The Road Less Traveled

In the summer of 1961, at the end of the school year, my friend Marsha and I decided to camp our way around the United States. I had my pink '57 Plymouth with the tail fins and a large trunk. We loaded up sleeping bags, a pup tent, a Coleman stove and a Coleman lantern, cooking utensils, clothes and other useful items, and set out.

We planned to start by heading east for Pennsylvania and beyond. We wanted to see historic and literary places. We wanted to see those places we had read about and pictured in our minds' eye. We walked the battlefields at Gettysburg and took the chocolate factory tour in Hershey. We were surprised to find so many people swimming in Thoreau's Walden Pond, but his cabin site was intact. We toured the House of Seven Gables, photographed the "rude bridge that arched the flood" guarded by the Minuteman statue, and explored the scenes of Little Women. We camped at state parks and wherever we could feel safe. Once, in a small village in Massachusetts late at night, we pretended we didn't have any money and asked the police if we could sleep in a cell. They sent us to a friend's boardinghouse where we were given a bed and breakfast for a dollar. And made friends even though we talked "funny."

By the end of June we had made our way to Middlebury, VT., where we found beds in a youth hostel. But our goal was Ripton and a farmhouse on the road to the Breadloaf School that we learned about from the locals after many inquiries. Yes, that was where Robert Frost stayed in the summertime. Few would speak of it, a well-kept community secret. We were young and brazen and determined. The Homer Noble Farm mailbox located, we turned into the narrow road and drove right up to the large woodframed farmhouse. An attractive older woman came out to meet our car and asked if she could help us.

"Yes," we said. "We've come all the way from Indiana to see Robert Frost."

Unruffled, she smiled and asked for more particulars, We told her of our journey, our plans to see the USA, and she said he might be interested in hearing about our adventures.

"Call me tomorrow at 10 and I will let you know," she smiled, and we drove off in a daze.

We found a place to camp near a fast flowing stream of icy mountain runoff, pitched our tent, hung our one skirt and blouse outfit apiece on tree branches to shake out the wrinkles, and waited for tomorrow.

Promptly at 10 the next day we found a pay phone in Ripton, and called the special number we had been given.

"Yes," answered Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, he would see us at 2 that afternoon.

The real significance of this opportunity hit us as we drove to the Noble Farm, and we were a bit shaken. When we arrived, a man was on a ladder painting the window frames of the farmhouse. He descended at his own pace and greeted us.

"Ted Morrison," he said, with extended hand. "He is waiting for you at his cabin. Just follow the path up the mountain and you'll find him. Try not to stay long and tire him," he concluded and climbed back up his ladder.

I don't remember how far we climbed or how steep and long the trail. I only remember seeing Robert Frost standing in the screened doorway to his porch, looking down the path for us. He led us in and seated us in wicker chairs on the porch overlooking the Green Mountains. He nodded encouragingly and asked us to tell him our mission, our purpose, and our dreams. He was delighted that we were traversing our country and applauded our plans for a working and traveling year. He talked about the Kennedy inauguration and how cold it was and windy. He said the sun was so bright in his eyes that he couldn't see to read his poem, and he recited "The Gift Outright" changing the last line to "such as she will become." As he spoke to us in that cadence that was so like his poetry,"just talk" he might have said, his voice seemed to fill that room and ring out over the mountains. His head bobbing so near seemed too big for his narrow shoulders, and his wispy white hair framed that expressive lovely, loving face. It was a moment in time for me.

As we were taking our leave, he rather slyly inquired if I wanted an autograph. I had all but forgotten that I was clutching a well worn copy of The Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1949 which I had brought along for just that purpose. He wrote "Robert Frost to Constance Renaker, portable copy for her circumnavigation of her country, Ripton, Vrm't of July 1, 1961." It is my most prized possession.





























Little Women.

Of Tragedy and Remembrance

Tuesday, December 13, 1977

The first indication I had that something was horribly wrong was the sirens. Emergency vehicles were converging from every direction to a spot very close by. Nine year old Rusty and I ran outside into the foggy, rainy night and looked at our neighbors who had also come out. Our faces were white with terror. Several of our children were at a Madrigal dinner at the neighborhood school. Our first thought was Highland School. We always fear for our own when we know that something really bad is happening. Then I thought to run back inside and consult the TV. The sound of that lead-in music that means a special announcement is coming can still make my heart lurch.

