Catswamp

(Skip now or forever hold your peace).

I’ve been on a sort of English-major kick over the last few days. (I’m blaming this on my 50th college reunion a couple of weeks ago.) Number 1 was What Blest Genius, by Andrew McConnell Stott, about—as the subtitle puts it—“the jubilee that made Shakespeare”— the famous 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford, promoted and dominated by the actor/director/producer/empresario David Garrick—a near-disaster (many would say an actual disaster) that became a historic triumph, placing Shakespeare irrevocably at the center of British literature and turning his home town into the pilgrimage site it remains. The book is stupendously well researched and written. It’s also absolutely hilarious. (To a 20th-century sensibility with my particular character flaws, a great deal about 18th-century cultural history is hilarious, but Stott is really very funny.)

Number 2 was The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot. D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature [Whew], by Bill Goldstein. The year was 1922. NOT hilarious, and not remotely up my particular street, but wonderfully researched and beautifully constructed, interweaving these writers, their work, their personalities, their muses, their urgencies and neuroses, their relationships and interrelationships and jealousies. (Also, the author calls them all by the names their friends used: Virginia , of course, but then “Tom”, and “David”, and “Morgan”—a little unusual, but it works well in this context.) I’ve read all these people, of course. (English majors do.) But not for over half a century. I was reminded of a lot, learned a lot more, and it was excellent exercise for my lazy and increasingly flabby brain. I may even have a late-in-life go at Mrs. Dalloway. I couldn’t possibly understand it any less than I did in 1967.

I had two stupendous bits of early good fortune in life: my mother and my father. I was well into my teens before it dawned on me that not all marriages were happy.

We lost my mom far too soon, to early-onset Alzheimers, a cruel, cruel disease under any circumstances, but particularly painful to watch in such a vivid personality. My dad died on Easter morning five years ago, so I’ve been thinking of him particularly these days. Which, of course, makes me think of mom too.

She once told me that she had early on said to my paternal grandmother, “Dick has such wonderful manners.” Nana gave a characteristically waspish reply: “Of course he does. He was raised at my table.”

Partly because of those manners, and partly because of the luck of the genetic draw, my father was a popular young man. He captained the football team, was elected class president, and as his high school yearbook had it, “Dick’s fascinating charm and bashful manner have caused many a female heart to flutter.” Even a half-century later, the newspaper article about his class’s 50th reunion led with quotes from female classmates gushing about his handsome wonderfulness. (All of us, naturally, razzed him silly.) 

My mom, a class younger, once purposely dropped all her books in the school hallway just as he was passing. “He picked them up, I said, ‘thank you,’ he said ‘you’re welcome,’ smiled, and went on his way. I could have kicked him.” She eventually broke through that bashful manner, and dad spent the rest of his life believing he’d won the lottery.

Neither of them went to college. Dad could probably have gone on the G.I. Bill, but he’d  gotten a decent job and really had no interest. Mom, on the other hand, would have killed for a college education. She made do with reading. She read everything—from poetry to history to cheap detective fiction—everywhere, all the time. She read, for example, at the table. Which meant I had permission to do the same. And my father took it up, too—primarily Louis L’Amour westerns. “Out of self-defense,” he always said.

Together, though, they agreed  that their only child was definitely going beyond high school. They started saving before I actually appeared, using the cost of a Yale education as their guide. In the late 1940s, that came to a breathtaking $1,000 a year. So. Used cars (very used cars), no big vacations, and the cheapest possible house in a town with a good school system. All this seasoned, thank goodness, with love, kindness, and good humor. We laughed a lot. A lot.

Mom and I often played word games. I remember sitting outside, looking at the stars in the summer sky. She’d say a word. I’d say one—preferably a better one, preferably a funny one—that rhymed or that I could make rhyme by pronouncing it wrong. She’d sometimes read or recite to me a short poem, often comic. And in the process of all this, I learned about the rhythmic possibilities of language, not just in poetry, but in good prose, too. And have I said we laughed a lot?

