Morgantown - Two Years later

Two years ago, on July 11, my husband Joe Hample, our cat Tappuz and I arrived in Morgantown, West Virginia, from Crescent City, California. Joe is the rabbi at Tree of Life Congregation here in Morgantown. Our life in Crescent City is illuminated in my other blog, Barry's Excellent Adventure, at barrywendell.blogspot.com. I ended that blog when we arrived here. It's available in book form, with a beautiful cover, some extra posts, many fewer pictures and slightly fewer errors, by sending $25 to me at PO Box 831, Morgantown, WV 26507.

I don't plan to discuss Tree of Life. That is Joe's job and career. This will be hopefully, my thoughts and travels.

So here are the thoughts about living here. We have found a group of friendly, intellectual people here. Both of us are brainiacs, Joe especially, not interested in sports and somewhat outside contemporary culture. This is a university town, the home of West Virginia University. Lots of dreamy intellectual types live here, especially among the older, retired people. In Los Angeles, where I lived for twenty-five years, my friends tended to be younger. Here they are older. I'm older as well - sixty-five in October. The town is pretty enough, and there are places to go and things to do here. Our sadness is that there is not much going on here for gay people. There are student organizations and a bar, but we are too old for those things.

As far as West Virginia, there are thing I don't get. People have a horror of cities here, yet the rural towns all seem to be sinking into the mud, losing population and populated by meth-addicts. "Environmentalism" is a dirty word. Coal is king. The state-wide reps, notably our Congressman, a Tea Party Republican,  our Governor and junior Senator, both conservative Democrats, have come out against same-gender marriage. Meanwhile, the suicide rate among young men in West Virginia is the highest in the country. Some say it is economic issues, but I'll bet there is more to it.

We are not big shoppers or glamour boys. We do with Kroger for a food store, while longing, like many residents here, for a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods or Wegman's. Pittsburgh is an hour and a half drive, so we visit sometimes. People we've met go there for Macy's, Trader Joe's or Costco, but we look for judaica, lunch, and the feeling of being in a "real" city.

We both travel frequently. I've taken it on myself to visit every county within three hundred miles of here, in alphabetical order. Don't laugh. I've been to twenty-five already.

Morgantown could be a lot better laid out. Until recently, there was no zoning outside the city, so large developments are built wherever a developer wants, without concern for traffic or transit. There is a rudimentary transit system, largely controlled by the University. It includes the PRT, a people-mover that connects downtown Morgantown to the sprawling parts of the WVU's campus. It's brilliant, but it dates from the early 1970s. This summer, the University is updating it, but there has been no mass transit added in forty years.

Osher Life-Long Learning, or OLLI, is a school for people over fifty to take enrichment classes taught by volunteers. This is where my older friends hang out. Lots of them are retired professors. I've taken a few classes there, and taught two in the last year about pop music history. One class was about New-York based songwriters in the early nineteen sixties: Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Lieber and Stoller and others, and the second was a six-week class about Motown, from the beginning in 1959 to the end of the last century. Both were successful. I may teach about The Brirish Invasion in the fall.

So I keep busy here. I work out at a gym, take and teach classes, travel, and attend synagogue events with my spouse. We should be here another five years, God willing. Hope fully we will both maintain our health and the congregation will continue to support us.

More to come.







I hope my future blog posts can be more interesting.