A grim faced David James looked out at me and began to deliver his incredible message. It went something like this: "A chartered DC3 carrying 29 people, among them the entire Evansville Aces basketball team and Coach Bobby Watson, went down tonight shortly after takeoff from Dress Regional Airport. The plane was headed for Nashville, TN, where the Aces were to play Middle Tennessee State Wednesday night at Murfreesboro. The plane left the runway shortly after 7:20 p.m. and crashed less than 90 seconds later."

Newsman James and sports reporter Mike Blake went on to tell us that at least 26 passengers were dead and three had been rushed to Deaconess Hospital. Later in the night we learned that two died in the ambulance. Only Freshman Greg Smith was still alive. He was pronounced dead at 12:20 a.m.

As Rusty and I stood staring at the television with tears streaming down our cheeks, Cara returned from her evening activity with the school choir. We poured out the story to her and she, too, began to cry. She told us that everyone at the dinner knew something serious was going on because beepers went off one by one all over the room and doctors quietly slipped out, not to return.

The three of us remained glued to the TV, stunned and heartbroken. The Evansville Aces were the heart and soul of the Evansville community. They had just gone Division I after years of success at the Division II level. We attended every home game and the children worshipped the individual players. I finally tore myself away from the news and got the children calmed and into bed. Then, I lay on the bed with the TV going and dozed on and off until morning.

The headlines and pictures in the Evansville Courier made it all more real the next morning. Also killed in the crash were Marv Bates, popular Evansville radio sportscaster and the voice of the Evansville Aces; the UE athletic business manager; the UE controller; the UE sports information officer; three student managers; and two local businessmen. We were almost compelled to read every word written about the crash, to listen to every piece of information on TV, and to talk endlessly about it to our friends.

The next days and weeks went by in a blur to most of us in the Evansville and Tri State area. We were almost ashamed and embarrassed to be Christmas shopping, as though we had no right to seek pleasure and happiness from the Holiday season. I have no memory of that Christmas, who came to stay with us, who came for dinner...nothing. Mostly, I have an overweening sense of heaviness and depression. We attended memorial services and listened to community and University leaders pray for and praise the dead. The period of grieving seemed endless.

I asked Rusty tonight how he thought that crash had impacted his life. He says that he never boards a plane but that he thinks of that group of young men and their tragic end. The morning after the crash when Rusty had left for school, I found a slip of paper on which he had printed "Dear Evansville Aces, I will always love you and never forget you. Love, Rusty" As for Cara, she went on to graduate from the University of Evansville. Personally, I have had difficulty with the Christmas holidays ever since. The terrible sadness of that situation haunted me and exacerbated the depression I have suffered for so many years. But, wherever we are and whatever our circumstances, we will always be a part of the UE community and will always remember the 1977 Aces.

My eyes see 20/20 and, yes, I can see a ball on the green from 200 yards, but it isn't mine. I'm playing a Titleist Pro V I and this is a Nike.

Curiouser and Curiouser

I don't remember the particulars that led up to the invitation, but suddenly I found myself on the way to the Florida Keys in a yellow Buick convertible with the inimitable Jimmy Drye. He was a gift from my mother who knew him first. He had performed her hysterectomy and ultimately did her breast cancer surgery. They had become friends before all this horror, and she knew we were bound to appreciate each other. Strange to have your mother arrange your liaisons. I met him at her apartment in Louisville in the converted carriage house behind the old mansion on Cherokee Road. The night after her surgery he called asking me to meet him at a neighborhoood bar and grill to discuss her prognosis. I suffered from a certain naivete in those days. I met him and it was a revelation. He actually believed in "courting" a woman he informed me. He totally blew me away with his knowledge of poetry and the ability to quote long passages. I had never before been "courted."

The next morning he disappeared about 6 a.m. He soon reappeared bringing each of us a crystal glass with champagne and strawberries, and we toasted our discovery of each other. He invited me to watch him perform his magic at Louisville General. I watched on closed circuit TV along with his interns as he performed his surgical wizardry. We dined and danced and reveled in each other. He gave me a proclamation from the Governor of Kentucky making me a Kentucky Colonel. And he invited me to go with him on a vacation to the Keys.

We stayed in Islamorado where we could work with a tennis pro friend. Days were early arising to watch the sun come up, breakfast , and then off to tennis. I was a competent player and was glad for the instruction. We often spent afternoons playing doubles with the pro and his wife. Some afternooons were spent snorkeling and spear fishing among the coral reefs.

