Detour Down Memory Lane

My home is Plum Island, Massachusetts. I’ve asserted that since I was about 10 or 11 years old. But the reality is: Plum Island started out as a summer house. My father, who grew up in Medford, Mass., started visiting the island when he was a boy in the 1920s and I first visited in 1965 when I was still in my mother’s womb. My folks bought the house my brother and I now live in back in 1972, when I was 6 years old.

And while I consider Plum Island my home, the fact is that my early years were largely spent in Orangeburg, New York, a hamlet just outside New York City. Orangeburg is in Rockland County, on the west side of the Hudson River, just north of the New Jersey border.

Autumn on Kingswood Drive in Orangeburg, New York

With the maturity (ha!) of age has come the realization that it was an amazing place to grow up. Despite being just 20 miles from Manhattan, I lived in a forest with deer and all kinds of critters running around. We had trails to roam and creeks to wade in, and there were foundations and wells scattered throughout the woods that dated back to when the Dutch first got to the area in the 1600s. Really. And in addition to this rural playground, we had the Big Apple within easy bus range.

How did my Dad, a guy from Medford, Mass., end up in Rockland County? Simple: World War II. Orangeburg was home to Camp Shanks, the largest embarkation point for troops headed to Europe. Dad moved through Camp Shanks en route to Europe and on his way back from the war. When he graduated from Dartmouth and attended Columbia Journalism School on the G.I. Bill, Dad and his first wife settled into veteran’s housing at what had become known as Shanks Village.

Despite being a Bostonian, Dad was of the mind about New York City that, as Sinatra sang, “If you can make it there…” (though Dad ALWAYS preferred Liza Minelli’s version of the song from the movie, but that’s a different story), so he was staying in New York and making his career there. He and a handful of other vets who were also living at Shanks Village found a plot of land at the base of nearby Clausland Mountain. (If you’ve ever driven across the Tappan Zee Bridge, Clausland is the mountain that forms the western shore of the Hudson River.) Dad and his cronies platted out a dead-end street — laid out such that the top of the road ran into a grade too steep to go any farther — and built eight homes, one for each family.

Ours was at the top on the right-hand side. We had no one behind us to the summit of the mountain (on which sat an Army Nike-missile-guidance station, this being the height of the Cold War) and a view from the living room that included the tallest buildings of the Manhattan skyline. We could see the lights on the Empire State Building and I grew up watching the World Trade Center rise in a stutter-step pattern above the New Jersey forests between our house and the city. We raised damn near every domesticated animal there is — chickens, ducks, geese, dogs, cats, horses, rabbits and more — and yet we went to movie premieres at the big theaters in midtown Manhattan (thanks, Mom!).

Like I say, it really was an amazing place to grow up, but I’ve pooh-poohed it for decades in my New England snobbery. I mean: Dad was from Boston and Mom from New York…my sister was hanging out in NYC as soon as she was a teenager, while my folks and I had worked it out that, had I not gone to prep school I was going to live with neighbors and attend school (and play hockey) in Massachusetts. Guess who got whose blood?!

All of this is a long-winded introduction to the point of this post: I’d not been back to Orangeburg in many, many years — until yesterday. And the result was a surprising (to me, anyway) clench in the chest and even a slight tearing up at the corner of the eye.

I was driving home to Plum Island from Maryland, and rather than cross the Hudson River at the George Washington Bridge I turned north and rolled up the Palisades Parkway.

The Palisades Interstate Parkway is a lovely, cars-only thoroughfare that Rockefeller and other wealthy folks donated way back when. It runs along the crest of its namesake cliffs and overlooks the Hudson, New York City and out toward Long Island, before turning away from the river at the town of Palisades and running north to Bear Mountain and West Point. My parents commuted on the P.I.P. every damned day seemingly forever, and I rode and drove it tons of times myself. But driving it yesterday I was reminded of just how lovely a drive it is. Forests, grand vistas, no billboards or buildings — it’s a civilized way to travel via automobile.

The basketball hoop is gone — it straddled the “no parking” sign — but the tree my friend and I turned into a fort a good 40 years ago is still visible lying in the woods.

