“…There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else,
And happier;
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking…”
~Mary Oliver
Some fifty years after leaving I have come back to New Lisbon, NJ. Matthew and Stephanie are with me and I wonder what they think of this small village in southern New Jersey that lacks a discernible center, an ordinary place with no defining characteristics. No great towers or museums or rivers or stadiums; just houses, fields, roads and trees scattered about like discarded toys on a playroom floor. I almost feel embarrassed at the plainness of New Lisbon, with its raging simplicity that confounds the memory in defiance of grandeur. It should be more dramatic, but it simply is not.
Still, life happens in small towns and here are some things I do remember.
I struggled at Pemberton Township High School, not because the material was beyond me, but because I actively sought the middle. This was the time in my life where I basically hunkered down and tried to avoid attention. Once, I remember winning a National Merit Scholarship award. When my name was called in assembly I ducked my head and became invisible while my juvenile delinquent pals snickered and called me egghead, in their world a mark of shame.
In November of 1963 the school broadcast over the loudspeakers that President Kennedy had been shot and that we should pray for our country. Little did we know how profound that loss would be and how tumultuous the decade to follow.
On this trip I tried to find the old high school but it had long since been replaced by a great gray cluster of buildings that look vaguely like a prison complex. I sought out the history of the school but it only went back as far at 1990. 1965 apparently has been relegated to the ancient mythos of prehistory. Perhaps I could find the fossilized remains of old term papers?
This was also the time and place that Baseball became my bedrock; from playing organized ball in the Babe Ruth League to keeping intricate and detailed box scores of my favorite team, the Yankees. Mickey Mantle was my hero then and I tried to copy his swing when I played. The Mick played center field, so I played center field. I was never really an athlete; just a kid who liked to play ball.
The garden. Everywhere we lived Pop had a garden. Below you can see the one in New Lisbon with Pop checking his handiwork. Pop would can everything possible, but mostly I remember a cellar filled with row upon row of mason jars filled with snap-beans.
I would often ride my bike the four miles out to this circle ironically called “4-Mile Circle”, quite an adventure since this was a time before such things as bike lanes. At the intersection was a diner which served this amazing thin-sliced ham sandwich piled so thick it was a challenge to bite it.
The kids and I rolled out of New Lisbon with a better appreciation of the place that was so central to my upbringing. Next: New Haven and Yale University.
whoisfenton 