Here and There

(This appeared in the Utica Observer-Dispatch in summer 2015.)

I had to look Utica up on a map before I applied for a job here. The first year I was here, a colleague who had also moved from out of state said, “The locals will never let you forget that you’re not from around here.” Well, yes and no. And not long ago I found myself saying something to a newbie faculty member at MVCC, also a transplant: “It is possible to make a life here”.

Initially I planned to stay in Utica for one year, period, but at this writing I have lived more than half my life here. I have a nice circle of friends and a job that has provided opportunities that I never would have expected that day then I looked Utica, NY up in an atlas before I sent in my application. I have paid off a mortgage. I live modestly but comfortably enough.

But I am not much of a fan of Utica until I find myself hosting  company from overseas.  Don’t get me wrong: I have always liked the gritty authenticity of the place. I like the four seasons even if it seems that the street I live on is the last one ever plowed. I don’t like the regular cloud cover, the potholes, the taxes, and what I think of as the generalized seasonal affective disorder. I am still not convinced of the promise of nanotechnology. A lot of people here seem to be related. My last name doesn’t end in a vowel.  I grew up going to New Hampshire town meetings, and I still miss those all these years later, just as I miss seeing more than one candidate for each local position on a ballot. And sometimes it seems I see the same names over and over again. But that is not all that the area is—and besides, I can choose to make my life pretty much as I like by just ignoring that local closed shop and toodling along. Sometimes being ignored can be good. And I have managed to find a way to use Utica as a point of departure when I need it to be a point of departure.

This spring MVCC is hosting our seventh visiting professor from Kien Giang Community College in the south of Vietnam.  To come to Utica for nine weeks she has left her husband and two small children. As with MVCC’s previous visiting professors, Ms. Quyen Luong says Utica is a beautiful city and Buttenschon’s Christmas Tree farm is a wonder.  She had read about diners and asked to go to one, and at Crazy Otto’s Empire Diner in Herkimer she had the biggest pancake of her life (and insisted we take her photo not only of the pancake but of her with the Spiderman figure up high so she could show it to her son, a Spiderman fan).  She has learned that turtle cheesecake contains no turtle.  In the MVCC hallway, she can’t tell the teachers from the students; they are all just big, as is pretty much….everything. She touched a locker when she visited a high school, touched a football—things she has only seen in movies. Like her predecessors, she takes a photo of many of her meals before she picks up her fork.  She played the slots at the casino, and she marveled at the Tiffany lamp she saw during the tour of Saranac Brewery.  She says, “I love it here.”

She hooted and hollered at a hockey game and was thrilled when Rich Pucine, a big American friend, gave her a Comets t-shirt which is almost big enough to be a dress. “Our team won!” she said. Regardless of the weather, everywhere she goes she wears at least three layers.

And the fifteen MVCC students who have recently traveled to Amsterdam, Paris and London will have an experience similar to hers. Even the hamburgers in McDonald’s will not taste the same as home, and that is part of the fun of the travel. I have pleaded with them to not just go shopping  or find a McDonald’s in their spare  time but to seek out authentic experiences. See the Eiffel Tower, of course, but don’t see only the Eiffel Tower.

I write this in a time of increased concern with money and numbers than in the past—test scores, shrinking budgets. Another year of do more with less—or to try not to have to do less.  But even an MVCC  colleague of mine who is a bean-counter par excellance knows that life is if not just about the money and various digits. In his spare time, he dresses up as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Without going too far from home, he gets it: put yourself in a different place, wear different clothes, and TA-DAA! see things anew.

It’s not about the beans.

I don’t like New York taxes but shortly I will probably be retiring here—after all, my house is paid for, and if my property did not appreciate the way it might have had I bought the equivalent elsewhere, at least here I was able to afford a house. My buying a house was one of many surprises over the years.  I never expected to stay here, really, but here I am with a house that looks, well, very lived in.

Just as Quyen’s visit started to wind down and I started cleaning out 39 years of memos and assignments in my office, I was caught unaware one more time.  Another surprise: our very first visiting professor from Vietnam, in  2009, Mr. Nguyen Duy Khang, sent me an email and reminded me of how good this area  looks like through new—his-- eyes.  Now finishing his Ph.D. on a scholarship in Gdansk, Poland,  he and his wife will be visiting family in southern California this summer, and, in order to see his friends at MVCC and in Utica, they will be taking either a bus or a train, whichever is cheaper,  both from and back to Los Angeles for a two week visit to the place I once had never heard of.

And I am still here to welcome them.

This piece was originally published in the Utica, NY Observer-Dispatch.
Copyright Sandra A. Engel