I left the parkway at exit 5 onto Route 303 right by the old 303 Drive-In Theater (now a flea market) and north past the former site of Orangeburg Pipe (now a mall). (Sidenote: Musbro Kennels is STILL there, though the Wedge Deli is long gone.) The Orangeburg Library is still at the corner of 303 and 340, and is now part of the Camp Shanks Museum (to which my father donated a bunch of stuff). Turning right onto Kings Highway, the old stone house (dates back to the 1700s and was a little local museum when I was a kid) is still a restaurant. The phone company and the comic-book factory (now some other company) are still there. And the creek still runs alongside the road before crossing underneath and heading onto the campus of St. Thomas Aquinas College.

The turn onto Kingswood Drive was pretty much the same. The families are all changed — I believe with my father’s passing last year all of the originals are now gone — but the houses are mostly the same. The Ulrichs’ house is identical; the Landreths’ has a big fence with a loud dog behind it. The Lunds’ house is completely different, but the Wallachs’ and Les Thompson’s and the Markalouses’ all looked like they did when I was walking up and down that hill each day to catch the bus to school. The Gwilliams’ house is basically the same, though where the pool was is now a forest of small trees and weeds. But in the woods just above their home (but below Marty Pizza’s house), the tree that fell during a storm when I was 8 or 9, and in which Neil Gwilliam and my brother, Scott, and I built a series of forts, is still there, if quite a bit disintegrated now.

Still the same shade of red my parents painted it. That driveway was AWESOME for sledding in winter. The two evergreens were Christmas trees (that we transplanted) when I was a kid.

And my house is…the same. Mostly. I didn’t drive up the steep driveway (GREAT sledding in winter and down which Scotty rode his Big Wheel once while barefoot, resulting in a slam into the Gwilliams’ rock wall on the other side of the street) but it’s still the same shade of red my parents painted it. Hell, the mailbox is still the green my father painted it 20 or more years ago and it still reads “7” and “Smith.” There was a guy raking leaves in the front yard — dropped by the same huge oak tree that is still there but has had one major branch cut off — and throwing them off the edge of the level ground, just as I’d done countless times as a kid.

I stayed for just a few minutes and then continued on, east along Kings Highway past Rockland Cemetery (resting place of my childhood friend Neil Gwilliam, who passed away late in his freshman year at Brigham Young University, and also John C. Fremont who expected it to become the national cemetery), past Lawrence Park Apartments (home of many of my elementary school classmates) and onto Route 9W north to the now-new Tappan Zee Bridge (which is a stunning piece of architecture and engineering).

The mailbox hasn’t changed a bit.

Before I left, while standing next to my mailbox taking it all in, a car came barreling up Kingswood Drive. It slowed as I stepped out of the road and a woman asked out her open window, “Are you lost?”
“Nope,” I replied, smiling.
She looked a little wary but nodded and rolled past before I could say anything more. She turned into the Gwilliams’ driveway, where she parked and went into her home. I got into my car and drove to mine.

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It’s a Young Man’s Game…Or Is It?

A bunch of different threads in this post today, the result of a bunch of different threads “runnin’ around the ol’ Duder’s head”  the past few weeks. So bear with me while I talk through things out loud. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy, although a lot less effective, I’ll grant you (and probably not very interesting to you).

So, a month ago I wrote about how I’d thought about spending the summer when I was 26 at the surf break known as the Mexican Pipeline. I finally made it there this year, in March, when I turned 51, and I wasn’t ashamed to say that, upon my arrival, the waves were intimidating.

Puerto Escondido definitely intrigues me as a potential long-term destination. (I have every expectation that if I wind up dying of old age it will be in a foreign country. After seeing the way my father, a World War II veteran, was mistreated by this country’s health system, what can a selfish deadbeat like me expect as his body starts to wind down? But that’s a topic for a separate post.) But when I thought about spending significant time in a surf-focused life, I wondered if that really made any sense to an aging (as are we all) middle-aged man.

