Pennsylvania – RecoveringNostalgic

Four Decades Worth of Memories

The only time I ever bought a one way ticket was in 1983. As I stepped off the Air India flight on that crisp fall day, I had no idea that JFK Airport was going to be my own Ellis Island or Plymouth Rock! That significance did not dawn on me till a few days ago, when I reflected on the four decades that I have called the United States of America my home!

Here are some random and cherished indelible memories from these past 40 years.

1983 to 1993 – Laying down roots

I arrived in Iowa City (from JFK, via Chicago) on a weekend before school started. Walking through downtown, and seeing partying kids overflowing from bars/clubs and some of them making out right there on the sidewalks was quite a culture shock for this ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ from conservative Hyderabad!
Having lived a nice sheltered life with my parents till 1983, it was quite a shock dealing with the idiosyncrasies of difficult roommates – one that ordered me around and another that insisted on making Rajma and rice everyday. I feel that these experiences actually prepared me quite well for marriage (in which, to be frank, I was probably the difficult roommate).
Mrs. Johnson rented out a bunch of units in Iowa City to grad students on Bowery St. So many Indian students used to live there that it was nicknamed “BoweryPuram”. She was such an Indophile that she was the only one in Iowa City to have an Indian flag back then.
Dr. Skorton, the Cardiologist that I worked for, joked that the cross section of a clogged artery that he showed during one of our lab meetings was pepperoni! Needless to say, I never ate pepperoni after that! Mind you, I eat everything else including all other meats, cheeses etc. Just NO pepperoni! That’s where the line was drawn in 1984, and it remained there!
I will always remember my very first Thanksgiving dinner in my friend Mike’s house in 1984. It was a sumptuous feast with his warm and friendly family. I clearly remember his little nephew taking one peek at me from the other room and saying “No, he is not Indian”, to the utter horror and embarrassment of the adults! Poor kid was expecting the other kind of “Indian” at the Thanksgiving dinner table! I thought that was hilarious!
For my first job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I had the best commute of my life – a 10 minute walk. Unfortunately, later on (starting in 1990), I had to endure 2 hrs. of driving everyday for work.
You’d think that as a single guy making big bucks ($28K per year) I’d be living it up. Nooo! I used to spend all my evenings cooped up in my apartment, watching every sitcom and drama (5 hrs. straight), finally ending the night with “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”! Normal people would consider that a sheer waste of time. I looked at it as diligent preparation for future “80’s Trivia night” contests. 😊
When I went on my 1st trip back to India – in 1987, I came back engaged! This was mind-blowing for my American friends and colleagues! One of them asked – “How do you know that you are compatible?”. After 35 years of marriage, we still don’t know if we are compatible and now we have fewer and fewer chances to find out!
I loved Iowa so much that when I first moved to the east coast and anyone asked me where I was from, I used to say that I was from Iowa. Iowa had friendly people, clean roads and was overall less congested compared to the east coast. Initially it was tough getting used to the east coast. But now, I am tempted to show the middle finger while driving, just to let people know that even I am a local now.
Uma came over from India in 1989. It was a tough transition for her (not having ever lived away from her family). In those early years, it was wonderful getting to know each other (ours was an arranged marriage, which I covered here earlier). All those years of learning to adjust to roommates of different temperaments came in handy for me! For Uma, this was her first experience with a difficult roommate, who insisted on watching all those sitcoms every evening.
I tried to teach her driving. This was one among many of my big mistakes! We used the mall parking lot on weekend mornings. Once I screamed at her to step on the brake, as she was about to crash into a light pole. She angrily declared that I was more worried about the car than her! She was right (as I found out later.. the wife is always right!)! It was my first car. A Toyota Corolla, that came into my life way before Uma did.🤪
In 1990, we moved from Allentown to Lansdale area and then I commuted 1 hour each way for 30 years! Yes it was a total of : 283,518 miles!
There was a time in the early nineties, when it seemed like all Indians were into Amway. It was a challenge avoiding all these prowling Indians in the malls looking for their next partner (“victim”). The first hint that the stranger approaching you was an Amway guy was that he was smiling (A dead giveaway. Indians normally do not smile or greet fellow Indians). If you acknowledge the smile, you are hooked. Then it moves on to – “Aren’t you from Bombay?” or “Didn’t I see you at the temple?”
For the 1st pregnancy, we signed up for Lamaze classes but soon realized the futility of getting into a comfortable position and doing breathing exercises when Uma started to doze off (she used to be terribly sleep deprived after a 32 hr. shift at the hospital). #LamazeSchoolDropout

1993 to 2003 – Joys of Homeownership & Parenting!

