Day 124, Wednesday August 7, 2024: Dover, New Hampshire to Rockland, Massachusetts
- Mark Carl Rom
- 12 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Leominster, Clinton, Marlborough, Hudson, Somerville East, Somerville Central, Somerville West, Revere, Chelsea, Rockland, Massachusetts
Days sober: 412
The alcoholics sitting in the VFW meeting hall in Manchester were facing away from the bottle-lined bar behind them. One or two of the participants were actually sitting on barstools. Force of habit? The room was ringed with banners with slogans for recovery: “Keep It Simple.” “Take It Easy” “One Day at a Time.” I was puzzled by the one that said “Sobah” until I was reminded that we were near Boston. When I introduced myself, I said “I’m Mark, from Arkansas, and I’d love to hear you say that.” A few did: Maak from Aaakansas.
The speaker, Kevin, began by talking about the number 12: the 12 Steps, the 12 Traditions, he was one of 12 children, and he had just completed 12 years of continuous sobriety (note also: 12 months, 12 jurors, Texas A&M’s 12th man, women’s lacrosse, etc.) He gave himself 12 minutes to speak about the 12 banners on the walls, but only got up to the fourth banner before his time expired. I was pretty sure the next person who spoke was drunk. He claimed that he had been sober for 12 days – color me doubtful – and then launched into a story which consisted primarily of how he liked to catch squirrels and paint their tails blue, because that’s funny.
My first stop after the meeting was the Peterborough Town Library, which claims to be the oldest library in the world that was free and open to the public and also supported entirely through taxes. Like most of our nation’s earliest libraries, its founders were male. Reverend Abiel Abbot, a Unitarian minister, who opened the library in 1833 with just 100 books, gets credit here. The ladies nevertheless did their part. In 1890, when the need for a new building became urgent, former resident Nancy Smith Foster wrote a check for $10,000 – her cousin Will Smith chipped in $5000 – to fund the construction. In 1977, Peterborough resident Elizabeth Yates McGreal wanted to expand the children’s area, and so started a campaign to build “The Elizabeth Room” by writing women with that name locally and nationally. Good thing her name was not something like Odina (Germanic for “wealthy” but rarely chosen).
After stopping by the Carnegies in Leominster and Clinton, and taking several wrong turns, shortly before lunch I arrived at my friend Kelly’s home in the country outside Upton, Massachusetts. Kelly and I worked together at Cypher’s Mine, one of the living history camps at Philmont Scout Ranch, in 1976. In 1980, we spent seven weeks hiking 750 miles south along the Continental Divide from the Canadian border to Jackson, Wyoming. It was the most intimate relationship I had ever had, in the sense that we were together almost 24 hours a day without company or distractions. By the end of that summer we were both glad to go our separate ways. We had largely fallen out of touch – Kelly does not use Facebook, although his wife Leanne does, and neither of us are big on calling or writing to our friends – and it was good to reconnect with him.
Kelly was proud to show me his RV – a well-equipped camper van which left me drooling with envy – and the nearby town where he has lived for a few decades. He loves his community and his work there. Of special pride to him was the mural that his son Aidan created as his Eagle project in the church they attend. We got takeout sandwiches at the Country Club Sooper, the downtown market/deli mainly frequented at noon by guys wearing neon t-shirts with company logos. It was great to catch up. It made me wistful, for a moment, at the prospect that I would never have long-term connection to a community in the way that Kelly, or Lillian, or Caroline, had.
The rest of the day was the workaday drive, stop and photo, and drive on. When I listen to music while driving, I usually explore new music. After seeing Kelly, I wanted to play the music he introduced me to during my first year of graduate school, when he paid me a visit. He gave me albums from Bill Staines (“The Whistle of the Jay”), a folk singer, and Will Ackerman (“It Takes A Year”), the founder of the “New Age” Windham Hill Records, and I listened to them hundreds of times, at a time I listened to vinyl that I mindfully bought. Today, I simply plugged their names into Spotify and let it do the rest.
Somerville, a Boston suburb, has three Carnegie libraries, and Revere has one and I hit them all late in the afternoon. The sky was azure behind the Boston skyline while I drove through ragged industrial areas, and I was grateful for all good things on this day.
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