Puerto Escondido is a destination for young surfers from all over the world, and there’s a reason that particular demographic overruns the town during peak season. It takes strength and fitness just to step into the ring at a serious wave. And while I still go to the gym and play hockey and lead a generally fitness-focused lifestyle, well, there’s a reason I play in the over-50 hockey tournaments now. Can I still handle a wave like Puerto? Yes. But it’s exhausting. And potentially dangerous. And my recharge capabilities aren’t what they once were. Those are just facts.

So when I look at potential paths I might take — and I do that a lot as this year in which the generations of my family changed hands winds down — I question whether such a pursuit is an appropriate core focus of my life. In fact, I question WHAT should be the focus of my life to come.

And that’s an important question because in just a few months my father will have been gone for a year, at which point (or shortly thereafter) my role as executor, trustee and caretaker of the family’s assets and physical legacy will come to a close. And I have some decisions to make.

Do my brother and I keep our family’s house (our sister has no interest in keeping her share)? Does that mean I remain living there? If so, what do I do for a living around here? If not, do we rent out the house? Or do we sell? If we rent or sell, where should I go and what should I do? And if we keep the house, how do my brother and I come to terms about what we should do about various aspects of the house’s management and upkeep (and who should pay for them)?

Questions of career, location, home, legacy — questions that have built up over the close-to-a-hundred years of my parents’ lives and the lives of the children they produced, including me — are about to require an answer. And as those of you who know me well can attest, I have a wide range of interests and dreams pulling me in an even wider range of directions.

The security of a “straight” job back in Corporate America has its appeals but in my field those options are largely out west. And even if they’re in around here, among the reasons I didn’t opt for a commuting-into-Boston career when I got out of college is the fact it’s a hellacious, dangerous, expensive and exhausting commute from Plum Island. And it still is. But shouldn’t I be maximizing my income (and savings) at this point in my life in an attempt to set up my so-called “golden years”?

Or: What about carving out some sort of niche, working-for-myself career? Can I parlay my skills (cough, cough) and experience into something that lets me work from, say, the office on the third floor of the house at Plum Island? Travel — to Boston, New York and beyond — is easy enough. My mother always implored me to be my own boss (as she was), but I’ve yet to make that happen. Maybe I can create enough of a career yet stay at home — and keep that home in the family. But can I even create that career now, at this age?

Speaking of which: underlying all of these internal (now external) debates is the aforementioned fact that I recently turned 51. I’ve already experienced light doses of ageism and I can only expect them to increase, right? Is Corporate America or building one’s own career every bit a young man’s game as living for surf in a grubby apartment in Mexico?

Then there’s the age-old dream — and those of you who’ve known me for any length of time have heard me talk about this since I was a teenager — of buying a sailboat and taking off. I came close back in the ‘90s (Mom, in her infinite wisdom, refused to help me out financially then, for which I remain thankful). I came close in 2011 (which, given what happened to Mom and Dad in 2012 and 2013, I’m glad fell through). And when I returned to New England last spring I planned on two things: one, helping Dad; and two, buying a crappy, old boat and fixing it up to head south in November. That plan went with Dad in July, but there’s no reason the plan can’t be resurrected this year.

I follow the journals of friends who are living a life of early retirement. I follow those who continue to work but live on the road. I monitor the experiences of those courageous souls who never bought into the system in the first place. Hell, I even adore the fictional character Travis McGee and his plan for “taking retirement in installments.” So the pull of that dream I’ve had since I was a boy remains strong. And this might be the time to make it happen. Selling the house would certainly generate enough cash to go. Keeping the house and renting it out would generate at least some income on which to live. Hell, there might even still be enough money left in my savings to go as I’d planned to last year (though I’ve been burning through a lot of it this year as I’ve been living at the island and chipping away at what’s needed doing), but would managing that be more trouble than it’s worth?

No matter what I wind up doing, I still need some sort of purpose in life though, don’t I? Elon Musk raised the question of a universal basic income as a response to the rise in workplace automation, but questioned what, if anything, such “free” income could do for people in terms of a reason to live. As I’ve been mostly idle for the past year, I’ve come to realize that a focus, a calling, a purpose is a good thing. It’s a requirement, actually. Elon’s right.

Which brings me back around to today’s original question: What to do when those things that might function as a focus in my life are largely geared toward those (much) younger than me? Do I rage against the dying of the light? Or take up a serious golf habit?

