February Nostalgia

In Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, the compose Hugh Moreland explains to the narrator that he expects to die from nostalgia: “Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia?  Will that be my end?  I should not be surprised.  I can see the headline: MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA” (Temporary Kings, 230).  After last month I think I know what he means.  The day after Groundhog Day I turned 76.  As I told my friends, if my years were trombones, I’d be leading the Big Parade. Nostalgia was in the air.

It started off right after my birthday when a long-time teaching colleague, Randy Peffer, called me up: “Hey, you want to go sailing?”

We first met in 1982 when I went to teach at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.  But now I live in Long Beach, CA, a continent from where I grew up and taught in New England.  I don’t see old friends every day.  But Randy spends part of each year here in Long Beach, where his son Noah lives as well.  He and I taught English together at Andover.  He dealt with my son, and though I didn’t teach his, Noah often baby-sat for our two boys.

Both of us write, books and essays, Randy more assiduously and successfully than I.  This day we sailed around Alamitos Bay, close to the Queen Mary, permanently docked there.  We talked about this and that.  The breeze was soft, but Cornflake – Randy’s boat – slid along easily, and Randy let me steer, like when I was back in Maine on my father’s Sunfish.  Nostalgia.

Then on the 21^st I spent a couple hours sipping a Pike venti at my local Starbucks with Trudie Grace.  Trudie and I were not only classmates at Brunswick High School in Maine, graduating together in 1962, but since Grace immediately followed Gould alphabetically, I sat right in front of her in home room.  She was tiny, maybe five feet tall, and very cute.  She was also very, very smart, becoming the editor of the school newspaper, the Orbla Review (after Orange and Black, the school colors), and eventually the class valedictorian.  (I limped along, somewhere behind her.)  Today she teaches art history at one of the NYC universities, but her husband and daughter live here in Long Beach.  Her husband, an artist, is recovering from a stroke, so she comes out here during vacations and long weekends to help him with rehab.  “He can still drive,” she told me, “so he doesn’t need me to get around.”  We meet occasionally when she’s back here.

We talked about a wide range of topics, but one of the main ones concerned one of our classmates who had recently died.  Barbara Legendre had been a strong, outspoken girl, smart – she was the salutatorian, right behind Trudie – and an enthusiastic thespian.  Senior year, our class did Arsenic and Old Lace; Barbara was Aunt Abby, one of the mercy-killer aunts to my bewildered Mortimer Brewster.  She was excellent, and Trudie and I recalled her, happily, bringing her back to life for a time, seeing her back on the stage for one more curtain call.  Nostalgia.

Two days later, my son Gardy and I had lunch with Nan Butterfield and her older sister, Betsy.  I’d met Betsy when I went first west in 1970, and later when I bicycled cross country in 1976.  It was a treat to see her again.  Nan, who taught English at Brunswick High (where I would come to teach two years later), and I were an item in 1969 when I was living in my parents’ cabin on Great Island in Harpswell, Maine, and I started my first book.  I’ll confess without apology that it was a cookbook, The Great Little Hot Dog Cookbook, in fact, eventually published by Doubleday.

After it was published, I gave Nan the manuscript, and she recently sent me a photo of the title page.  As is seen, Doubleday, feeling my title – A Dog’s Life in a Man’s World – was a bit sexist, changed it.  Looking closely, one can just make out the dedication, which bled through the corrasable bond, so necessary in those pre-laptop days.  It reads: “To Jill, who started this book, and to Nan, who finished it.”

I told Nan I was sure the manuscript would constitute a major asset of her estate.  She snorted and smiled.

Nan now lives in South Carolina, widowed from her partner, but she came west for a week to visit her sister in Carpinteria.  We all met in Union Station in Los Angeles, and went to a nifty taco joint in an artsy section not far away. We talked about where we’d been and whom we still saw.  (Most of our old colleagues in Brunswick have died.) Gardy chatted away about his film editing career and his hopes to teach art and film-making someday. One of the great pleasures of having cool children is showing them off.  Nan wrote, “Absolutely loved Gardy.”  Nostalgia yet again.

Two days later, after my Nan and Betsy lunch, I drove down to Carlsbad, just north of San Diego, and had lunch with Bob “Mitch” Mitchell.  We were classmates at Williams College in Massachusetts in the ‘60’s.  After an academic career in French literature and later a career in advertising., he has gone on to become a writer as well, having written books mostly about sports: tennis, golf, baseball, and The Tao of Sports.

