Two days ago, I received a series of texts from an uncle on my mom’s side of the family asking me to swing through Memphis on this next leg of my journey.
I will not be swinging through Memphis.
I could write a whole book—or at the very least, an extremely long pamphlet—about why I’m not visiting Memphis, but the most relevant part to this particular trip is, quite simply, that heading that way would add more than 100 miles to my route, possibly for nothing. Depending on what time I made it into the city, I might be able to go out to dinner with my family. Either way, I’d get to spend a night in my old bedroom—and my sister’s old twin-sized four-post bed, which is now there—saving me the cost of a hotel. But right now, I’d gladly trade $100 for 100 less miles.
On my driving days, I’ve been forcing myself to stay awake and moving during the last leg of each day. Most nights, I’ve spent the final hour or two on the road doing math with the numbers on my GPS to keep myself awake: I’m traveling 80 miles an hour towards a destination 15 miles away, 16 is 1/5th of 80, an hour is 60 minutes, 1/5th of 60 is 12. I will be at a hotel in 12 minutes, in roughly three songs. Stay awake for three more songs.
A hundred miles would be roughly 25 songs, and that’s an awful lot of driving to say hi and sleep cheap.
Another factor, though, is that Memphis had little to do with my father’s life—sure, my parents married there, but that’s largely because that’s where my mom grew up. Today’s destination, however, has everything to do with my father’s life, as well as my own.
I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Baton Rouge.
After my dad worked at Exxon for a few years, he developed an interest in learning more about the company’s operations, so he applied for a transfer to a different facility in Louisiana. While there, he joined a local synagogue, made some friends, and dated some women. Eventually, mutual friends introduced him to my mother, who wound up in the city after post-collegiate jobs in Memphis and Mississippi.
My mom said in the past that she’s certain the only reason she got a second date with my father was that she felt ill during the first, and after only ordering salad and dessert, she came off as a cheap date. Then again, she also said that it was destiny that they ended up together, as he already dated pretty much all the other single women at their synagogue. I’m skeptical of both of these explanations, which I think makes me a romantic.
Regardless of the reasons for their coupling, within six months, they were engaged. They married at the temple in Memphis where my mom was raised, the same one we attended when we moved there after his death. When the new couple returned to Baton Rouge, my mom sold her house and moved into the one my dad already owned. Less than two years later, during the summer of 1983, my father’s transfer to Baton Rouge reached its end, and the two of them moved to New Jersey, where my sister and I were born.
In Baton Rouge, my mom and dad became a couple. In New Jersey, they became a family. Memphis is just where we wound up when that idea shattered.
In the summer of 2006, I received a phone call from my sister.
“You won’t believe what Mommy just did.”
We had developed a sort of routine after my mother’s occasional splurges—my sister, not my mom, informed me when our mother purchased her second Dale Chihuly blown glass sculpture, her Ford Thunderbird convertible, and a few other items.
Every time I received one of these calls, I answered the same way.
“What did she do now?”
“She just bought a riverfront condo,” my sister told me.
Less than a year earlier, my sister had left Memphis to attend NYU, and in the lead-up to my sister’s move, my mom openly contemplated the idea of buying a condo in New York. My sister immediately vetoed the idea, but my mom argued that, if she got a place on the Upper East Side, my sister, who was living in the East Village, would never see her. My sister and I both knew that, if my mom had a place in the same city, she would find an excuse to be in the Village four days a week, and this argument carried the day.
My sister only lasted a single semester at NYU, though—she learned quickly, as I had, that living in New York is a very different experience than visiting. And so, when my sister returned to Memphis, my mom had a clear path to splitting time in New York, as she’d wanted to for years.
I didn’t think my mom had, or at least was willing to spend, the amount of money that a riverfront condo in New York would cost, but she had always been coy about her finances, and I didn’t know the market well enough to be sure. Besides, she had dreamed of this for years, and finally, nothing stood in her way. So, maybe.
“Which river?” I asked. “East or Hudson?”
“No,” my sister replied. “Mississippi.”
I expressed confusion, which my sister seconded—of our mom’s indulgent purchases, this seemed the most ridiculous by a large degree.
Later, when I spoke with my mom about it, she told me how an apartment building on the Mississippi riverfront had been converted to condos, and said she bought as soon as she heard about it, because she wasn’t sure what the availability there would be down the line. This way, she explained, she could sell the house and get a place elsewhere—somewhere like New York—and still have the condo for when she visited Memphis.
Today, my mom still owns two fully furnished residences ten miles apart, both in a city that she claims she doesn’t want to live in. The condo sits unoccupied—my sister and her friends crash there during the annual riverfront music festival, and my mom occasionally hosts events there, but it’s basically deserted.
Over these three years, my mom’s explanations for not selling the house have shifted repeatedly. First, she blamed the belongings my sister and I left there, even though I made it clear the things I still cared about there could be counted on one hand, and my sister owns her own house1 a few miles away. Lately, she’s cited the housing market crash.