These are the things I ponder of late. A lot.

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The Big Room

On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room.

I hadn’t been able to make the move sooner for a variety of reasons. For one, I like my old room. It’s cozier than the master and it looks out toward the northeast and the Atlantic Ocean — or rather, it did before the asshole put up the oversized monstrosity on the lot across the street. The bizarrely designed box took the place of the small cottage that had been there for decades; the woman who lived there died and the charity group she left the place to sold it off to the new guy. He’s an architect who ruined a nice, stylish beach place down the street a few years ago and the worked his magic on this beachfront lot. But I digress…

Anyway, yes, my old room is cozy and nice. But it is also small. And the bathroom is down the hall, shared with two other bedrooms on the floor.

The master, on the other hand, has high ceilings, a wide-open floor plan and an en suite bathroom. It also has a view of the Atlantic (to the east and southeast) and direct access to the deck. While not an issue with winter approaching, deck access is nice because that’s where I spend a lot of my evenings at home. My usual spot on the deck, accessed through my sister’s room, faces east and northeast, and while nice, has been assaulted by the aforementioned glitter dome. That the palace is lighted all night also lessens the stargazing.

But at my parents’ corner of the house there’s a wondrous shadow. No streetlights impinge on the sky and the neighbors on that side value the night sky as much as I do. And instead of having to carry speakers outside with me when I chill out on the deck in my old spot, now I’ll be able to simply open a window and turn a speaker to face outside and I’ll have tunes to suit the occasion.

So there were concrete reasons why it took me three months to make the move. But there were also more subtle obstacles to be overcome.

For starters, it’s not my room. It’s my parents’. It’s ALWAYS been their room. Moving in there puts the final touch on the fact that they’re gone and the generations have changed hands. It’s like it’s the next, penultimate step in the path of life: birth, cradle, shared bedroom, own bedroom, master bedroom…casket. It’s been weird enough no longer having living parents and moving into the master bedroom makes that fact even clearer.

There was also one unanticipated consequence to moving into the master bedroom: doing so has made the already-too-big house even bigger. When I occupied one bedroom and the shared bath and the hall in between, I was using a good half of the floor. Now, with everything self-contained in the master suite, I’m using maybe a quarter — and the rest of the floor can essentially be shut down. That’s nice financially — the heat can be turned way down in those other rooms and the sun bakes the master room to a high temperature all winter long, which is nice — but it makes the place a little lonelier.

And finally, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to make the master room mine. I’ve hung some things on the wall and put my clothes in the closet, but I don’t know that anything less than a wholesale overhaul — new paint, new window treatments, maybe new flooring — ever makes it seem like I’m doing anything other than sleeping in my parents’ room. Or maybe that’s just a function of time. I guess we’ll find out.

With the finality of my father’s passing, and the fact that my siblings and I are now the oldest limb on this family tree, everything has become a function of time, and finding things out down the road. I guess all of life for everyone is that way, really, but it’s still weird to make that right turn into the master bedroom instead of continuing on down to the end of the hall when turning in for the night.

*    *    *

Sidebar: People have asked about the future of the house. The short version is this: The house has, for almost a decade, been owned by a trust comprised of my brother, my sister and me. My sister has no interest in the home but my brother and I do so we’re going to buy out her third and keep the place. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how finances work out and that won’t be determined for several months. But I’m living here now and have been since the spring, and I’ll stay here for the foreseeable future barring any amazing job offers elsewhere (hint, hint to anyone reading). On the job front, my goal is to set up some freelance projects (another hint, hint to anyone reading) — consulting, writing, editing — so that I can remain here. And in the meantime I will continue to clean and thin out the inconceivable amount of stuff my we-grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression-so-we-saved-EVERYTHING parents had stashed all over the place. One dumpster’s worth of stuff has already been removed and another will be needed soon. I also have close to a thousand books to be donated or discarded — and that doesn’t include the hundreds of books I’m keeping because they’re of interest to me personally or they’re first editions or autographed or an antique or some other reason that gives them a particular value. If you’re a bibliophile, give me a shout.

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