. Here, it blooms low to the ground, out of frame to the left of the foto above.

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In any case, I decided to meet my friend Don in the Village (Greenwich, that is) but not to take the most direct route, over the George Washington Bridge, despite its being my favorite bridge in the world. When I was little, we lived in Palisades Park and once walked to the middle of the Bridge, guided by my brother Brian (who was at the party yesterday). We had picked up pebbles before setting foot on the span, and when we got out toward the middle, dropped them. We counted aloud as they fell, and Brian calculated the height of the walkway above the water from that information. He is now a mathematician/engineer for an aerospace contractor out of the Johnson Space Center near Houston, and has a NASA email address. You could see his fascination with science and math even then, but of course we weren't thinking of future careers at the time, only of how long it took pebbles to fall that great big distance and make a little splash in the Hudson.
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The Bridge is often the most congested route into Manhattan from North Jersey, and I am too impatient to stand for that. If I have to burn gasoline, I want it to be in moving, not waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Besides, I had things to see along the way.
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I did something I don't like to do. I'm a man, and you know how we are. But I asked a guy for directions. I know. I'm duly ashamed. But he was sorta cute, we were at the bank in Fort Lee (I needed to take out some cash), and I figured roads might be complicated atop the Palisades, so I asked. He gave me excellent directions to the Lincoln Tunnel. Little did I know that I could get up to within a quarter mile of the Tunnel and there would be NO SIGNS, whatsoever, to tell you which way to turn. I got in the wrong lane and had to turn away from the Tunnel at the last minute, so decided I'd prefer the Holland Tunnel to get to the Village anyway, so went farther south, finding my way by dead reckoning. There were no signs to the Holland Tunnel either! And when I was finding my way to the party earlier that day, I saw a number of street signs where only the cross-street, not also the street you are on, is shown. What is wrong with signage in New Jersey?! My sibs, who live in other states, have said that New Jersey's signage is among the worst they've ever seen, and I can't defend it. Around here, you just have to be born knowing where things are, because you sure can't find your way by relying on signs.

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Cameras tend to put more space between objects than the human eye perceives. In person, the blooms below seem denser and larger.

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Along the way to the Lincoln, I saw enormous wisteria displays, on River Road in Edgewater, I guess it was. Vines had grown to the very top of 40-foot trees and turned the entire height resplendent in purplish-blue. I couldn't stop to take pix of those, and they weren't in Newark anyway so were not exactly apropos for this fotoblog, but I do have some pix of the much more modest wisteria display at one side of my front porch, so show those today instead.
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There is a huge amount of new construction of condos and apartments all along River Road opposite Manhattan, fueled by New York money and people who want out of Manhattan but don't want to live in the Outer Boros either. The clifftop in Fort Lee is filled with towering apartment buildings in their own private space, with private garages and private roads closed to the general public. The lowrise condos along the River are also gated communities, as the rich seize public space and turn it into private reserves barred to 'riffraff'. (That would be me and you.)
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I envied the massive development going on in Edgewater and farther south along the Hudson — and the Hudson is a magnificent river (well, estuary, actually, at that point) that makes the Passaic look like a 'crick' by comparison — but I don't want Newark turned into a patchwork of private estates closed off to the public. I want ours to be a more communal and shared space, where people look upon each other not as neighbors-against-our-will but as people we're glad to neighbor; potential friends and allies in civic life, all living happily in shared public space.
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We can do without the rich who want no part of people less wealthy than they. Let them live in the sky in Manhattan, or behind iron fences in Edgewater. If they're too good for us, they're not good enuf for us, in Newark.

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(This is an entry for Saturday uploaded Sunday due to time constraints.)