Home Ground

Reflections:


I had a fascinating day. I had an errand in the North End of New Bedford, where obviously I’d been as a kid (I recognized the church by name from several blocks away – must have seen it before) – but it wasn’t a hangout. What an intense, vibrant neighborhood that physically hasn’t changed in at least 100 years! The streets were lined with old triple and quadruple decker houses, with no front or side yards. It’s now a Portuguese neighborhood (everything was written in Portuguese), --very lively, with lots of people on the streets and sidewalks. I think it was an Italian neighborhood way back when – similar energy.

Then I figured I’d drive back to Dartmouth via the place where my sisters and I went to school at Holy Family, in midtown New Bedford . There, too, the preservation is virtually perfect – these houses were probably around 150 years old. Narrow streets, granite curbs, huge sea captains’ homes three or four stories high, crowned with Widows’ walks. One of my friends from grammar school lived in one of the captains’ houses on that main street, and it was odd to drive by it now, so many years later. Being inside that vast house was a memorable childhood adventure for me.

The schools are still there. The elementary school where two of my sisters went is still in use as a Catholic grade school, and as I passed by, I could see where the kids used to line up in front, grade by grade, to go into school.

The high school is there as well, but boarded up. It obviously hasn’t been touched, maintenance-wise, in decades, but seemed in decent shape nonetheless – a two-story, solid, square, brick building with “Holy Family High School” engraved in granite over the peeling, double front doors. I studied it from across the narrow street and knew, with assurance, which teacher occupied each “home room.” The little store and lunch counter where we went for lunch every day is also still there – a square, one- story brick store 90 or 100 years old. It hasn’t changed a bit outside, and the part of the store occupied by the candy case, lunch counter, and soda fountain is still intact, with all the same furnishings. It’s still a breakfast-lunch diner, but obviously Mr. Goggin, who was the proprietor in the 1950s, is long gone.

So much was unchanged – as if preserved in amber. One late 19th century house that was on the corner of the high school block has been torn down and is now a parking lot, but everything else has obviously been there for a very very very long time – It never occurred to me as a high school student to wonder how long things had been there – they just were. It’s strange to walk in the same places over 55 years later in yet another century – the same person in a very different emotional place and body. Back then, I couldn’t possibly have imagined this happening. I feel as if I’m revisiting a very distant former life. The streetscape is the stage set; the live play, as if it happened yesterday, dwells in my memory.

I don’t know why New Bedford isn’t on every tourist itinerary as an incredibly well-preserved example of New England industrial history.

I also spent a little while at Apponagansett Beach. The weather was gray and chilly, with an extraordinarily cold, strong wind, so it wasn’t comfortable staying there very long. I’ll go back tomorrow, hoping for nicer weather. I plan to float two roses in the water, and throw in two pebbles, to recognize and commemorate Ellen’s and my wedding last year. I’ve got to find out when the tide is going out!


Sea Shore Haiku (Ellen, September 20, 1995)


Lacy sea spirals
Blown aloft by Fall blusters,
Wind-pressed, turgid sails.


Gulls (Rosemary, September 10, 2009)


Gray and white, they crouch against the wind,
Feathers skewed like tousled hair, riffling with each gust.
They walk stiffly, like gnarled old men --
Mincing steps, no neck -- nothing moves above their hips.
They gather, gossip, gang together, argue.

The walks are strewn with shells they’ve dropped from soaring flight,
So they could eat the quivering mollusks that had lived within.

The gulls are here since long before we humans came.
Eternally, they’re one with tide and rocky shore.
They carry on, supreme, as if they’re here alone,
Using what we’ve made – entitled.