My father was, of course, my model for what a man should be. As a partial result, along with knowing how to go back on a fly ball, I have, and still reflexively deploy, the manners of an earlier time. I learned that men look people in the eye, shake hands firmly, walk on the outside, open doors, stand when ladies come into the room, take off their hats when they enter a building, deflect gracefully any praise that might come their way—and (he was a lower-middle-class man of his time) don’t wear pink.

He may have had something there.

Shortly after I staggered back home after a stumbling shuffle a few weeks ago, my Garmin gizmo had this to tell me: “Your VO₂ Max is 49 which is superior for men ages 70-79. Your fitness age is that of an excellent 20 year old. That’s the top 5% for your age and gender.”

This is a lot like being told by your old auntie that you are such a handsome boy. You appreciate the thought even though you know it’s not true. I have a vague memory of what it feels like to be a fit 20-year-old, and—believe me—this ain’t it.

Chuffed all the same, of course.

Woodbury has three burial grounds. The oldest dates back to the 1670s. It’s the smallest, and though it’s well-maintained, to me it’s always  felt crowded with fallen and haphazard stones. If you’re say, at the library, it can make a good shortcut to the local swimming, ball diamonds, and playgrounds down in the Hollow.

Our North Cemetery, a half-mile or so up the road and also on the small side, had its first burial 150 years or so later. One of its boundaries meets the edge of the fields where I played baseball as a boy in the ’50s and ’60s, and we occasionally stepped into the brush-line there for a necessary moment.

The New North, across Washington Avenue (which is much less grand than it sounds), opened in the 1870s and is a different matter altogether. At about 20 acres, thanks to an extension a few years back, it’s by far the biggest of the three. It slopes west, down toward the river, with a dirt lane around the three of its edges not bounded by the road. Four more-or-less east-west lanes cut down the slope, with a number of cross-lanes connecting them. Perhaps a third of it is still open land, where no one has yet taken up residence.

New North is a cemetery. It’s seen a lot of tears and has regularly hosted sorrow, sadness seemingly beyond bearing, and utter despair. Some of those emotions have been mine. But time heals, and for me it’s mostly a familiar, comfortable, and even comforting place. There are lots of trees and other plantings in its older section, but it feels open, and because of its slope and orientation, it catches and holds the sun during the day. My parents are here. One set of grandparents. An uncle. An aunt. School classmates. Friends and parents of friends, and colleagues of three generations. The spot where my dust will eventually be sunk, preferably by slightly inebriated friends and family members.

Down in its southwest corner is an area I call Lake H., after our daughter. Before they improved the drainage, a foot-deep puddle would form here after every significant rain. Once, when H. was a young runner, we went out for a shuffle during a deluge, and when we got to the corner, the water was halfway up to her knees. We just thrashed on through the deep for six or seven strides, which she thought was a wonderful upending of usual behavioral norms, and we chortled the rest of the way home, where we topped it all off with a splash fight in a driveway puddle. I miss old Lake H.

New North has been a part of my running for a long time, much more so after its expansion. It’s quiet and safe: no cars blowing by. The terrain offers almost everything you need. You can just cruise around enjoying the day, doing up-and-downs or figure-eights, or just big circuits. I often use convoluted loops as part of a longer road run. And during periods of more-or-less serious training, the terrain is perfect for fartlek and Lydiard-style hillwork. The best slope for this, 200 yards or so and just the right pitch, is a lane that runs close by the grave of a great old friend and teammate, so in my mind it’s become David’s Hill.

I’m nowhere near alone in enjoying New North. Lots of locals walk here, many with their dogs. Unless the snow is deep, Paul and I wander through—dogless—a little after 7:30 on our morning constitutional. In season, fisherpeople park at the bottom of the slope and head for the river. In the fall, the cross-country teams from the nearby middle school do some of their training here and race the lanes as part of their competition course. I love seeing their somewhat eccentric limed directional markings appear every fall. There’s a man who parks against the southern boundary every Sunday morning and reads the paper. (We’ve decided his wife’s at church, and he’s…not.) Especially on long warm evenings you often see family members adding plantings and tidying graves. Of course, spring through fall, there’s a crew out mowing and trimming and keeping things neat. And digging and refilling the occasional hole as required. After all, as my grandfather, now in residence, used to say, “People are just dying to get in here.”