VACATION

A

DICTIONARY

OF THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

IN WHICH

The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS,

Explained in their DIFFERENT MEANINGS,

AND

Authorized by the NAMES of the WRITERS

IN WHOLE Works they are found.

By the Author

Samuel Johnson, A.M.

W. Strahan et al, London

1770

VACA’TION. [vacatio, Latin.]

1. Intermission of juridical proceedings, or any other stated employments; recess of courts or senates.
2. Leisure; freedom from trouble or perplexity.

See you all in two weeks!

SERIOUS BUSINESS...

There are twenty-six of them, neatly dressed.

Hair shining, parted, combed.

Two are still sporting high collars, but the rest have the modern, turned look; a few have vests; one’s in a bow tie, but the others are knotted and pinned; almost all have French cuffs with links, laced shoes, sharply creased trousers.

Confident. Assured. Not smiling.

It’s serious business…

This is the Class Day Committee – the seniors responsible for the activities for the full-day celebration for the Class of 1907 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

         

My grandfather, Gardner S. Gould, is on the far left, front row.

          He majored in Civil Engineering, was a member of the track team, captain of the hockey team (two of his brothers followed him to MIT; the Gould Forward Line was formidable, indeed!). His thesis? A Plan for the Abolition of Grade Crossings at Quincy Mass.

He disliked working for others, preferred to be his “own man;” he had a private practice with offices in Boston (which shut down every day from noon to one; he and a colleague from down the hall religiously played cutthroat cribbage during lunch).

One of his projects was the construction of the portico over Plymouth Rock—I have a postcard view of it and a framed citation from his construction crew!

But who are all the others? I’ve often wondered where they worked, wondered about the bridges and roads and structures they designed and built; who they married, the names of their children, where they lived and died.

And I’ve often wondered how they remembered my grandfather—fondly, I hope, as do I.

NANA, FISHING...

This is my maternal grandmother, Verna (Vernette)…born in January of 1885 at Bear Island, Queensbury Parish, Province of New Brunswick, Canada.

Her father had both a farm and a general store there—he sold flour, meal, dry goods, groceries and hardware. Her chore on the farm was caring for the chickens – feeding, cleaning the coop, collecting eggs, which she sold in her father’s store for her first earnings.

She relocated to the USA when she was just twenty-one years old; eventually worked as a nurse at Faulkner Hospital in Boston, where she met my grandfather. She was his operating nurse for a few years, then married him in 1911.

          She lived the rest of her life in Boston.

The photo was taken by my grandfather in 1911, at Bear Island, where they traveled to be married in her parents’ living room – their honeymoon was a week-long fishing and canoe trip along the St. John River (note the rod by her side, resting on the seats). She looks pretty fashionable: dark hose, skirt, middy blouse with tie; her hair’s swept up a la Gibson.

I have her eyes.

She fished for her supper in the St. John River as a child, fished later on in the lake near their summer house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. She taught me to fish in that same lake; I caught my first perch in the shadow of Mount Monadnock—I remember the quiet grinding of the oarlocks as my grandmother rowed me about in that soft, purple light.

She loved dogs (several cocker spaniels, oftentimes in pairs), fast cars (my mother remembered her bombing around Boston in a bright yellow roadster). She ate apples and ripe pears (Bosc preferred), liked the smell of horses and farmyards; she insisted the alphabet ended in “zed.” She talked to crows, made fantastic blueberry pies, sewed matching pajamas for me and my teddy bear, took me for long walks in the woods and taught me to build houses for the Little People (who, she said, migrated to and from Canada with the geese every spring and fall). She bought me jeans and soft flannel shirts, Red Ball Jets and sweatshirts.

And she loved me; she was the first person in my life who accepted me unconditionally.

I adored her.

She died in Boston on May 27, 1957. 

WRITING AND WORDS...

Typewriters.

Writing.

Words.

Couldn’t be more appropriate, I thought, for I’ve spent my week going over galley proofs of my latest novel – pages and pages of type, of writing, of words: Copyright page, title page, dedication; table of contents, running heads, pagination; acknowledgements, notes on sources; chapter heads, introductory quotes…

          …two hundred fifty-eight pages…

…seventy thousand, nine hundred fifty-seven words.

Four years.

I used to think that writing a novel is an act of faith.

I mean, you start at what you think is the beginning, and you go until you reach the end.

You start with a town, say, a particular stretch of roadway, the river that runs near it. You start with a house that you own and love; you start with a deed that helps you go back to the people who first lived there nearly two hundred years ago – the people who built your house.

You learn their first names, their middle initials.

You find the years of their births and marriages, the names of their children, the years of their deaths; you go to probate court and read their wills, their legal papers; you hold documents they have held, you see their handwriting.

          You read the public remnants of their lives.

You walk in their barns with the memories of their horses and cows, their sheep, their oxen and swine; you find the old foundations of their sheds and cribs, their chicken coops.

You smell their lilacs in spring, you watch their apple blossoms fall.

You stand on their front porch in moonlight.

At night you cook dinner in their kitchen and read the newspaper in their front room; you climb their stairs to their bedrooms and dream of broad fields and woodlots, orchards and old stone walls.

After a while, you realize you have a sense of them, and that they are still here. You are living in their house; you begin to understand that you owe them something for this gift they have given you.

And that’s when you realize that you were wrong – that writing a novel is not an act of faith; it is, rather, an act of integrity.

