One Lap of America

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Sat, Nov 9- Is this road trip supposed to have a theme, or a lesson, or a moral? Am I trying to get anything out of this? What kind of stuff am I hoping to see while I travel? What is this blog supposed to be providing to you or me? This early in the trip, there seems to be a noticeable undercurrent of the organic side of history. There is the history one can read about in books or on displays in museums, but it has a different element when you are listening to someone tell their story. It was different when I heard veterans telling their stories of WWII, and when I ditched the Spruce Goose talking points speech to hear a crotchety engineer talk about how the movies were wrong, based on what he saw firsthand and read in documents and specs. Now, here I was in some Bar Mitzvah in Menlo Park, one of the richest neighborhoods in America, listening to the congregation's old cantor talk about growing up in Berlin in the 30s, and how he was there on Kristalnacht, and saw his synagogue burn. He seemed almost casual about it, the way one can only be about an extreme if one had been there.



Later, the rabbi took a Torah scroll out of the ark, and started giving a talk. As it was, the aforementioned cantor was selling a book of memoirs, and the rabbi wanted to read the first chapter, titled Deja Vu. Back in the 70s, when this guy was the cantor at the congregation at which we were at, the place caught fire and, remembering how his cantor braved the flames to save their Torah in Germany all those years ago, he charged in to save the scrolls of his congregation. He was only able to save one, it being the one laying on the table next to the rabbi. I'm not religious anymore, but that's still hardcore.

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