Even though I was not very mechanically (or electrically or plumbingly) inclined, I did enjoy tackling the DIY projects around the house – with a lot of help from my friends. I used to do oil changes for the cars, installed garage doors, garage door openers, storm doors etc. This was way before we had helpful YouTube videos for everything. Uma has more of an engineering mind than I do and so she always helped me with all of these projects. Believe me, we did have our share of DIY disasters… (as written here)
I can’t believe how we used to host parties for 50-75 people at a time in those days – doing all the cooking and cleaning while caring for two young ones and with fairly intense work schedules! The caterings started much later. In those days the nearest Indian restaurants or grocery stores were in Edison, NJ (3 hours of roundtrip driving).
For one of Vidya’s birthdays, we hung a piñata and let all the kids take turns whacking it. After it was thoroughly beaten into pieces.. and no candy fell out of it, the kids were close to tears. That’s when one of the other moms enlightened us that we were supposed to fill the piñata with candy. The store only sells the empty piñata! Oops! 🤦🏾
While I enjoy watching classical dances. I could not stand it when Uma and Ramya got into arguments during the Kuchipudi dance practice sessions over the right amount of knee-bending to achieve the correct posture or some such. I used to routinely seek refuge in the basement while this was going on.
We had several fun family vacations and road trips, with the exception of the one when we drove from Philadelphia to Orlando (16 hrs. each way) and 2 year old Vidya insisted that we play one particular Telugu song non-stop on a loop! BTW, “Adhireti Dressu” song is forever banned in our house since then.😊

2003 to 2013 – Exploring America and the World

As a family we loved the National Park vacations where we collected memories to last us a lifetime – Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Grand Canyon, Zion, Acadia and more recently Bryce, Arches and Antelope Canyons.
Celebrating milestones by traveling to new and exciting places was a great idea. We did Montreal for Ramya’s graduation, Thailand for Vidya’s and Machu Picchu for yet another occasion.
As parents, we are happy to have passed along some of our personalities to the kids, which got nicely blended with their own inherent ones. Ramya, for instance, did not mind me chauffeuring her and her friends to the High School prom in our old Mercury Villager minivan (when everyone else was hiring stretch limos). By the time it was Vidya’s turn – she definitely wanted to go the limo route, and more importantly, never wanted to be seen by her friends getting down from the old Villager (whose paint was peeling by now). 🤷🏼

2013 to 2023 (‘Empty Nesting’ like a Boss!)

Exactly 10 years ago Uma and I celebrated our 25th anniversary in Hawaii – specifically Lahaina in Maui – which has been devastated this week with the horrible wildfires! The loss of lives and destruction of properties is truly heartbreaking! The 150 year old huge banyan tree (brought from India), which we admired so much, has been burnt but is still standing.
I started writing in nostalgia/humor genre in 2013 (with the first one about the 30^th year anniversary of my coming to America). In fact, this is the 10 year anniversary of this blog. Over this past decade I have written about 40 pieces – covering growing up in India, early immigrant experiences and some random musings/reviews of movies and OTT series. I have thoroughly enjoyed this new creative outlet. I doubt that the friends and family whom I have spammed on Facebook and WhatsApp groups over this past decade are as thrilled about this new hobby of mine.
This decade brought major changes to our family. Ramya and Vidya started their professional lives. Ramya was only an hour away in the city and she introduced us to the side of Philadelphia that we did not know at all – the restaurants, museums and theater scene. Vidya totally enjoyed her stint of independent living in San Jose where she had a wonderful group of close friends.
Ramya and Shivam’s wedding was a major joyous event for us and we were thrilled that our extended families from India could come and celebrate with us.
Uma and I joined Toastmasters in 2017 and have been loving the experience of the friendly club that helps with public speaking. I credit Toastmasters for leading me to Improv and stand-up comedy.
I have been dabbling in stand-up comedy for these past few years and have been enjoying connecting with the comedy community online (during COVID) and in real life as well. I have thoroughly enjoyed doing stand-up open mics in different cities that I visited – Tokyo and Charlottesville, for example. Once I tried to do the same in Hyderabad but found the comedy scene there to be highly competitive (even for an open mic)! It is way easier to score tickets for a Taylor Swift concert than to get on an open-mic list in Hyderabad! Geez!
It has been fun watching our grandson Naveen grow over these past 2 years! It’s so cute that he asks us for “Pappu/Annam” (which is lentils/rice in Telugu, our mother tongue) and then turns around and asks his other grandparents for “Daal/Chawal” (which is the same in Hindi, their mother tongue).

We’ve come a long way baby!

Over these past 4 decades, we certainly have come a long way and have seen some unbelievable changes..

— Long gone are the days of waiting in K-Mart for a blue light special to grab that special deal. Now we just find the deals online in a matter of seconds so that the item gets delivered to our doorstep the same day!

— I have lived here under 7 presidents – from Reagan to Biden, with some more memorable than others, for different reasons.

