Hartford Weekend

GA's son
Originally uploaded by senvetti.

Hartford pics

No one can reside in New England without a stop in Hartford, Connecticut, state capital, one-time home of the Whalers and the (former?) insurance capital of America.

Stepping out, my first impression was where is everyone?! Because although everything was clean and pristine, there were no people - it was a ghost town. It was eerie. However, Hartford did look like a big insurance and financial services hub with an impressive skyline - just a city devoid of life.

But I was here to see the Gangster Actuary.

When he picked me up in his truck, our initial exchange went something like this:

Raza: Sen, how long you been in Connecticut?
Sen: I started August 28.
Raza. And you call me now?

That’s Raza for you.

We had a CST (Coffee Shop Talk), and he proceeded to regale me stories of growing up in his neighourbood back in the day (late 70s/early 80s). Scarborough Golf Club Rd & Lawrence - a place once infested with white trash, hookers, and drugs (though I'm sure he was exaggerating for dramatic effect). If things are bad now, it was worse then. He told me about the racist venom he faced growing up - getting beat up, called a Paki. I gaped in shock the whole time, because I couldn’t imagine that these things had happened - and this was only 20 years ago. His experience was entirely different from mine.

We got back in the truck and I said “Raza, show me the real America. I want to see the bad and the good.” “OK, you want the bad first or the good?” I said I wanted the bad. And then he took me on a tour of the Hartford ghetto, filled with crumbling abandoned Victorian homes now functioning as crackhouses, with brothers standing on the porches as lookouts. I told him I wanted to get out of the car and take pictures. He said “Sen, they will sell you.”

Then we took the Interstate highway and fled to the nicer part of town - Glastonbury, his suburb. His neighbourhood was upscale, very hilly and wooded, and it felt like being in the country (made me regret not coming earlier and being one of the "leafers" who came to New England specifically to see the fall foliage.)

As with most people that are part of the brain drain migration, it seemed he had a visible antipathy towards Canada. He ranted and raved about the barriers, the glass ceiling, the Anglo/Francophone establishment, the fact that Canada's wealth is pretty much controlled by 13 families. Still, he admitted that Toronto would be heaven on earth if not for the relative lack of opportunity given the harmony, egalitarianism and relative lack of socioeoconomic segregation. All it takes another 9/11 and a Salem witchhunt and you’ll see how brown people flock to Canada.

I stayed that night with his family (wife, daughter, and two sons, one of whom attends UConn). We watched the really lame Where's the Party Yaar? and the next day Raza and I got to talking more (LRT - Living Room Talk). He showed me an album of his 18th birthday at a banquet hall, and I had a chuckle at the shaggy early 80s hairdos.

Then he showed me his yearbook - Cedarbrae Collegiate, Class of 1982. What’s alarming was the demographic transition; back then, Cedarbrae was almost all Anglo/Scottish mungiecakes, with Greeks and Italians being the closest to ethnic. I remember in first year Sonya showing me her yearbook from 2003, and you could count the white kids on one hand.

Raza told me of his brother, one year his junior and also an actuary, and allegedly major player in his day (reputedly 5 girls at once?) He regretted not introducing me to him (his bro lived in East Brunswick, NJ), because he wanted to show how to leverage my status as an ActSci major to get girls, because brown girls didn’t go to university for a degree – they went to find a guy with earning potential (at least, back then).

Raza loved to talk, and it was fun discussing everything from the streetwise working-class kids he grew up with, the colourful characters that played an integral role in his life, the pranks they pulled on their teachers, India’s stagnation as a function its miserly people, Joe Clark and Pierre Trudeau... What I found most interesting was his theory of how the white man defines "having made it" by acreage (how distanced he is from his neighbour) whereas the immigrant defines it by square footage (if you're from a 200 sq.foot closet in the sky in Hong Kong, who cares if you can see into your nieghbour's kitchen 6 feet away?) and hence the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the GTA (developers know they can sell them) vs. the monster plots in Connecticut. We got to talking about Jewish-led inner-city gentrification from his experience in Hoboken and Jersey City, the “pattern” to American cities with Hispanics as a geographical buffer between blacks and whites... Each one of these subjects is worthy of a blog post on its own.

The fact that he had an ethnographer’s eye as I did meant our talks were lively and entertaining, and I could see exactly where he was coming form. It seemed he was reliving his past vicariously through me. A fellow Scarborough boy, he was my older, paler, more rotund, more crass equivalent - incredibly well-versed on all subjects, and never a bore.