For the first time in many decades I am spending a long summer break in the land of my birth and childhood. I escaped New Jersey shortly after university, but now events require my presence. Mostly my visits have deliberately avoided the extremes of summer and winter, but this year I have no choice but to sweat it out and put in some hard yakka.

We are halfway through two months of sorting out my mother’s affairs and placing her into assisted housing. Thank heavens for clever and obliging spouse, for without him the myriad tasks with so much process and detail could not be accomplished in this timeframe.

Houses with attics and basements, I conclude, are conducive to the storage of unwanted items and (occasional) treasures. We sold a crumbling box with Kennedy assassination newspaper headlines and even old high school yearbooks.

Burdensome as it is to quickly pack up someone’s life and home and memories, there are some rewards and reminders of the good as well as the bad and ugly dimensions to life in this extremely multicultural society. What a parade of accents and backgrounds have come to look at the ‘estate sale’, and poke around at the house for sale! How nice to speak French with a pretty Algerian woman!

The suburb of my childhood was settled by Germans in the mid 19th century, and still celebrated German festivals when I was a kid. The big wooden beer hall was demolished to make way for a Borough Hall, police station and fire department, as every tiny town has its own full blown facilities. In Australian terms, it would be like Glebe and Annandale in Sydney having separate services, including a Board of Education. No wonder the local taxes can be up to $20K per year in more salubrious areas.

The next suburb is fully Polish, and every shop and business has Polish speaking staff. Other areas are Italian, and you can speak Spanish pretty much anywhere. Turks, Koreans, Syrians, Africans, you name it. The only thing that has changed since my childhood is that the mix has become even richer.

But the tasks at hand require great concentration and much patience. If there is anything more frustrating than a stubborn old German, it is a stubborn old German with dementia. Knowing that the responsible person is often the main target for anger and aggression doesn’t make it more pleasant. She will be safe in the Altenheim:

She is fortunate to be there, despite what she says about her mean daughter. To begin with, the retirement home was founded about 117 years ago. In those days they would only accept northern Germans, not Bavarians like my mother. It is also a non-profit, and one of the few that operates like Disneyland: pay once to enter and after that all care is included.

The staff is of course also a diverse mix of Filippinos, Latinos, etc. A stone’s throw from NY, we have found time to catch up with another visiting Australian, and even lured him into the MOMA to see a show by another foreign observer of exotica, which you are sure to recognise:

Friendly as Americans are, aspects of the culture leave me sweating. The weekend paper has an unhealthy (IMHO) balance of ads to news, and a young guy we met who works in NY (and therefore should be ‘sophisticated’) had never heard of the political party called The Greens.

As I write this, the US news is awash with sadness at the untimely death of Robin Williams. He was an American prince, the best of the best. He was one of the actors you would always go out of your way to watch, and never come away disappointed. Vale.