7/18/2020 — Charlotte, Vermont
Part I— Stanford
It was early summer when I walked across the stage at the University of California, Santa Cruz to accept my bachelor’s degree. Nine days later I packed up my blue manual Honda Civic and rode up the coast along Highway 1, then east over the Santa Cruz mountains, through Ken Kesey’s La Honda until I descended into the Santa Clara valley. I was moving to Stanford, a university so expansive it has its own ZIP code.
I crept the Civic in third gear through the campus entrance, south down a boulevard lined with palm trees like from a movie of having made it in California, then curved through campus to 622 Cabrillo Avenue. I was in awe and, apparently, at home. I unpacked my bags in a former maid’s quarters in a rambling, shag-carpeted, six-bedroom arts & craft house. It was a quick walk to fraternity row and the bookstore, but, as a professor’s house, it was secreted away from campus life. Most students would never know it was there.
I had moved to the university’s inartfully named Faculty Ghetto. I would spend my graduate summer living with a professor emeritus of hematology, Dr. Creger, and his wife Mrs. Creger (I would never call them Bill and Nancy) while I attempted a master’s degree in Communication with a hefty scholarship. It was a house last furnished when they had raised four children in the ’60s and ‘70s. I rented a room just off the kitchen on the first floor, below the Cregers and two medical school students and an adjunct professor of intellectual history I had known from UC Santa Cruz. It was a boarding house, like out of a mid-century novel, you pick the era. I’m sure the retired couple enjoyed the rental income, but, now, looking back, as I see my own parents age, perhaps what the Cregers valued most was the company and the purpose it brings.
At 6:30pm Mrs. Creeger would ring a bell for dinner, then the students and instructor would assume our places at the table, always at the same settings, then she and her husband would wheel in two glass-topped carts laden with food that soon made its way to the huge living room table — the board in this room & board — with enough space for all of us. I don’t ever remember anyone being late or the Cregers ever once accepting help.
The haimische old world living arrangement fit the neighborhood, which was like living in small town pre-war California. Kids pedaled bikes along dusty streets smeared with the buttercup glow of sunsets from the western hills. There was no traffic. There were no stoplights. There were no strip malls. It was a village bordered by rolling meadows on one side and students on the other. It was Jane Jacobs with a sun tan. It was all mine for 12 months of graduate school. I studied, fell in love with a classmate — a beautiful woman from Northern Ireland whom I still think of as the Star of County Down, lifted at the Tresidder gym… and that’s about it. We rarely left campus since Stanford’s work load could have been measured in tonnage.
Each night around the Creger table, after a day spent reading and studying and essaying and test taking, we talked about the news and medicine and language and movies. Since I was the youngest scholar at 22-years-old, whenever we debated a word’s meaning, I would dash to a bookcase to pull out the right volume of the Oxford English Dictionary and read the text aloud. They kept all twenty volumes of the OED in the dining room, where they were needed most.
My education in the classroom was as concentrated and dense as a collapsed star. I enjoyed the work, it was laborious and demanding, and I couldn’t falter or my scholarship would disappear, so I marched like a good solider under the full weight of coursework. Naturally my gifted girlfriend didn’t seem to notice as she skipped through assignments like child’s play.
For me at least, it was only at the nightly dining room where the gravity of grad school went weightless. The Cregers presided over a symposium of medicine, history, journalism and film — intermixed with stories from medical school in the 1950s and please to pass the avocados. There were no tests or examinations or grades. We filled our glasses from decanters of white and red wine from northern vineyards, we ate salad from the garden and we participated and created a kind of sunset-dappled intellectualism that Dr. Creger would bring to an end each night when he pushed back from his chair, took out his box of Romeo y Julieta cigars, lit one and then ease back into his throne for the night’s last act.
Second only to my relationship with a remarkable woman, dinners at the Cregers are what I loved most about Stanford; which is a university, if you’re lucky enough to find the right people, that will instruct you as much in life as it will in erudition.
Part II — Charlotte
Last night I sat in a kitchen with one of my oldest friends. We chatted in the first floor of a Vermont farmhouse he and his Brooklyn-born wife shockingly, surprisingly bought this spring in the Year of Our Lord Corona. Have they shared a life-long passion for Vermont? Have they even ever been to Vermont? All good questions, yet also, all unimportant. They are here now. Quid erat demonstrandum.
(Kudos to my Stanford girlfriend— who had graduated Oxford before matriculating to Stanford — for teaching me the Latin. That year the OED was only one source of my affection for all things brilliant and British.)
As a friend observed in a recent phone call, I’ve been jumping to the lily pads of most enduring friend to most enduring friend since leaving Manhattan in March — first to Andrew (age 4) for 3 and a half months at his Massachusetts farm, and now, as of two weeks ago, to Jesse (age 5) at his new-to-him 1800s farmhouse. His family abdicated New York City for a rural life an hour’s drive to Canada. Their tiny hamlet reaches to the eastern shore of Lake Champlain and lies just close enough to Burlington for groceries, but also far enough that you may opt for leftovers.
