NYC/Star Island reflections

Sunday morning in New York City’s East Village. I’m writing this in Alt.coffee, an internet cafe facing Tompkins Square Park. Sunshine outside. Inside, heavy-metal music and air-conditioning. Intermittent short rushes of business at the counter, where Leila and a colleagu are pulling the Sunday-daytime shift (and keeping me filled up with coffee.)
Yesterday I got back to the mainland after a week on Star Island, a magical, amazing, special chunk of rock anchored ten miles out from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bill and Lorna and I have been going to Star Island’s annual ‘International Affairs’ conference every year for more than 15 years now.
This year, the program part of the conference was on “Islam”, and they had four really talented and engaging speakers. However, I had to spend quite a lot of time away from the conference, finishing up the big drafting/redrafting project I’ve been working on for the past two months. The deadline on that is tomorrow, and it’s just about ready to go.
So I was using my daughter Lorna Quandt’s laptop, a Mac, which was a bit scary for me. Even scarier, I had no internet access for a whole week. I checked out the possibility of getting a boat back to the mainland midweek, so I could rush along to the Portsmouth public library and use their computers to download some mail, etc etc. But there was no boat that could work for a day-trip, and the idea of overnighting someplace there just so I could satisfy my web-lust seemed a little ridiculous.
So a whole eight days of weblessness it turned out to be. Cold turkey!
I survived. I got my work done. And I had some excellent, real life experiences without even thinking much about whether I could subsequently frame them into posts on the blog.
How is Star Island amazing? Well, for starters, life is very different. Not just no web– also, no regular showers! They have two regular slots for communal showers throughout the week– Tuesday and Friday. But during the Friday shower period, the line out of the women’s showers was so long that–even with a total estrogen-powered takeover of the men’s showers– it looked like a 30-minute wait down there in the steamy, slimy shower area…. I took two pitchers of warm-ish water and went back to my room to wash myself in a basin: a much better experience.
But the main thing about being on Star is, as everyone agrees, the people. It’s a unique way of being with people. You get to the dock in Portsmouth at noon on the Satruday and there are people you haven’t seen for 51 weeks. “How was your year?” is the main question on everyone’s lips.
How was my year? That is a question we far too rarely stop to think about– unless maybe we are Jewish and go to Yom Kippur services where a similar kind of accounting for one’s behavior over the past year is, as far as I understand things, at their heart.
How was my year? Well, that’s a question you can either blow off quickly… or you can try to give it a serious answer…

Over the following five days, there are opportunities for all kinds of conversations: intense, supportive, difficult, or silly. As many flavors of conversation as there are of ice-cream in the island Snack Bar.
When I was working there, I worked mainly in the Peace Room: a lovely room with a large table and windows on two sides that give spectacular views of the island’s little harbor, or over beyond the summer house to Appledore Island and the distant–sometimes quite invisible–mainland.
I love it when the clouds or fog or rain roll in and the mainland disappears. There used to be a foghorn nearby, and I loved the eery but reassuring boom of its voice through the night. Now, it seems to have ben replaced by a slightly irritating warning bell: ding, ding, ding, all night long.
On a windy night, the other main sounds are the distressed shrieks of the whirling gulls and the relentless slap-slap-slap of the flag-ropes against the aluminum flagpoles.
When you get off the boat at the pier, there is a big flagpole atop which fly the State Flag of New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die”) and the Stars and Stripes. As you walk toward the big main building, there are two more flagpoles: one sports the Canadian maple leaf and the other a very faded UN flag. I am so happy to have those flags flying there! Though I do recall we had a Bosnian speaker there one year, maybe shortly after the Srebenica massacre, and his reaction to the UN flag was quite different from mine…
So that’s a little general view of Star Island for you.
I wanted to write a bit about one of the conversations I had on-island, one in which we were comparing the issues of Israel and South Africa. The person I was talkig with was Heather Gregg, a nearly-done doctoral student at MIT…
(And actually I did that, but then later moved that part of the post up to a separate post, dated July 30 and titled “Israel and South Africa compared”… )
It’s nice to be back online!