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December 31, 2004
Few degrees of separation
Glenn Reynolds links to two blogs being posted from Thailand and India. These provide texture beyond the canned television network coverage described in the December 31 entry in Fear and Trembling.
Along with fewer than 800 people, most of them of European descent, we live in a rural village in central New York. Earlville has a bar, a minimart, a fully restored and maintained nineteenth-century opera house, a small grocery store, a lawyer, a realtor, a paper box factory, a bowling alley, a hardware store, and a cleaning service. That's about it for commerce. It's a middle- and working-class village, many of whose inhabitants were born here or in this locale. We're 40 minutes from Utica, an hour from Syracuse, and an hour and a half from Binghamton. That's about it for access to "urban" centers. It all seems very, very far removed from the Indian Ocean.
Tom and I are fixing pork chops, baked beans, cornbread, and broccoli for dinner. So I go to the next village, Sherburne, which has an exceptionally fine butcher shop masquerading as a small grocery store. From the outside, the shop is very unprepossessing, with aging blue vinyl siding and a message board that always announces "Bait" plus the special of the week. I get my pork chops, I'm checking out, and I see a crude plastic donation jar at the counter. In these parts, when somebody faces a terrible, expensive illness or their barn and house burn down, the community raises money by a variety of means, including these jars. This time, though, the jar is for donations to "tsunami relief," and it's spelled right. And I'm thinking damn, even here in rural central New York, people feel really connected to what's happening in southern Asia.
And then I realize, oh god, Brian just married a woman from Indonesia. Not a woman of Indonesian descent--a woman from Indonesia. And Brian wasn't behind the butcher counter just now. And I just stand there stupidly for a moment, staring at that jar, until the new girl at the checkout counter says, "Will there be anything else?" And I turn to her slowly and ask slowly, "Is Ida's family all right?" The girl doesn't know. She says she guesses so.
So I carry the groceries to the car, and then I walk back in, back to the butcher counter, where Brian's father Skip is talking to a couple of other guys, and after a minute, Skip says, "Did you forget something?" And I ask him the question.
It's okay. Ida's family, Skip tells me, all live inland, down near Jakarta, and are unharmed. But, he says, a lot of people have died. And suddenly all three men are giving me details--how many casualties where, how much money has been donated, what the survivors' problems are. And I realize that not only is the group of us standing there connected to the disaster by virtue of Skip's daughter-in-law's origins and recent residence in Indonesia, but also because yes, even the working stiffs in rural central New York are sobered and sorrowed by this disaster.
So I go get back in my car, sit there for a moment and calm myself, and head for the car wash. It's an above-freezing day, and I've got to get the crap off the car so that I can see to drive.
Posted by senioritis at December 31, 2004 02:13 PM