EAST MONTPELIER – Summer, 1958. I was in temporary remission from higher education and looking for work. I possessed a copy of “On the Road” that I read rather as a bible. I still have it; it’s about eight feet behind me on the bookshelf. I was driving a 1946 Plymouth sedan[Read More…]
Willem Lange
Bored with the details
EAST MONTPELIER – Whatever happened to the idyllic idea of living in our houses by the side of the road and being a friend to people? Whatever happened to listening to Walter Cronkite talk about the main story of the day? Ending with “And that’s the way it is.” Poor[Read More…]
Here’s where my amazement began
EAST MONTPELIER – As I age, I’m more and more frequently amazed at the complexity of various systems and the genius it must have taken to design and build them. The loop-the-loop highways of Montreal, Boston and Los Angeles are one example. Though much cursed, reviled and lampooned, it’s hard[Read More…]
“Gee!” I exclaimed as I took it from him
EAST MONTPELIER – I see by the news that the Iditarod Race is in full cry up in Alaska. There’s a ceremonial false start right near Anchorage: kind of a parade, really, with celebrities everywhere. Then next day, safely out of downtown, the real thing begins: a roughly thousand-mile slog[Read More…]
Bread and circuses
EAST MONTPELIER – I had the experience, some thirty years ago, of sharing a canoe in the Canadian Arctic with a delightful child psychiatrist. Naturally, we talked all day long of shoes and ships and sealing wax, I suppose, and I remember a few of the things I learned. One[Read More…]
This stuff never gets old
EAST MONTPELIER – One of the advantages of a three-day weekend is that we get an extra day just to talk. It doesn’t matter what else we may be doing, there’s just more time to chat and share points of view on what’s happening around us. Thanks to the wild[Read More…]
Miles were already adding up
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…]
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…]