I don’t know if she’ll ever sell the house. I doubt she’ll ever own a place outside of Memphis, or split time like she claimed she wanted to for years. Maybe it was only a dream, one that seemed less desirable once it was achievable. I don’t understand why my mom doesn’t want to leave Memphis, but then, I never wanted to live there to begin with.
As I approach Lafayette, Louisiana, my stomach calls for attention, so after I pass through the city, I stop in a small town that might exist solely to provide business to its local Walmart. Fortunately, a Chick-Fil-A shares the Walmart’s parking lot, so dinner will include delicious, delicious waffle fries.
Inside, I stare at the menu, wondering to myself why I’m pretending I don’t know exactly what I want. As I (don’t) weigh my options, one of the boys behind the counter—they’re all far too young to be called anything but boys—tells me that he can take my order whenever I’m ready. Every time I set foot in a Chick-Fil-A, I feel a little weirder: To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, I get older, but the employees stay the same age, which appears to be 14.
I ponder this for only a moment until, as I’m about to step up to the counter, the girl at the register beside the boy who spoke up interjects.
“Oh my God!” she squeals with glee. “I know where you got your t-shirt!”
I look down, unable to remember what I threw on several hundred miles ago, and see that it’s one of my favorites: a black t-shirt, featuring a drawing of a white rabbit on its hind legs reaching up for a balloon that’s flying away, which I bought a while ago from a nerdy website.
If she recognizes my shirt, I know this girl is a fellow nerd. What’s more, her giddiness over seeing it tells me is that she may be the only nerd in town.
Poor girl.
I smile and step to her counter instead to place my order. While I wait for my food, we discuss the website, where I’ve bought several other shirts of varying degrees of wittiness.
In half an hour, when I’m done with my food, this girl will stand once more as the town’s lone nerd.
College will be a magical time for her.
Several years ago, Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana. Baton Rouge escaped with less damage than New Orleans, but still suffered a fair amount, and the synagogue where my parents met 25 years before the storm needed a lot of work afterwards. In the wake of the hurricane, my mom received a letter from the synagogue asking for donations to assist in the repair. She sent what I inferred was a rather generous check, and, when repairs were completed, she received another letter, inviting her to attend the grand reopening.
One day, my mom hopped in her Thunderbird and made the six-hour drive south to the rebuilt synagogue that forever reshaped her life. She returned disappointed—all of her friends had long since left.
“There’s nothing to see there,” she told me when I mentioned I planned on stopping in Baton Rouge, and the thought relieves me as I cross the Mississippi River into the city with darkness on the horizon. Sure, I could have asked her for the address of the synagogue, or the house my parents shared, or the restaurant where they went on that first date2, but none of these places really matter all that much.
What matters is this city, still rebuilding years after Katrina. As I drive around and look for a hotel, I remember how much the Bush Administration got wrong in that moment, which reminds me of the biggest thing that administration got right.
They negotiated with Libya.
For years after the attack, the United Nations and the United States subjected Libya to harsh sanctions. The U.N. refused to lift sanctions until Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and paid reparations to the families of those who were killed, and Libya refused to meet the United Nations’ terms without a guarantee of relief.
The stalemate began to break in 2002, when Libya and the Pan Am 103 families struck a deal valued at up to $10 million per victim. Libya would put the money into escrow, to be paid out when certain “triggers” were met. The families would each receive $4 million when the U.N. lifted sanctions, $4 million more when the U.S. lifted sanctions, and the final $2 million when the United States removed Libya from its State Sponsors of Terrorism list3. As soon as this deal was approved by both parties, Libya sent a letter to the United Nations accepting formal responsibility, the U.N. lifted sanctions, and the first payment went through.
While the vast majority of families approved the deal, many felt we were in an awkward position: We wanted the Libyan government to stay ostracized for its crime, but at the same time, we wanted compensation for our suffering. The deal made these two things mutually exclusive—if Libya remained a pariah, we would never get what we felt we deserved. On the other hand, if Libya gave us what we were owed, the international community would welcome it back.
Even within my family, feelings on the deal differed. My mom and I took a pragmatic view: Sooner or later, sanctions would inevitably be lifted, and we’d rather have them removed sooner and get something out of it than wait and get nothing. My sister, however, declared that she didn’t want the blood money. My mom, who ensured my sister and I wouldn’t have access to the money until we turned 35, told her that she could give it all away then if she wanted.
Seemingly the only thing everyone could agree on was that with this agreement, nobody won. The deal was designed that way.
Regardless, it’s all over now. We received our money, and Libya returned to the international community, without a single shot fired or bomb dropped4. Everyone’s better off, and nobody’s happy.
- For those keeping count, that makes five residences paid for by my father’s death: my mom’s house and condo, my condo, my sister’s house, and Steve and Nancy’s house.
- She drove us by some, if not all, of these places many years ago, plus the house where she’d lived before she met my dad. Also, she said the restaurant closed forever ago.
- If, by a certain date, the first trigger had been met but the others hadn’t, the families were entitled to an additional $1m each, and forfeited the remainder. Families could also opt for this extra $1m in lieu of the potential $6m from the final two triggers. Few, if any, took it.
- Aside from all the bombs that were dropped that initially caused this situation.