6 August 2020

Trigger Challenge: “The heat just never seems to go away, even at night. As I toss and turn, trying to find sleep, I flash upon a memory of my most memorable summer of youth. In looking back now, all these years later, it seems almost too magical to be true.”

Penny In Heaven

A memory of a magical summer

Even though it was the first week of June, 1954, the heat and humidity of southern Indiana was already oppressive. There were yet 4 more days of school but this was to be my last. My father, a young civil engineer who worked for a small family run steel fabrication and construction company, was being sent on his first job overseeing a building site. The job was already underway across country in Massachusetts , but my parents had decided to delay their departure to send me to school that last morning. All children were to be given the newly developed polio vaccine shot that day. I remember standing on a long line, waiting my turn, as nurses in their white uniforms administered the needles while the nun in charge of the class stood by to ensure discipline and minister to the cries. Imagine that, in this day of virus and vaccine deniers, all children in a school getting a free shot with no one allowed to opt out.

As soon as I had my shot, I was escorted out to the curb where my parents and two year old sister were waiting in their recently purchased 1952 chevy, the newest car my dad had ever owned. In those days before interstate highways and town bypasses, we were looking at a 3 day drive to the area 50 miles west of Boston where the job was. It was to be the first of many cross country trips following my Dad’s job. Sitting in the back seat on that hot humid day at the beginning of the trip, the wind blowing in through the open windows was like being in a blast furnace.

The country, recently out of the war and Depression, was in many ways though, still emerging from the early 1900s. The two lane roads passed through every small town and city along the way with very little in the way of roadside billboards to obstruct the view, unlike today in the US . Here and there would be a barn with a side painted in black with white letters “See Rock City” or the most looked for series of red and white oblong signs with funny sayings for the Burmashave company. Such as:

“If Caruso’d kept

his chin more tidy,

he might have found

his lady Friday”:

To pass the time my parents would play games like I spy and count the license plates. We stopped at diners and stayed over in motels along the way to our destination. The best part was as we got further north, the humidity and heat broke and the time inside the car became more tolerable.

To keep me occupied and help me understand where we were, my Mom passed the road map over to me and I soon mastered the details and kept my Dad informed of our next road and stop. That was to be my job many times over the the years to come. And it presaged my lifelong joy of travel and seeing new places and planning out trips and where to stop and what to see, all of which has enriched my life. It also broke me away from life in Indiana, but that was all to be revealed in my future.

Arriving in Concord Massachusetts, we spent the first days in a motel, searching for a place for us to live until our return in September. While Concord has a large place in the founding history of the US, tourism in those days was in its infancy and there were no such things as gites or summer rentals. We had to search for a family with enough space to take us in and it was finally found a few miles outside of Concord commons on a tree shaded country lane. We were to take rooms in an old farmhouse that was being redone by a young family of my parent’s age. Coming from our small Indiana frame house put up after the war, this place seemed huge to me. It was also a historic house as it had formerly been owned by Henry David Thoreau and was about a half mile from Walden Pond. That of course meant nothing to me at the time, but was to be important later.

What I loved was its isolation. Having lived only in a city and neighborhood, the idea of being in the country was totally new to me. The area all around was woods and farm land. The farms in that area supplied the markets of Boston with its fresh produce, meat and chickens. The proprietors of the house did not farm themselves but the old farm buildings remained, scattered through the forest surrounding the house. Those buildings became my play grounds and imagined forts and encampments. We were truly isolated.

The closest houses were a quarter mile in either direction and I was soon introduced to the kids who lived in those houses and that was what made the summer the most magical. Down the lane to the right was the house of a major farmer. Much of the land around was owned by him. There were twin boys both my age, Donnie and David, and they became my daily mates.

It was an innocent time. My father of course would go off to work. My mother would take care of my sister and help out with the housework and cooking as both families ate together in the evenings. And me, I would walk down the tree lined lane by myself to spend the day with Donnie and David. The world was ours. We would wander the fields, plucking fruit and vegetables to munch on. The whole idea that a carrot, or a cabbage was there for taking from the ground was totally new to a city boy like me. We would ride bikes on the roads and chase the farm animals. Most fun of all for me was when we would take their donkey, Henry, attach him to a small cart and go up the lane to where I lived and then on to the next farm further along. That’s where Penny lived.

I did not realize it at the time, but now I understand Penny was my first crush. She was a teenager with freckles and long red hair, always tied into a pony tail. Most important of all, they had a large stable and Penny had her own horse. Horses were my favorite animal but always beyond my reality.

