Not much makes me travel 300 miles, each way. Every passing year and the roads seem to have stretched out. The looming knee surgery for M makes it difficult to drive ... after 50 years of copiloting, M has been demoted to "navigator." And, anyhow, she doesn't much like driving a clutch.
But, hey, our oldest grandchild is in school far away from her home, her parents and matched-set sisters and her maternal grandparents. The paternal ones live even further away and still we all show up for Harvest Festival at the Kid's school.
I -- maybe twenty years ago -- wrote of how the Wing-tipped Shoes at the bottom of my closet did something towards counting the passing years. This weekend has been convincing in other ways. In addition to recognizing that I have grown progressively sensitive to gratuitous slights coming from others, M and my side-trip, yesterday, to a school just 45 miles East of the Mountain top house we all collectively rented for the weekend. M and I had lived and worked at that school 40+ years ago when our older children were 7 and 8. The mother of the child we were visiting, this weekend, would not arrive for another 5 years and Grandchildren were not yet even among the fantasies. That school was one for very bright adolescents struggling with autisms, schizophrenias and other serious childhood emotional illnesses. We lived there ... M, I, the Boys and Kazimierza Kuratowski the Saint Bernard who had been named after my mentor, the ex-Director of the Polish Akademie in Warczawa. I had, just a year before, given up Mathematics, and decided to work with people ... What a clever idea!
The school outside the then tiny town of Rindge, NH population 75! provided us with a trailor ... thanks to OPEC, that didn't necessarily mean reliable heat. M and I slept with Kaz-the-Big-Dog between us for heat and the boys had refused to get out of bed one morning when the outside temp was -35 and inside was -10. Good memories. M and I, before visiting the school, stopped in a Diner that didn't exist for Sunday eggs. I asked the youngish waitress wearing ink that just wasn't done in early 1970's in Rindge.
Hey, where's the Red Rooster?
The Red Rooster was a bar ... by no means a tavern ... a bar where staff at the school who were allowed to leave for 30 hours a week spent the very few pfennigs they weekly received on getting snockered on 151 proof Wild Turkey to bolster something or other. With kids, I can only recall going once and was privvy that time to a conversation between two young guys ... with a 90 year old farmer listening in.
The kids were describing their love life with their ladies in astronomical terms ... stars, moon, earths moving, ...
The old guy leaned in and looked them down spitting out have his rotgut drink with:
You kids are so full'o'shit.
When I fuck, there are sparks.
The Red Rooster was that kinda bar ... but back to the story. Not only hadn't the waitress heard of the Red Rooster but not the owners or the old diner waitresses, either. Apparently ... 40+ years is a long time.
After eggs, we drove to the school. The field where our little trove of trailers were settled ... was no more. M explained that a lotta growth comes in 40 years. It further struck us that a goodly percentage of the trees growing in Rindge? just plain weren't there when we were.
I could go on describing the Town Green that no longer was just Sander's Store and a Post Office ... the school where all the kids except our little ones were Blonde Finns named Aho ....
Sad ... like the time I went looking for a house in Toledo where I had lived with my parents and sibs in the early '50's. M and I, indeed, were on a road trip to Chicago to visit this same grandchild maybe 16 years ago. M and I found the block that 2410 Lawrence was on ... the block where I first planted a garden of radishes and Swiss Chard ... found the block cut off by a fence overlooking an Interstate that was some thirty feet below groundlevel and running at 65 mph.
I know I'm not the first to discover that you really can't go home ... still, other folks' accounts never quite got through. M and I will head back today ... her surgery is 6 weeks off and our older son turns 50 after the turn into 2016.
I could use a drink.
