Georgia day 2

September 27

We spent the morning relaxing at Aunt Joan and Uncle Sandy's home. When Uncle Sandy was up he offered to make us breakfast. He gave us several choices and then went about preparing them. Coffee was something he especially liked to make for us with his coffee-making machine. The toaster also got a good work out. Aunt Joan joined us for breakfast, and the TV was on in the den and visible from the dining room table.

I spent a great deal of my time trying to prepare blog entries that had fallen far behind by this point in the trip. While I made notes and produced blog entries I also monitored Facebook. I used Facebook often to chat with people I needed to reach. I also used Google maps to plot courses and calculate times and distances. I stayed in my room and worked on my bed with my laptop, and came out from time to time to be sociable, but mostly I concerned myself with getting the blog caught up.

Every Tuesday Uncle Sandy participates in his synagogue's Torah study group, called "Torah in the Woods." This group meets between 12:00 and 1:00 PM in the office of a marriage counselor. I attended one such session last year in December, moderated by Rabbi Mario Karpuj, and was very impressed with the level of scholarship of the participants. I told Razelle she was in for a treat when we got there.

I programmed my GPS to take us there, but Uncle Sandy insisted that we follow him. We went in separate vehicles because our plans were to see Stone Mountain afterwards, and we wanted to go straight out there from the meeting. As I followed Uncle Sandy, I noticed that he was taking us along a different route than our GPS recommended. I followed Uncle Sandy rather than the GPS, and Razelle and I both noticed how well he made sure he didn't lose us in traffic.

We parked in the office-complex parking lot and headed for the building. I heard my old shoes squeaking audibly as I walked and remembered I had wanted to wear my new shoes just purchased in Savannah. Those older shoes developed a squeak way back in Fiji and nothing I have tried since could make that squeak go away. I returned to the van and wore my new shoes for the first time. They felt comfortable, but unfamiliar as I walked on the pavement, stepping over the first fallen leaves of autumn. I reached the office where everyone else was now seated and helped myself to some lox and bagels and tossed salad. Because this was a meeting before the new month (Rosh Hodesh, in this case actually Rosh Hashanah) the lox were an added treat. These meetings take place at noon, because it is the lunch hour of the busy doctors and lawyers and other lay people who attend them. I was pleased to see a few familiar faces from my previous visit. This time the moderator was the other rabbi of Congregation Or Hadash, Rabbi Analia Bortz. These two rabbis are the congregation's husband and wife co-rabbi team.

The portion of the week was gone over sentence by sentence and discussed. Razelle and I had points to offer while Uncle Sandy listened attentively. I explained that Razelle and I lived in Israel and that I was a Hebrew-English translator – not a Bible scholar – and that was why I understood the subtleties of the wording but not necessarily the traditional interpretations that Bible scholars have come up with. Rabbi Bortz provided those, but so did the commentary in the several different texts we were all reading from. Razelle came away from this meeting as impressed as I had been my previous visit.

We drove away from this meeting to Stone Mountain. It isn't far from Atlanta and can be seen in the near distance from Dunwoody, where my aunt and uncle live. On a weekday this time of year, after Labor Day, the park surrounding Stone Mountain was nearly empty and the rides stood silent and idle. We paid an entrance fee at the gate and followed the concentric road system to the access point for the cable car to the top. There is a museum here, as well, but we didn't visit it. We had very little notice before the next cable car was ready to take us up. As we ascended, we could see the bas-relief carving on the side of the mountain. Its workmanship was not as impressive as Mount Rushmore's. The men who were glorified by this caving had lost while fighting for a rebellious cause. It seemed altogether wrong to champion their losing efforts in such a grandiose way. Had they won, I suppose, we would now be touring a country other than the United States.

At the top of Stone Mountain there is a visitors' center. There are vending machines here that can emboss souvenir pennies with likenesses of Stone Mountain and of the individuals sculpted into it. One of these individuals is Jefferson Davis, the president of the short-lived Confederate States of America. It occurred to me to have a penny embossed in such a way that Lincoln's original likeness would be discernable on one side of the penny and Davis's on the other. This way both contemporary presidents would occupy the same coin. I studied the machine and figured out how to do this without obliterating Lincoln. The cable car pilot was impressed by what I had accomplished. I seem to have been the first one he'd met who cared to do this.

Razelle and I wandered around on top of Stone Mountain a short while and took in the view, then descended by cable car to the parking lot to leave. We saw some African-American visitors and thought it ironic that they would want to patronize this monument to those who preferred to see their ancestors remain slaves. I remarked to Razelle that the Confederate Soldiers Museum we visited in Alabama made sense to me – it was dedicated to the memories of those individuals who died fighting for a cause they identified with. But here at Stone Mountain the men glorified in this place were the ones responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in a losing cause. By what rationale were these men heroes? It seemed obscene to me to elevate them to such a status.

We returned to my aunt and uncle's place in Dunwoody. I worked some more on my blog and was able to post two entries while Razelle watched TV to catch up on current topics. I contacted Jule, who was in Israel with me in 1974 and now lives outside of Atlanta. We spoke by phone and caught up on old times. We haven't heard from each other in 37 years, so it was nice to fill each other in on what has transpired in our lives during that time.

Uncle Sandy gave Razelle and me our tickets for Rosh Hashanah services. We will need these to enter the synagogue (actually the Jewish Community Center) and the parking lot. I entered the address printed on the ticket into my GPS.

Aunt Joan and Uncle Sandy left us for a while during the evening. Razelle and I watched television and were especially entertained by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. We also got to watch the international version of CNN rather than the domestic version. Life on the road had denied us such pleasures.

It occurred to us that in not-too-many more days we will be winging our way to London. My, my, how time flies! We still don't have a place to stay in London, so I began researching accommodations there. We have crisscrossed the US for close to two months now in our van and have been so absorbed with doing it as well as we can that thoughts of accommodations further along have not occurred to us ... until now.

I used Jajah.com to call a couple of hotels near Heathrow Airport. It turns out that my scheduling of flights into and out of London 36 hours apart would require us to reserve two nights in London, even though we would only be sleeping there the first night and flying on the second. The reasons are complicated. It made me sad to realize that with all my flawless planning, my planning regarding London was indeed flawed. I went to bed without committing to a hotel booking. Tomorrow I will think about it some more and then make the booking.