I love small town life in Vermont. I recently had a surgical procedure done at a nearby hospital and the nurse turned out to be a former student of mine at Hartford High School, where I taught for almost a quarter of a century.
To ensure sterile conditions, she dressed me up in pale blue headgear that made me look like a pharaoh about to be mummified. I took a selfie and asked the doctor if I could post it online. He gave permission, and before several injections administered by my former student started to numb my cheek, I added this caption: “I’m being mummified at dermatology surgery. The nurse is my former student. I hope she enjoyed my class. LOL.”
Then I added: “I love the blue pharaoh’s outfit. Can I keep it? It suits my ego.”
Had I not moved to Vermont 33 years ago, I might have remained in my birthplace, Mount Carmel, Conn. It was a village in the 1950s when I grew up there but has since been absorbed by Hamden, a city-sized town with more than 60,000 residents (plus Quinnipiac University and its 7,000 students). In other words, it’s no longer a picturesque New England village. It’s a “town” with more than one-tenth of Vermont’s entire population.
I’ve lived in Hartford Village for 28 years and taught English to more than 2,600 high school students during that time. Hartford Village today is almost exactly like the Mount Carmel I grew up in, right down to the tiny post office and the elementary school, which long ago was converted into professional offices. Even better, everywhere I go I meet former students, which makes me think the fear that Vermont kids are fleeing the Green Mountain State isn’t exactly true, at least in my experience.
These former students don’t all attend to my medical needs, but they do help me in many other ways to live my village life comfortably: The man who now plows my driveway and cuts my trees was in my English class and now has a son old enough to drive a plow truck, too. My dentist — now an accomplished lecturer on dental surgery — was a student in my American literature class, as was his sister, who is a dental technician in the office. Another American lit student is now a local lawyer. The two brothers who own the body shop where my cars go for reconstructive surgery are former students — one now has a son who plays football for Hartford High School. Many of the cashiers and staff at the local food store are also former students. The secretary in my optometrist’s office took my English class. The real estate agent who helped when I bought my house 28 years ago is the father of at least one of my former students, and one of the real estate agents on his staff took my class, too. And several of my English class students own their own businesses, from landscaping to pottery to carpentry and plumbing. One of them remodeled my bathroom, installed a picture window in my kitchen and put a new roof on my house.
Get the picture? So many parts of my life — from medical to mechanical, from real estate to home maintenance — are blessed by familiar faces and fond recollections of the past.
Vermont may be the smallest state in the union, but it has an amazing 237 towns (plus a few cities, “gores” and “unorganized” places). At one time, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, it also had as many as 76 villages. Sadly, many of those have been taken over by their larger neighbors, just like my native Mount Carmel disappeared into Hamden.
Even so, Vermont still lets me be what I was born and bred to be — a small-town kind of guy, pharaoh headgear and all.
Thank you, Vermont.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford Village.