I was a fan of cowboy movies and a regular listener to the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers shows on the radio. For my 7^th birthday, earlier that year, I had my Mom write to the Lone Ranger telling him how much I loved his show and saying for my Birthday, Mom was going to take me to a live stage show put on by Gene Autry in the Evansville Coliseum, with Champion the wonder horse. Imagine a horse, on a stage ,performing tricks. I received back a signed picture of the Lone Ranger on Silver and my letter was read on the air with a happy birthday wish from the Ranger. He skipped the part about me going to the Gene Autry show.

When I wasn’t with Donnie and David, I would walk to Penny’s house in hopes that she would be outside and let me hang around the stable…and her. And in one magical moment of that summer, she let me get up on the horse behind her, and she brought me back to our house.

Oh, what a memory. Her ponytail bounced in my face as I held on to her while we clopped down the lane. I was in heaven.

And the summer days passed as carefree as they have ever been in my life. Evenings were spent around the communal table in the farmhouse. My mother who grew up in Normandy of a fishing family, was now able to find fresh fish, and even lobsters, all unavailable to us in the midwest of the US in the 1950s. She also was relieved to be out of the hot Indiana heat and in that relaxed summer atmosphere. As she had no real responsibilities it was probably the best summer of her life as well. That I’m sure has influenced my memory.

The mild New England climate without humidity and high heat, made being outside wonderful. Sleeping was with screen windows open and under covers due to the cool night air, not grasping for the faintest breeze to allow me comfort as it was in Indiana. The lack of traffic on the lane also meant mornings lying late in bed without noise to wake me. Each day, I would arise with nothing to do but to enjoy myself. The closest I have ever come to replicating that was here in the Dordogne this spring, during the confinement.

But, as all summers do, this one came to an end. And we piled with our luggage into the Chevy and headed back across the US so that I could start school. Back to the heat, and humid nights keeping me from sleep. Back to school and my first experience with Sister Mary Theresa who was to be a malevolent presence in my life over the next four years.. As I would come in and out of that school depending on my Dad’s latest job assignment somewhere else in the country, I was more like a foreign virus infecting infecting her mental control of that class of catholic boys she taught from third through sixth grades. But that’s another story.

While my life moved on from that idyllic summer, the memory never left me. And 30 years later, I had a chance to retrace my steps. We took a weeks vacation to explore New England a few years after our move to Manhattan. I felt drawn to Concord and the chance to see how things were at the farmhouse and Donnie and David’s. However, no guidebook seemed to mention anything about Thoreau other than Walden Pond. I drove aimlessly around trying to recognize something.

Concord is truly a jewel of a village, though now inundated with tourist glitz and souvenir shops. Luckily, I spied a small kiosk that said “Tourist Information” and stopped. At first I spoke with a younger woman who seemed mystified by my request to find Thoreau’s farmhouse. Then an older gent volunteer arrived and I told my tale to him.

“I don’t know about the farmhouse”, he replied. “However, there is a stone plaque which says that it was the location of Thoreau’s house.” That stone plaque had existed when I was there. Though much time had passed since my first trip, gps devices were still to be invented allowing exact location programmed to take me to the spot. But, he showed me the road where the plaque was located, and following the mark he made on the map, I set out.

“This cannot be it”, I said to myself as I followed along the road he had indicated. There were no fields. There were no woods or trees. There were no farms. Houses, large houses, had been planted everywhere. Concord is now a bedroom suburb of Boston and nothing was familiar. Nothing resembled my memory of the house we stayed in. No trace of Donnie and David’s family house or farms or barn with Henry.

After driving around for a while, I was just about to give up and go on my way, when something struck my memory. It was a dilapidated farmhouse, run down, paint peeling from wood and abandoned. But what I recognized was the courtyard and barn. It was Penny’s house. Somehow it had yet to be purchased, demolished and turned into another copycat faux New England colonial. I knew where I was. Penny was to bring me home again.

I turned around and went back down what is now a typical city street and off to the side, saw the stone marker. Behind it, in the setting I remembered, was a two story white framed house, no longer with the barn like roof it had when I was there. It was not as big as I had remembered from my childhood and had been updated. There were a few large old trees around it, leftovers from the past surrounding woods. All the outbuildings were gone and a subdivision surrounded the property’ but it was there where I had spent my magical summer.

While the area had changed, the reality of the memory remains. And on hot sleepless nights in the Dordogne, sixty-six years later, I remember that cool, fresh air and the life that was my magical summer those many years ago, and it gives me comfort all over again.