Month: January 2018

“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”

                                                                                             ― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

The kids and I leave New Haven behind and head off into the wilds of Connecticut.  I used to tell everyone that I was born in Storrs, Connecticut, the home of the UConn Huskies, but it would be more accurate to say that while I was born at the hospital in Storrs, I lived my first two years a few miles down the road in the small town of Willimantic.  My grandfather owned a house on Church Street and I have vague memories of visiting there as a child and walking through the pines behind his house.  I can still recall the crisp, dry pine scent and the crunch of the thick mat of brown needles.  I want to retrace those steps but our first mission to see if we can find the house on Church Street.

Willimantic is a classically rendered New England town and we find Church Street easily enough; it is after all a short lane directly off Main Street, placing it in the exact center of Americana.  It was overcast and gray this day in early October, unseasonably warm so as to not offend our equatorial sensibilities.

If I were a better genealogist / cartographer I would have done my homework earlier and figured out which of the fine old houses on Church Street was Grandper’s house.  I apparently assumed that it would just suddenly occur to me in a flash of memory as we drove along, but in retrospect this was just my foolish pride relying on the whimsy of conceit.  We pulled to the side and I called my brother Bill and left him a message in hopes that he would simply know the address.  The kids await my instructions, suspecting that while we found Church Street, reliance on ol’ Dad’s memory was not going to find Grandper’s house this day. 

I tell them,” let’s go see if we can find Margaret.”

My sister, Margaret Ann Fenton, died in Willimantic on the 9^th day of September, 1949, just two weeks after I was born.  She was only three years old on the terrible day she was found in a nearby pond.  

I know the approximate location and address of the cemetery in Mansfield so we off we go, leaving Church Street behind. 

We find the Mansfield cemetery down a narrow country road.  It is set far back and away from any dwellings

We pull in the narrow entrance and quickly realize that there is neither caretaker nor map.  We are on our own.  I have a plot number but no way to locate it and once again my hopes are dwindling.  We drive slowly around the quiet sylvan setting looking at ancient headstones, some dating back to the 1700’s.  I am about to give up when incredibly I spot a large headstone saying FENTON.  We stop and approach.  The headstone is very old and etched with the names of ancestors who lived long ago. 

I realize that this is a family grave site, hundreds of years old.  And there, on the ground, is another stone.

I have found Margaret only by the sheerest of happenstance, as if she was calling out to me.  As I look at her resting place I cannot help but think of this little girl waiting patiently all these years; waiting for her little brother to drop by for a visit and introduce his kids.  I would like to tell her about all the things we said and did and saw and thought and dreamed.  We share the Fenton name and here in this quiet place we meet at long last, along the arc of time.  Had she lived she would have been 72 this year and the stories I am writing now would have been very different, in ways I cannot imagine.

I often think about the choices we make or are made for us, and how so many things had to happen just so to find us here and now.  These thoughts lead me to consider destiny and the road we are fated to take, yet I know with certainty that time flows only forward and we ride bravely on, passengers headed to what is profound and possible.  Imagining a life with different choices is the stuff of stories and dreams.  We are at the place our journey took us and no other.  The rest are ghosts.

I could never sing my song, so I lived it instead.

“All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full…”
                                                  ~ Richard Brautigan, “The Return of the Rivers”

We are on our way to New Haven, Connecticut to eat pizza and see Yale University, not necessarily in that order…oh wait yes, precisely in that order. I note on the map that there is this large barrier blocking our path to Connecticut, something called “New York City”.  Google is once again in charge and tells us that it would be a good idea to avoid the George Washington Bridge through NYC proper and head up the Jersey side and attack Connecticut from the west. All of this sounds vaguely like an army preparing a battle plan, which I guess in a way we are.

For some reason I always thought of New Haven as a little rural college town like Chapel Hill. It is actually closer in size to Raleigh which is the big city down in these here parts of Carolina. New Haven is surrounded by, or maybe comprised of, the municipalities of East, North and West Haven. I wondered if there was a *South* Haven but if so it would have to be in the ocean and be called Atlantis.

Anyway, the entire Haven family is collectively a pretty cool place and beside being the home of Yale University it is also the city with arguably the best pizza in the USA. The locals refer to these pies as “apizza” in deference to the source culture and language of Naples, Italy. Another oddity is that the mozzarella cheese topping is referred to as “mootz” by long-time residents. I am pretty sure if foreign interlopers such as ourselves attempted to use these words, the local linguistic police would descend, whisk us away to some drab cellar and force us to listen endlessly to Dick Van Dyke painfully attempting to mimic a cockney accent in Mary Poppins.  (In the previous sentence I almost wrote “linguine police” which would have been a mondo cool typo).

Pepe’s and Sally’s are the two legendary New Haven pizzerias most sought after by tourists and locals alike, so we head there to see what all the fuss was about. 3:00PM on a Sunday in October and the lines are out the door in both places! Who knew?

We settle for a place with NO waiting lines which I, Mr Literal, have named the NoLinesNewHavenPizzaPlace, or NLNHPP for short. The pizza at NLNHPP was out of this world – it’s hard to describe how good this thing was — although to be fair I didn’t try the white clam pizza because, guck.  If I lived in New Haven I would eat pizza exclusively and weigh 300 pounds.  Hello, the name is Mootz, MIKE Mootz.

We are here not for the pizza but because the Fenton clan has Yale connections.  My father graduated in 1939 with an MA in Forestry, and my grandfather received a Law degree in 1901.  The kids and I wandered about the campus in New Haven, mingling with students and tourists alike.  I guess I should not have been surprised at the tourists; after all they were watching us as we were watching them.  We stood outside Yale Law School where my grandfather attained his law degree. 

I suppose it might be said that there is a sameness about university campuses, but the great institutions like Yale carry the weight of history in and among the buildings.  It is a palpable presence, the ghost of past discoveries clinging like intellectual ivy to the sandstone walls.  It has been 117 years since my grandfather walked the halls and grounds of Yale, nearly 80 years since Pop did.  We came here to pay our respects to the University and to those in our family who were part of it.

Tomorrow we drive west to my place of birth to try and find Granper’s house in Willimantic, Connecticut.  Then to Providence, R.I. and up to Portland Maine.