One day the tennis pro asked us to play doubles with an older couple, who were also students. They were a delightful pair, energetic and considerate of each other. Hans and Margaret were a treat, cheerfully teasing each other over missed shots and extolling each other's virtues. Margaret kept call Hans "bubeleh," which mystified me. Jimmy and I had speared two Florida lobsters that morning, and Margaret invited us to dinner if we would bring our lobster. Imagine our overwhelming surprise when discovered that our hosts were H. A. and Margaret Rey, the creators of Curious George. How incredibly fortunate we were!

The Reys told us many stories during dinner and the late evening. They told us the story of their escape from the Nazis. They had met in their youth in the city of their birth, Hamburg, Germany. Margaret was born on May 16, the same day as I, much to my delight. They met again in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1935, where Hans was working in a family business, and Margaret had gone to escape the political upheaval in Germany. They soon married and moved to Paris and started work on a children's book. But the Nazis were moving toward Paris and they knew they must escape. Just ahead of the Germans, early on the morning of June 14, 1940, they set out on two bicycles with only the clothes on their backs and a little food. For several days they rode furiously for the French-Spanish border as the Nazis entered Paris. When they reached Lisbon they sold their bicycles for train fare. Eventually, they made their way back to Brazil and from there to New York City. In 1941 Houghton Mifflin published Curious George. The telling of their story lasted several hour and several drinks. We spent many days playing tennis and visiting with the Reys. I am doubly blessed for my time with them and with Dr. James C. Drye.

THE BETTER TO SEE YOU WITH, MY DEAR

I have to have eye surgery. Immediately. I learned this when I went to my opthomologist for a field vision test? because I take a medicine called Plaquenil (for my rheumatoid arthritis and polymyalgia rheumatica), and presumably it can affect one's eyes in a detrimental fashion. This test is a baseline. I think it tested my peripheral vision, a situation that has nothing to do with my peripheral neuropathy. That's a different problem for which I have several other doctors: Dr. Soriano, Dr. Rosen, Dr. Kinley, Dr. Spiegel, and on the horizon a neurologist recommended by Dr. Warren, my psychiatrist, ( and who wouldn't need one of those after all this fun) Dr. Angelo Alves, who is, according to Dr. Warren, better that the entire Mayo Clinic and will save me the trip. I never learned how I'm doing in the periperal vision arena because Dr. Behler was so excited to see that I have cataracts on both eyes, fast spreading ones, of course.

I have been aware for some time that I have fairly indifferently growing cataracts, but suddenly they have been spurred on, probably by Plaquenil, prednisone, and the 10 other prescription drugs that I subject my body to each and every day. Hear me on this: as fertilizers are to plants so drugs are to diseases. Remember I was the first to point this out.

I am to go on Monday to be measured. I think, although this hasn't been confirmed, that I am having one eye measured then for the new lens which will be implanted on Wednesday after that old stiff, cloudy, yellow one is (for wont of a better word) phacoemulsified.

This phacoemulsification will be preceded by capsulorhexis, in case you were wondering. I am. I realize that I did not ask Dr. Behler a single question. He even asked me if I had any. I replied that I didn't know enough about what he was telling me to ask a rational question. Well, that may have been a first. It all happened so fast. In these days of Socialized Medicine specialists have to be quick in order to pay for their Beemers and Alpha Romeos and this visit was no exception. The field test was fast, the vision test faster, and the surgery scheduling fastest. I was out the door and totally blinded by the Florida sunlight (pupils enlarged by drops) before I could say clear corneal incision.

I do have a distinct memory of Scott's (I call my doctor by a first name if I am so addressed) glowing promise that I would be able to see my ball on the green from over 200 yards away. Since I have never hit a shot 200 yards this will indeed be a happy occasion. I was also assured that I would see colors better than an LSD trip could provide. I will be unable to verify that comparison.

I have not queried the fact that my playing partners have not commented on my growing sightlessness. We are all used to playing with the seeing challenged. I have gradually become accustomed to hitting my ball into a fog. I have been able to identify the general flight direction, but if it cut, hooked, faded, sliced, or went in the hole I couldn't say.