— I can’t believe that we used TripTiks, AAA’s spiral bound maps that we used to flip through for navigating road trips. The inventor of GPS should be given a Nobel prize!

— The advent of internet changed the world dramatically. New students arriving for the first time from India today know more about what’s on sale in my neighborhood store here in Lansdale than us.

— I’d also give a Nobel prize to the inventors of cell phones! They changed the whole world in ways that you could not have imagined even twenty years ago! In 1983, when I first came to US, I wrote a letter to my parents informing them that I arrived safely. That letter reached them almost a month later! Today, my dad can wake me up with a (“free”) video call from India to inquire if we are safe from the mass shooting “in America” that he heard about on CNN.

Personally, I have come a long way from that meek Indian guy who walked out of JFK airport in 1983. I am thankful to my extended family as well as close friends that I made along the way from Iowa (who still insist on calling me “Yosh” or “Punati”) to Allentown (who had to put up with my corny jokes for 32 years) to Lansdale (who are like family to us). I am especially thankful to the professors and fellow grad students for their patience, generosity and friendship. Their support in those crucial early days meant a lot and I am forever indebted to all of them.

Around the World (11 times) in 465 Days!

Carpool Tunnel Syndrome

It was our typical 37 mile drive home from work. There I was… navigating the trusted Honda Accord through Coopersburg (trying very hard not get a speeding ticket) as the speed limit suddenly drops down to 35 mph from the usual 55 mph on RT 309, with my car pool buddies (and co-workers)!

My Vietnamese colleague Quan was describing the intricacies of a biasing circuit he was working on for a memory design (his specialty) when all of a sudden he goes “Guess what?? Jumbo shrimp on sale for 2.99/lbs. at Shoprite!” This was way before high speed internet and smart phones! In fact, he did not need any of these… he had all the available best deals in his head magically and like flipping through a Rolodex – he would just land on the right deal for the moment!

The other colleague Mike, a Virginia native and a fellow chip designer, says “My group went to that Indian Buffet place for lunch today! Their Baarfi is too good! Do you guys make Baarfi at home?” “I want to learn how to make Baarfi..” he said with a wink. I could tell he was relishing saying “Baarfi” over and over again. I played along “Sure Mike.. I love Baarfi too!”

Me .. “Guess what? Today Monica Lewinsky turned 28! It seemed like just yesterday she was crawling around on the floor in the Oval Office.” I was the true environmentalist in the car – ‘cos I was the one who was always recycling previous night’s jokes (from TV’s Late Night Comedy shows)!

Commuters R Us!

In 1990 when Uma started her Medical Residency in Philadelphia, we moved from Allentown to Lansdale so that it would be equidistant to both of our work locations. The plan at that time was that we would move back in 4 years after the completion of her Residency. Since then, a lot of things changed in our lives as well as the world around us – but my commute to Allentown remained essentially the same!

Allentown is in the Lehigh Valley along with its twin city of Bethlehem. Most people may not know that Allentown was the place where world’s first solid-state transistor (which paved the way to the computer and Internet revolution) was fabricated by Bell Labs Engineers Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen. Bethlehem used to be the home of Bethlehem Steel – which had a long history and provided steel for Golden Gate, George Washington and Verrazano Narrow bridges, Hoover Dam along with other major projects. Allentown was also made famous by Billy Joel with his song “Allentown” – which depicted (quite negatively) the life of the Lehigh Valley area after the demise of the steel industry in the area!

/spanhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3bcBBA9_68]

Lansdale area is essentially a northern suburb of Philadelphia with commuter trains to Philadelphia and several large pharmaceutical industries within short driving distances. Back when we moved there, it had a modest Indian community – but we still had to make weekly pilgrimages to Edison, New Jersey, for Indian groceries and restaurants. Now we have several large Indian grocery stores and restaurants (even a Hyderabadi one!) within a few miles from my house supported by the large Indian/Bangladeshi population in the area.

Earlier, I said that my commute remained essentially the same over the years. But, that is only partly true. Yes… the distance remained the same – a round trip of about 75 miles! But over the years a lot has changed along the way – corn fields turned into massive shopping centers with huge parking lots. I wish I had a time lapse video that showed the rapidly changing landscape: from countryside and cornfield to huge shopping centers with acres and acres of asphalt parking lots. Because of all this development, the total number of traffic lights that I now pass through quadrupled (compared to 1990) – thereby adding to the commute time.

In 1990 – George Bush (senior) was the president and gas was 75c a gallon and Saddam Hussein had grand plans to increase territory by annexing Kuwait. I used to work for AT&T Bell Labs and had a company cell phone that was as big and as heavy as a brick. In order to make calls, I had to pull out its antenna and balance with both hands!