However, to my mind his most interesting work is Time for a Heart to Heart, a memoir about his heart transplant.  Here is a man who played soccer, squash, and tennis in college.  He was a teaching tennis pro for a time and a semipro soccer player.  And he had had at least seven heart attacks, leaving scar tissue over half his heart.  So he got on a list, endured months of waiting, underwent heart and kidney transplant surgery, and the subsequent recovery and rehabilitation protocols.  He wrote about it in a stunner of a book.

But this time I had already read the book, and we didn’t have much of a heart to heart talk.  Instead we talked about baseball, for one thing.  Mitch grew up in Brooklyn, but even so the Giants were his team; up in Maine, I followed the Red Sox.  I told him about thieves breaking into my summer house and stealing my baseball autographed with members of the 1954 Sox.  He patted me on the back and started naming all the players on the ball: Sammy White, Ted Williams, Jimmy Piersall, and the rest.  (He knew the ’54 Sox!)  After a bit he told me about a tour he’d taken to hospitals around the country talking to doctors about his heart book.  He’d seen some classmates in Seattle, and reported on them.  Remembering baseball and college in northwestern Massachusetts pulled us together after fifty-five years.  So yes, nostalgia here, too.

And then on the 29^th of February, Leap Day, came the nostalgic pièce de resistance: Bill Hyde.  Talking with Bill was all my doing.  I first met him shortly after we moved to Portland, Maine, in 1952, when I was eight.  He wandered up one summer day when I was noodling around our new backyard.  “Hi, kid,” he said.  A wiry boy with a crew cut and an open smile, he became my first friend in town.  We played baseball and swapped comic books.  He was as my mother used to say, “Full of beans.”

My family left Portland for Brunswick in 1957, after the seventh grade.  Bill and I lost touch, although after high school he came up to Brunswick to Bowdoin, while I went off to Williams, where – as has been seen – I met Bob Mitchell, among others.  But there was something I didn’t know about Bill in those days.  He had dyslexia, and was being tutored by a friend of my parents.  When we met, he could barely write his name.  He looked at the pictures of the comic books, but otherwise had no idea what was in the dialog balloons.

Eventually I learned a lot about dyslexia. In 1976 I taught a year at the Gow School in western New York, a school that specifically remediated dyslexic boys (today boys and girls).  Next from 1977-82 I spent five years at Milton Academy, writing, teaching English and language skills, working under the same family friend that had tutored Bill in Portland.  That period brought Bill back to my mind.

So in 1981 I flew out to Denver for a few days to visit with and interview him for the magazine Quest: “How Billy Hyde Overcame Dyslexia.”  We hadn’t seen each other in thirty years; in the meantime he had earned a Ph.D. and become an educational economist.  It was a hell of a story, a hell of a journey, and the interview came clearly out of Bill’s mouth, clear testimony of how hard he had struggled and how far he had come.

Almost forty years later I went to Google and found his name and a phone number.  When I called, I spoke to a woman who turned out to be his ex-wife.  She didn’t have his new number, but one of his sons did, so I called him, and he called Bill, and the next thing I knew on Leap Day, my phone rang, and it was Bill.

Ten miles north of Denver, he and his present wife, Pam, own 10 acres of what he calls a “hobby farm” outside the little town of Henderson.  “We raise sheep and chickens, lots of vegetables.  We love eating our own food.  It’s a lot of work, but I love being outside a lot.  In my spare time, I’m a court mediator.”

There was a lot more confabulation, recalling another good friend from elementary days, Bill Pennell, who used to live right down Orchard Street four houses from mine and who now lives up in British Columbia.  The Hydes had gone up to Canada for a visit a couple years ago, and were glad to see him cheerful and well.  After forty-five minutes we finished talking, and I told Bill I would definitely drive through Denver this June on my way back to our house in western Massachusetts.

I’ve been awash in nostalgia, what with all those faces and voices from so far in the past.  Colleagues, classmates, lovers, playmates – all these are still friends, carrying their portion of my past back into my life.  The Cambridge English Dictionary defines nostalgia as “a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past.”  This past month has utterly wiped away that “slight sadness.” I’ve felt great joy at discovering that the past has never really passed away.  Even at a half century’s remove, the bonds once formed are still intact.  Moreland was, I think, wrong.  We don’t die from nostalgia.  If anything, we live on, kept alive by the people whom we love, and who love us.