Home with mom at little Korea on the Hudson

I catch an early morning puddle jumper to LaGuardia. It’s noisy and claustrophobic but gets me to New York in time for my class, avoiding more nights away from my daughter than are absolutely necessary. After class, I flag a taxi that takes me through some pretty ugly traffic to New Jersey.

For my two trips to New York, I’ve decided to stay with my mother rather than in a hotel. I’m saving the client hundreds of dollars in hotel bills, in trade for which I’ll take mom to some nice dinners. The company expense account rules allow this. Besides, I’ll sleep better at her house than in a hotel. I’m convinced that the subliminal smell of powerful disinfectants is what keeps me from sleeping decently in hotels.

I take mom to a nice meal at a pretentious but really rather mediocre Italian restaurant. As we eat, I worry that she’s battling years of instinct that direct her towards the lowest-priced item on the menu.

You have to understand something about my mother. She grew up in the depression and then had to raise three children at a time when my father wasn’t making much money. We didn’t think we were poor, but as an adult looking back I realize how tight money was and what a constant source of stress for Mom when I was a child. My brother claims to recall my parents serving meat to the children and eating only starches and vegetables themselves.

Sometimes mom’s runaway frugality is exasperating for my brothers and me. We tease her about her coupon collection, and as kids we used to joke that when friends came for dinner they always knew what they’d get — it was posted prominently on the windows of the supermarket. My brother Robert called her up once and said “Mom, I have great news!” “What?” she answered, perhaps expecting another grandchild. “The depression is over!” said Robert. By spending just about nothing on herself, mom manages to regularly contribute money towards the grandchildren’s college funds while living on Social Security. She’s been the best mother that I could imagine, and I love her dearly, so when she drives me crazy arguing over the validity of a nickel coupon with the girl at the checkout I try to remember that the pennies she pinched enabled me and my two brothers to graduate from college and buy homes. In fact, those pennies put us in a position where we won’t have to scrimp they way she always did.

The next morning I had a taxi waiting to take me into the city, but traffic on the George Washington Bridge was horrific. The cab driver was not looking forward to a two-hour traffic jam, so he talked me into taking the ferry service from Weehauken, NJ, a few miles south of my mom’s home of Fort Lee. My brother had used the ferry on his last trip to New York, and had recommended it, so I gave it a try.

The towns of Edgewater and Weehauken have changed dramatically since my childhood. Edgewater was a town of factories and warehouses owned by shady guys with mafia connections. Weehauken was the butt of jokes. Jokes that the rest of America made about New Jersey, New Jersey people made about Weehauken. Now both towns are full of construction: wildly expensive luxury townhouses and condos. There are some fancy restaurants there, and the usual suspects like Starbucks and Barnes and Noble have reared their internally-illuminated heads. The narrow strip of riverfront at the foot of the Palisades awaits only some parks to make it a wonderful place to live if you’re somewhere between well-off and filthy rich.

Now that the Hudson is less polluted the riverfront is pleasant place, and the view of Manhattan (a well known author whose name escapes me called it “skyscraper national park”) and the George Washington Bridge rivals many scenes of natural beauty, especially at night.

The ferry terminal is parklike, with boxed flowers and plantings around the parking lot and tent-like awnings leading to the terminal, which itself appears to be an out-of-service ferry. The ferry ride is fun, pretty, and refreshing. I was in New York as soon as I boarded. I could tell because I was apparently the only one who did not have a cell phone attached to my ear. The ferry ride was such a pleasure that I found myself thinking that, after 29 years of sneering at and deriding Fort Lee, I could imagine living there.

Fort Lee itself has changed a lot, too. When I was very young, it was a middle and working class Italian town with a sprinkling of Irish and Jewish people. It had a reputation as being a good town for Mafioso to live, and several of my classmates in High School had parents who got called before grand juries while I was in college in the 1970s. One of these parents (Tom “Tommy Ryan” Eboli) was gunned down in a dramatic Greenwich Village shooting.

Starting in the 1960s and continuing through the 70s and 80 a maniacal real-estate boom brought dozens of upscale high-rise apartments to the town. Fort Lee became largely Jewish and upper-middle class. I remember returning from college in the 1970s to find one or two more of these megaliths. It reminded me of a giant emerging fingers-first from the New Jersey soil. Later, the town turned Japanese as the American branches of many Japanese corporations moved executives in for two or three-year spells in the United States. A cab driver in Fort Lee claimed that the Japanese corporados liked the town because so many of them were racist. They felt secure, he said, because Fort Lee’s mafia dons would keep people of color out of town. This, of course, is itself a racist statement, but there may have been a grain of truth to it.

At any rate, the Japanese stores and restaurants that sprang up in Fort Lee ended up drawing a large population of Korean immigrants, and in the 1980s and 1990s Fort Lee became a largely Korean town. My high-school English teacher tells me that my old high school has become a sort of magnet school for overachieving Korean music students, and boasts the best high-school orchestra in New Jersey (with nary a Caucasian face on stage).

If my cab driver was right about racism playing a role in the Japanese settling of Fort Lee, it’s a sweet irony that the Koreans, target of so much racism in Japan, have taken over the town. I also appreciate God’s sense of humor in filling Fort Lee with so many people whose surname is “Lee.”