Howsomever, Wednesday is the DAY for the first eye. The surgery itself will only take 8 minutes. Personally, I would prefer 8 hours. This is my EYE we are talking about, for gods' sakes. Someone has to drive me home afterwards, I am told, because it is against the law to drive while drugged. Well, hello, enforce that law, and you take care of Florida's traffic problems. Which friend to prevail upon? My daughter, who is supposed to be in charge of me when I am incapacitated, is teaching swimming that day and quickly absolved herself of the responsibility. She knew she was safe as she will be EARNING MONEY. She knows that I would never interfere with that. The rest of the women, my erstwhile friends, will all be at the golf course by 12 noon and not a minute later or risk being left out of the game. Juanita has fled for home just when she could have been of some slight use. The surgery is between 11 and 12 in Largo, 30 minutes away. A true conundrum. Transportation can be arranged for me, I learn, and that is good to know if all else fails. However, Ruby, my Shivas Irons stalwart and traveling companion, cheerfully steps up, as they say. Plan on a report later next week on the success of the CLEAR CORNEAL CATARACT SURGERY AND FOLDABLE LENS IMPLANTATION.

March 2005
The basement is an area that has had dramatic meanings for my life. The very word conjures up memories of the fruit cellar, the coal room, the warmth of the furnace, the hiding space under the stairs, and in a dark corner an intriguing and mysterious collection of boxes guarded by cobwebs and a thick layer of coal dust.

My first important basement was under the screened in back porch of the house on College Avenue. A small trap door opened to a set of narrow stairs that led down to a roughly dug out room. There my mother stored the home-canned fruits and vegetables that would sustain us through those meager post depression years when my father was earning $20 a week, and through the desperate early war years when food was so scarce. There, also, I entertained my fantasies of buried treasure fed by overheard and half understood stories of gold coins hidden by the deceased former owner of the house, who was known to have disagreed with President Roosevelt's outlawing of gold ownership.

During that same time I was spending many hours in my maternal grandparent's basement in their home on East Hackberry Street. Every Monday I walked the long block from school to Grandma Newlon's for both dinner and supper, there to find her and my mother doing their week's laundry in the basement with the help of the old Maytag washer. This was an all day activity characterized by the easy camaraderie I sensed between the two women as they pursued washer, wringer,, and clothesline activities.

In warm months, clothes were hung to dry on wire lines outdoors, but during those inclement winter months of my childhood, the clothes hung indoors on rope lines strung over basement beams. Often in the waning afternoons before supper, I chased and terrorized my younger sister through the wet hanging garments to the tired accompaniment of my mother's voice, pleading with me to behave.

On many long winter evenings I sat with my grandfather near the door of the warm coal and wood burning furnace, cracking hickory nuts and hazelnuts on an upright walnut log and attending raptly to his wondrous examinations of the intrigues of world affairs and current events. He was a college educated and extremely well read gentleman, who found me a willing listener to his philosophic ruminations and dramatic poetry recitations. A rural mail carrier by vocation, a carpenter and shoe repairman by avocation, and a quiet practitioner of the Quaker religion every day, he loved to share his hour before supper with his first grandchild. As he sipped his second and third glasses of homemade wine he became more and more expansive toward a high-strung and precocious granddaughter straining fiercely to comprehend and reckon with a world gone suddenly mad.

Years later, a freshmen in college, I at last shared with him a glass of homemade wine in his wine cellar off the main basement as we saddened to the sounds overhead of kindly neighbors and friends viewing the body of Vida Cronan Newlon as she lay in state in the front parlor. He pulled me clumsily to his unrelenting chest and claimed, "My dearest girl, without her it won't be home any more." And, after that, indeed, it never really was.

"Light a cigarette for me and put it between my fingers," rasped the emaciated form in the nursing home bed.

"But Mother, you know you can't smoke," I countered in surprise.

"Honey, when I see that cigarette burning, I know I'm still alive," she croaked wryly.

I did as she asked and watched as the hand holding the cigarette fell across her deformed chest. She studied the curling smoke for a moment, smiled almost contentedly, and closed her eyes. I rescued the cigarette from her slackened grip and extinguished it in the bedside ashtray. Barely two hours later she was dead. She was 53 years old.

My mother never knew Larry Bird, who was growing up in a town 20 miles west. She never knew Mohammed Ali who was Cassius Clay to her in a city 25 miles southeast. She never knew her only grandson, nor her second granddaughter. Most precious to her were the seventeen months she spent with her first granddaughter. My mother died of cancer when I was thirty-two.

As I turned from her bedside to the rest of my life, I knew we had just played a serious game of Tag and I was IT.