Jesse, tall, bespectacled at night, with close cropped hair my same ashy color, mastered another game of dishwasher Tetris while I kept him company in the kitchen. We had finished dinner with him, his wife, their two little girls, his father, his father’s partner, his sister and me. It was a family verging on a village. Our nightly arrangement around the dining table rang a pleasant chime from childhood, when Jesse and I were the age of his oldest girl. His parents, then slightly younger than we are now, would nourish us at their table in Newton in the late 1970s. The rule was that you could ask any biology question you wanted to his physician father, mostly about where babies came from, and his mother, who is sadly and impossibly gone for over ten years now, who is remembered at every meal and in every cadence, never seemed to mind us blowing bubbles in our milk.
Nearly a half century later, I’m still a witness to the same family at the table. We extol the delicious food they’ve prepared, our talk forms eddies and pools as we marvel over their girls who are full of dramatic stories and wry smiles and entreaties for treats, we murmur about the brilliance of Hamilton, the musical and sometimes the man. The discourse churns a little faster when we get to politics, but sooner than you’d think the discussion glides into nuance and insight and acceptance and eventually, to goodnight.
Jesse worked a lathered sponge over pots and serving trays and frying pans and strainers and casseroles and more. He filled the dishwasher with cereal bowls, adult-size plates, kids’ plastic flatware, cutlery, serving utensils, spatulas, vegetable peelers and the thousands of other items that go into his family’s dinner. I drank wine and chatted. He didn’t seem to mind my repose, he likes being captain of his kitchen, in part because he navigates it so well, and in part, or at least I hope, since he knows I will be the one who unloads the dishwasher first thing in the morning as I wake before the family and fumble around for coffee.
It was around nine. His wife and sister worked upstairs to wash and pajama and read and rest the girls. The older parents had retired. Window sashes stayed open to the street. Screen doors filtered out mosquitoes and moths. We were open to a Vermont world that was as quiet as a leaf.
By now the sun had curved beyond the Adirondack Mountains, turning them the color of wet slate yet with crimson cusps. We were close to New York, the state line is about three miles from the front porch, but we were a proverbial million miles from The City — capital T, capital C — where Jesse and I have, had, both lived for over 20 years. There is one shop in this town. It closes each day at 3pm. There are farm stands and grazing pasture and… more pasture. A family down the road sells bouquets in their front yard for five dollars apiece.
The subways and sidewalks and intersections and restaurants and traffic and the just, multimedia Dadaist collage of every day urbanity; the elevators and escalators and sirens and doorways and buildings that tell their stories in double, sometimes triple digits — all that makes up New York City was not missed by either one of us. It wasn’t despised either. It was just kind of, irrelevant compared to the near psychedelic beauty of Vermont.
Jesse placed the large dinner plates at the back of the dishwasher’s bottom shelf, he lined up the girl’s trays and the garlic press and two serving tongs and untold spatulas and acres of glasses and cups and water bottles into perfect repeated rows like a Christopher Burden installation. He hung a red rag limp with dishwater by the white stove. We finished whatever we had been discussing and bid each other goodnight. He ascended to the second floor. I walked out the kitchen and into the mudroom.
I crossed the threshold of the in-law apartment at the back of the house and walked barefoot across the milk-colored carpet.
It suddenly felt familiar.
A bedroom off a kitchen.
Dinners at a long table with talk of news and art and medicine and memories.
Wrestling with topics that never need besting because we can wait to struggle with them at tomorrow’s banquet, and besides, it’s a scrimmage among friends, not a battle royal.
The ending of meals with wine and observations and stories as the sky above us turns indigo.
A rambling, ancient house surrounded by gardens and side streets.
I was back at the old faculty neighborhood, it was the Creger’s house on Cabrillo Avenue a quarter century ago. Both pedagogic grandparents are now achingly, respectfully gone. The 94305 ZIP code lies three thousands miles to the west, where the sun lingers after lunchtime as we now go to bed, but back then out there was so immediately in mind that it felt physically at hand, as if you can grasp time by its handles. Of course you can’t, so you just pause halfway across the room, savor for a moment, and then go to bed.
It’s a cliché that time’s telling makes couplets. That evening as I turned on the lamp in my borrowed bedroom and switched the window a/c to redemption, I thought of a university who’s color is Cardinal, which might as well be Scarlet, which is a woman’s name that imperfectly rhymes with where I will sleep tonight in Charlotte. Technically, the residents here call it shar-LOT, after King George III’s wife, but you don’t care about all that. You’ll accept the rhythm.
So let’s just say QED. Almost.
