To pass the time on car trips we played a game we called "Bone Yard". This was long before Ike was persuaded to build the Interstate, when all travel by car was on what we call today "back-roads", two-way-travel through towns and past the inevitable cemeteries that lined the way. There were four of us, my parents, me and my sister, Sylvia, and, if you caught sight of a cemetery and called out "Bone Yard" before anyone else, you could claim one BoneYard. The person with the most BoneYards at the end of the trip would be declared the winner.
This day, August 13, 2014, I was driving by myself, heading for one particular bone yard, Calvary Cemetery in Concord, New Hampshire, to visit the grave of my mother, Germaine Scully Sawyer, who died 50 years and one day prior, when a truck carrying snowplow skids ran a red light in Rockport, Maine, collided with the family car, striking it on the passenger side, and, in the process, rupturing her aorta by the force of the collision. She died in the moment of the crash, they told me, given the nature of her injury. [Some said "she never knew what hit her," but I'm not buying it. A person's last moment in such circumstances must be filled with violence and terror, though the experience leaves no lasting memory because there is no memory when life ends, except for the memories of the living.] Dad told me he tried in vain to find her pulse in the immediate aftermath of the collision in that still, quiet moment when everything has come to rest. The truck had flipped, throwing its driver, who died when he collided with whatever it was he landed on, probably the roadway. He was the father of a small child, according to the newspaper accounts.
On this day in 2014 I was moved by unseen forces to make the 90-minute trip to the cemetery. You could say I was playing hookey from my job, having cited "urgent family matters" in declining a summons to a meeting that afternoon. Along the way on I-93, listening to pod casts of the Writer's Almanac I heard Garison Keilor recite this verse by John Dryden (1685) which made me feel good about committing the venial sin of skipping out on my meeting:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
At least I was in charge of this day, whatever it might provide.
I didn't go straight to Calvary because I was having lunch with Paul, a former colleague at the college where we once taught and fast friend ever since. We first met when I was teaching in the summer school of that college. Paul made his whole teaching career there and when he retired they gave him a little trophy on which was inscribed his name and the institution's name, written "New England Colledge". The fact the institution could not spell its own name may signify its standing, notwithstanding the fact that it was accredited. Our rendezvous was in the college town, Henniker, NH. It was a golden day. Having spent 12 years teaching there, every corner, every doorway is a landmark, so that a walk through the center is like a tour through a museum devoted to all the deeds, all the personalities, all the triumphs and all the defeats of those years.
I sought to revisit one of those memories, the one that had brought me here this day, the memory of receiving the crashing news that reached me that day 50 years and a day before. It was afternoon, August 13, 1964. I was teaching a physics class in the Science Building, just across the parking lot from the Administration Building. We sat at lab benches, all 4 or 5 of us, and I alternated explanations of the concepts in the text book with discussions of physics problems. A secretary from the Administration Building entered and interrupted to tell me there was an urgent phone call for me, waiting on the line across the parking lot. I don't recall any information about the reason for the call, just that I needed to come right then and there.
I was 23 years old, not accustomed to the dread of urgent phone calls, not yet versed in how to brace yourself when receiving "the call." I don't recall my state of mind, nor the scenarios that must have flashed in my mind, only the voice on the other end of the line. It was Sylvia. She was very distraught and told me the Maine State Police had called to tell her there had been an accident involving our parents. The only words I remember were "Mum is all right but they don't know about Dad." Come right away, she urged.
Back then I drove an MG-A sports car, painted light blue when I bought it, used, from Marley Langley, a local mechanic. I wanted to look cool and the car was part of the look, but I didn't care much how I looked when I blazed out of town, heading for the farm, 18 miles away in Concord, NH. I remember the agony of that drive, not knowing what news would be waiting for me.
As I pulled into the driveway Sylvia came flying off the porch, racing toward me, her face contorted as she threw her arms around me. She spoke about Dad, his injuries, his status. He had a broken leg and a broken pelvis.
“What about Mum?” I asked. She went on about Dad.
“What about Mum?” I pressed on. She was suddenly silent.
“Is she dead?” Silence.
“Is she dead?” I asked again. She nodded a silent “yes”.
Now my mind was in a daze. Are you sure? Yes... What about Dad? Injured.... Where? Hospital.
On this day, my walking tour of Henniker took me to that parking lot, now nearly empty. I looked in the window of classroom where my physics class was in session and saw it is no longer a classroom. I turned and traced my steps across the parking lot. It gave me a peculiar satisfaction. I wondered to myself, why this fascination of revisiting the past?
Place is important to us. We want to stand in the spot where is happened. As a boy my mother took me on a tour of the State House in Concord and I sat in the Governor's chair. I couldn't wait to tell my school mates "I sat in the Governor's chair," because it was where the Governor sat when he was in his office. Many years later as a teenage boy scout on a tour in Washington, DC, I visited the soon-to-be-occupied offices of the Teamsters' Union, where I was allowed into the office of Union President Dave Beck. [This was before Jimmy Hoffa became president of the union.] I sat in his chair and looked out on the city of Washington. I was there, sitting in the President's chair. Now, I was retracing my steps of 50 years ago when I approached a portal that would open a new chapter in my life. On that passage 50+ years ago I did not know what awaited me. Once I took the phone I knew something awful had happened and life was never the same.