20140713_115503 — Descent into the Lehigh Valley

During the early years of the commute, I used to listen to a lot of music – Hindi and Telugu songs as well as a variety of classical music on cassette tapes. Later I added talk radio to my repertoire. There was a financial adviser that I used to avidly listen to.. Once I even called his show and managed to get through. I explained my situation and asked him if I should buy a house (or rent) in Lansdale for a period of 4 years. He said that it did not make any sense to buy for such a short period of time! So… we went ahead and bought the house anyway! And lived in it for 14 years!

After a few years of driving alone, I came across others at work that happened to be doing the same commute. It made perfect sense to carpool with these guys. Over the years I carpooled with 5 other guys in different combinations. Two of them were Indian, one who grew up in Virginia, who it turns out lived only 2 blocks from my house and 2 Vietnamese guys. Even today, I still carpool with one of my co-workers. Carpooling worked out great for all of us. It saved a lot of money on gas (more on this later). At times we took turns to take a nap if we had worked late previous night and needed to catch up on sleep. Politics and religion are generally considered a no-no in carpools, but in our rides these came up all the time and since we were polar opposites on political topics – we’ve had some very fiery and spirited debates. It certainly helped liven up the boring commute!

Typical Pennsylvania Row Houses in Bethlehem

Overall – carpooling worked because we were all very flexible. There were a couple of instances when halfway through our drive I thought that I had left the iron ON in my house – and that we needed to turn back or the house would burn down or another time when I had left the garage door open and I would be robbed of all my treasures if we didn’t turn back immediately! My friends were very understanding and turned back even if it meant an additional hour and half of commute that day! We were all fairly reasonable drivers and a testimony to that fact is that we never had any accidents or speeding tickets in these past 24 years (on the commute). Outside of the commute it’s a different story – and probably a subject for another blog and another day!

Talk radio was our constant companion and it was mostly local talk shows in the early days that covered about Philadelphia specific topics. Later these evolved into national syndicated talk shows mostly dominated by right wing personalities who knew just the “right” things to say to keep the masses fired up about “gun control”, “the war on Christmas”, “the liberal agenda” or “the corrupting influence of the Hollywood elites” etc.

Transitions

I have driven through the presidencies of George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Obama. During these years the gas price ranged from 75c to $3.67 per gallon. In these 24 years my employers changed from AT&T Bell Labs to Lucent to Agere to LSI to Avago (plus a mini detour of 3 years to PMC Sierra – also in the Lehigh Valley area)! The drive itself is a vibrant mix of urban and rural landscapes. We drive by the usual box stores and fast food places – Walmart, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, BestBuy etc in Quakertown followed by lush greenery on both sides of Rt 309 for miles. Past Coopersburg, we drive by small roadside stands of home grown fruits and vegetables as well as “The Little Red Honey Stand”. This is a self-serve stand where there would be bottles of fresh honey along with a box to deposit the money in. Here’s a perfect example of honor system at it’s best!

The Little Red Honey Stand (click to enlarge)

In terms of numbers..

The other day on our drive home – I reminisced about my commuting experiences. What amazed me were the numbers! Yes… If we boiled it all down to just numbers – we are talking about 283518 miles driven for work. If there was a way to circumnavigate the Earth with my Honda Accord – I would have covered this more than 11 times with these 283518 miles! I could have easily driven to the moon and a third of the way back with these kind of miles! Want more such analogies? I could have driven 50 round trips from New York to LA!! I calculated that we had spent $17000 in gas for our commute (remember… even till late 2002 the gas price was less than one dollar per gallon). I estimated that I had spent 11172 hours on the road – which is about 465 days that was spent driving to and from Allentown!!

Much more than the numbers…

I ran into Quan the other day after several years. He is now retired and he has sharpened his skills about amazing deals to a whole different level. He told me about an airline credit card which actually “pays you to stay at the hotel in Paris after you get there on business class for free!!” In turn, I told him that I learned I can write off my hair loss and the resulting loss of self-esteem in my taxes! He has over 15 credit cards and got free money from all of them for limited period which he turned around and invested in CDs or even stock and made a lot of money! I always felt (and still feel) like a total beginner when it came to finance and other money matters compared to all of my car pool partners. I lost touch with Mike but recently found out that he is still in the area and works for a start-up chip company. I plan to look him up and re-connect with him. Over the years, I found that the car pool partners were also good sparring partners on all sorts of uncomfortable topics (usually during election times) – but we all got along quite well and remained good friends over these 24 years. Our families became good friends and we even had “Annual Carpool Family Picnics” for a few years and used to keep track of the progress of our kids through school and college. I have to locate Sanjay, Ravi and Mike and plan a “Reunion of the Carpool guys” along with Quan and Thien… like “Seinfeld” and “The Wonder Years” reunion shows! Might even do a road trip up and down Rt 309 for old time’s sake!