A safe haven. A new haven. A port in the storm.
We've navigated through our share of storms recently, both personally and as communities and as a nation. Storms on every level.
My spouse's recent and unexpected brain surgery, from which she is recovering super well.
The loss of young people in addition to old in our small, rural community.
The return of our nation to a man who embodies selfish, abusive male values antithetical to the well-being and equity of all people, contradicting our own.
Aren't we always looking for havens? And finding them where we least expect them?
This new year of 2025, our new haven has been literally New Haven, CT, on Quinnipiac land, and Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Since we landed here rather than on our intended vacations, and as someone who grew up 25-50 miles down the coast from here, I've been repeating the joke that I never in my life dreamed of vacationing in New Haven!
Growing up during the 1960's and 1970's on Connecticut's eastern Long Island shore, New Haven was never a place one thought to visit.
All U.S. cities were in decline during this period due to "white flight:" the mass exodus of middle class residents from cities thanks to deindustrialization; poor urban planning including the redlining of neighborhoods and lack of investment; and the continued centering of the car in the heart of American suburbanization, which had begun in the 1940's.
By 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. The gritty, small Connecticut cities to its east, including New Haven, were not in much better shape. The redlining was particularly fierce in New Haven. And in 1970, New Haven played host to a series of prosecutions against the Black Panther Party, and related protests, cementing its infamy.
Yet founded in 1638, New Haven was one of the nation's first planned cities in addition to being one of its first settled colonies.
Like so many colonialist communities, it was established as a theocracy. It's centerpiece, Yale University, was established with funding from the former colonial governor of Madras, with funds from the East India Company.
The city became a hub of industrialization thanks to Eli Whitney, who founded not only the cotton gin but also Connecticut's formidable gun manufacturing economy, earning the state one of its first unfortunate nicknames as "The Arsenal of America." Much of Connecticut's considerable wealth, especially in comparison with other New England states, remains based in the military-industrial complex. New Haven is an archetype of American colonialism.
And a place in no way viewed by my parents as a "haven" for their prowling teenager, who nonetheless escaped westward on I-95 for concerts at Toad's Place and New Haven's famous thin crust apizza. The crime. The deterioration. The immigrants newer than themselves, speaking languages not their own.
How odd indeed the way landscape works its way into our bodies early on, becoming a part of our cells and memories in ways I would not have thought possible.
I left this landscape permanently, after a previous departure, in 1982. Yet the gentle, salt marsh strewn coast criss-crossed by railroad tracks and marinas; the mighty sweep of the lower Connecticut River running through the deciduous hardwood forests; and the familiar suburban pathways and landmarks of my ancestors -- Killingworth, New Britain, Middletown, Deep River, Chester, Old Saybrook -- are etched into my fiber.
And at last, against all odds, New Haven has truly become a "new haven" for us.
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