EAST MONTPELIER – Normally, when I thread the stop-and-go traffic of Lynn, break out at last into seven breakneck miles of I-95, and then merge into the rocket-propelled caravan of I-93, headed for New Hampshire and Vermont, it’s with a feeling of regret. I’m leaving a lovely weekend behind, and[Read More…]
Willem Lange
How very far I was from home
EAST MONTPELIER – The last few years, I’ve been traveling to my son’s house in Arkansas for Christmas. I’ll do the same this year. It’s such a treat, after rattling around alone in this house through the seasons, to be immersed in family life, children and grandchildren all over the[Read More…]
Chasing away the darkness
EAST MONTPELIER – As I write, it’s only a quarter past four in the afternoon, but I wouldn’t want to be walking in the woods right now without a light. Down at the foot of the driveway, the headlights of homebound traffic zoom past, and a soft snow sifts down[Read More…]
Will widows and orphans be left to their own devices?
EAST MONTPELIER – Around 1906, a young Harvard graduate student was browsing a used book store in Cambridge and came across a rare treasure: a prompter’s script used by Charles Dickens in his tour of the United States to perform readings from his work. It was an abbreviated version of “A[Read More…]
Holiday travel certainly necessary, no fun
EAST MONTPELIER – In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, the schoolmarmish features of the newsies were on full display. Like old-fashioned country preachers predicting the apocalypse, they warned of unprecedented numbers of holiday travelers. It is, after all, the weekend of our greatest domestic migration, clogging the highways and[Read More…]
When the wheels fall off
EAST MONTPELIER – On an early spring day in 1958 I was tooling north in Constance Green, my trusty old Plymouth, on Route 9N in New York State, with Lake Champlain off to my right. The frost heaves were fierce, but in those days I treated them more like ski[Read More…]
Why they always hang up
EAST MONTPELIER – I haven’t conducted anything like a scientific survey of the subject, but I think I’d be willing to bet even money that each time I randomly turn on the little television set in my kitchen, tuned to MSNBC (now MS NOW) or CNN), I’m more likely to[Read More…]
I travel in silence
EAST MONTPELIER – Another interesting weekend in Massachusetts. This time it included the wedding of the son of a pair of old friends of Bea’s in Cambridge. Accustomed as I am to the haute couture of Vermont, my Sunday-go-to-meetin’ duds are a pair of chino work pants that look pretty[Read More…]
Even here in Vermont
EAST MONTPELIER – A few months ago I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker. In it, a king stands on his raised veranda with an aide, looking down on an obviously angry crowd armed with pitchforks and torches. Nonplussed, he turns to his courtier, who advises something like this:[Read More…]
People who made it possible
EAST MONTPELIER – “Mister Lange,” Judge Murphy intoned. “In the State of New York you are allowed to amass eight points in fourteen months on your driver’s license before a review of its status must be held. You have managed to amass fourteen points in eight months. Now, what do[Read More…]
Hope and wishful thinking
EAST MONTPELIER – I’m not much of a hand for praying anymore. More and more over the years it has come to seem too much like an implicit abdication of responsibility for desired outcomes. Still, thanks to many decades of indoctrination, I do occasionally slip into prayer-ful attitudes toward coming events. They[Read More…]
Pooh-poohing the winter’s inconveniences
EAST MONTPELIER – Well, it’s happened. We could feel it coming on for a few weeks: long shadows across the forest paths by four o’clock, nippy air flooding in through the door when I let Kiki out early, fog in the river valleys, the night light in the hall turning[Read More…]
