Most weekends, if there’s an occasion either here in Vermont or down in the Boston area, I drive south to Nahant or Bea to East Montpelier. We try to take turns. My recent spate of hospitalization and rehabilitation put me somewhat in debt to her; this weekend of Labor Day was the second in a series of three I owe her.
It’s not the cold fishiness it may seem. This weekend, for example, there was a pig roast on the seaside verandah of a house two doors up from Bea’s. She couldn’t miss it, and I, ever alert for free barbecue and pilsner, really couldn’t, either. Next weekend her graduate school colleagues are giving a picnic in honor of her recent retirement, which is obviously a command performance for her (and thus for me, too). The weekend after that we’ll both be in Yorkshire, England, for a tour of the famous dales. I have to drive down and leave my car in her yard so we can catch a flight out of Logan Airport, so that’s kind of a wash.
There are other aspects of the situation, as well. There’s more of a difference between bucolic Vermont (remember that our state capital is the smallest by far in the United States) and, shall we say, bustling Boston than most non-New Englanders could possibly imagine. And the difference has to do with more than population. Ambiance and atmosphere spring immediately to mind. We speak the same language (sort of) and salute the same flag. But there’s a world of difference between the two; it feels as if there ought to be a passport control west of Concord, N.H.
The other difference for me is cultural. Raised to the age of eight on Sunday school twice a week, and for some reason taught all the stories of the Old Testament rather than the New (except the salacious bits of Genesis, Judith, Susanna, and the Song of Solomon), I settled with the rest of my family into a comfortable adolescence and adulthood in the Episcopal Church after my father was ordained a priest in 1943.
My wife and I were married in the Episcopal Church and were members of one congregation or another for almost 60 years. It was a comfortable existence in a liturgy and social milieu with which we were familiar. Then, a few years after she died, I emailed an old friend to see how she was getting along. She was getting along just fine, thank you. If you’ve been reading this column for any amount of time, you know the rest. We’re currently wearing a groove in the road between Nahant and Vermont in environmentally acceptable high-mileage cars.
It’s been, however, a bit of a social shock. I’ll be an Episcopalian ’till I die (after I die, actually), and she’s Jewish. We’re both from New York, she from Manhattan and I from upstate, but that’s the end of the resemblance. She grew up on the Upper West Side, and I in central New York (she often jokes that upstate begins at 180th Street). My friends are either active or inactive Christians; hers are pretty much all cultural Jews. The difference is most apparent in group conversations. She does beautifully around my pals at our local Kaffeeklatsch. She sits down and is at home in less than a minute. I sit down with a group of more than four of her friends, and I’m swamped. They practice what linguist Deborah Tannen calls “New York Jewish” conversation, the most notable attribute of which is that if no one interrupts you before you finish a sentence, no one’s listening. I find that a bit unnerving — not to mention that often when I have something to add, I wait like a Midwesterner for an appropriate opening, only to find that the conversation’s moved on. It’s frustrating, but only fair; try to imagine Bea immersed in an Episcopal liturgy.
The second otherworldliness between our natural environments is geographical. She lives beside the ocean — in it, actually; her cellar floor, protected by a seawall, is below high tide — and the effect of the state of the sea surface is very much a part of being there. At night, with the windows open, the sound of the waves on the rocks below is soothing almost beyond belief. Me, I live right in the bushes, and at the moment, just as the first of the leaves are beginning to think of blushing, I’m immersed in a sea of green leaves. No surf at night; just very quiet.
I notice the change in ambiance when I drive north. I’ve learned to be patient with the stop-and-go through the cities. Everybody seems intent on getting somewhere fast, and I doubt anyone’s looking around. Before Concord, N.H., there’s nothing, really, to look at. Then, turning the corner at Concord, the hills of New Hampshire and later, those of Vermont beyond the river, loom above the highway, solidly forested. It’s as if the country were rising to embrace its homecoming son.