You start over, and you write a novel for them – it’s the best you can do.

BOSTON WATER WORKS...

My father was a civil engineer.

So was my grandfather and three more up the line – it runs in the blood, it seems.

John Allen Gould III, my great-grandfather, was born in Newton Upper Falls (MA) in 1852. When he was just married, he “took employment” (as they used to say) with the Boston Water District; he became an expert in the engineering of distribution systems – eventually consulted all through the New England states.

One of his first jobs was the Sudbury River Conduit, an aqueduct system that delivered water from the outlying Sudbury River to the water mains of Boston.

It was a big deal, and the Boston Water Works hired a photographer to record the development of the conduit system – a series of one hundred stereopticon cards, numbered and dated; each head engineer received a set of them.

The top photo, workmen are finishing centering the large arch over the Charles River. They built the framework first – all by hand, of course, without power tools or machinery. There are a few men on the top; the design of the support work is beautiful to me, and the wavering reflection of the trusses in the Charles River below is amazing. Photo taken September 13, 1876.

After the wooden structure was complete, the masons moved in, and applied the stonework. Here they’re nearly half-way through their part of the job – they’ve filled in some spaces between arches, and the first layer has been applied over the top. This was taken a month later – November 13, 1876.

In this last shot of the Charles River Bridge, workmen are laying the foundation for the conduit itself – the pipeline that would carry the water into Boston.

          The final part of the job, of course, was to burn out the woodwork from beneath the stonework, leaving clear passage for traffic through the arches. This shot was taken from the Newton side, looking west.

The whole project took a number of years, of course, and John Allen Gould went on to design distribution systems for the Brookline Gas Light Company; he also worked for the Boston Gas Light Company, where he became a director.

          He died in Newton Upper Falls on May 18, 1919.

DOUBLE DOORS...

I looked at that Sepia Saturday shot for a long time; I stored it on my desktop and sat down at my desk every now and then just to have a look at it.

          I noticed things: Pin striped suits, chessboards, chess pieces, tablecloths, chairs with scrolled backs, library tables, horrible flowery wallpaper, music stands – even men with receding hairlines – but nothing came to me.

          Nothing…

…until today, when I looked at the photo one more time.

And there they were, right before my eyes: double doors!

Double doors – or French doors – are two adjacent doors that share the same larger frame. Here in New England, old public buildings such as churches, meeting houses and businesses often had double doors; the doors had matching hardware, and both knobs were on the inside edges.

          Sometimes, there was a knob only on one side – the other door released from the inside; I’ve seen one set of doors with a knob on one side and a lock on the other.

These white double doors are from the old Union Church in Harpswell Center, built in 1841 by local ship carpenters. It fell into disrepair in the mid-20^th century; the Harpswell Garden Club restored the building in 1952 and continues to maintain it by charging reasonable fees for weddings and other events – it’s best to be married in the warmer months, for the old place has absolutely no heating (I can tell you this from experience). It does have the old maghogany pulpit and pine pews and floors; it has a working organ, too.

          But it’s “wicked cold,” as we say in Maine.

It was listed on the National Register of Historical Places in 1989.

The green, single-paned set is from the Merriconeag Grange Hall, just down the road from the Union Church in Harpswell.

The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry is a fraternal organization formed in the mid-1800s, right after the American Civil War.

It’s got secret rituals, like most fraternal groups; in the early years it was devoted to educational events (latest practices in farming, cooperative seed purchase, etc.) and, perhaps more importantly, social events for farming families – suppers and programs and dances that eased the isolation and tedium of farm life in the 19^th century.

          Merriconeag Grange still meets, twice monthly – one of the few Granges still thriving in the area.

Some say that the doors of a building frame the measure of its hospitality; if that’s true – and I tend to believe it is – then these old double doors, with their balance and symmetry, welcome you inside with warmth and a sense of grace.

ANNIE SAGAN'S PIE CRUST...

This battered Boston Cooking School Cook Book, published in 1942, was the only cookbook I remember seeing in my grandmother’s kitchen; it was the only cookbook that Annie Sagan ever used.

          My mother used to talk about other cooks my grandparents hired in their Eliot Street house:

There was Mary, who cooked and cleaned during the 1920s with such fervor that she exhausted everybody in the house! Mary won my grandparents’ devotion when she rescued my mother, who had gone down the street to attend a wake (she was about seven years old) because she heard there was a “boddy” there and she’d never seen one…

“At least she left a note,” Mary said to my grandmother!

And there was Kathleen, who was there through the 1930s and whistled all the time; drove my grandfather nuts, my mother said, but he let it slide because she made the best pudding he ever had, and a good pudding was worth a few tunes.

And then there was Annie Sagan, who arrived when my mother was away at college and stayed until the late 1950s, when my grandmother died and the house was closed up and, eventually, sold, marking the end of an era, the end of a way of life.

I remember Annie Sagan.

I remember visiting my grandparents – the long drive down from Maine, the crunch of gravel under the tires in their driveway, the hugs from my grandparents on the front porch. And I remember tearing down the hallway, past the sitting room, then the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen to hug Mrs. Sagan, who smelled like flour and hot bread!

And, best of all, she had a wen, a big one, right on her face near her nose! I was absolutely fascinated by it—it had a hair growing out of it, for goodness sake!—and she tolerated my examination of it with great patience. She wore flowered dresses, an apron (always an apron!), and sturdy, sensible shoes. She cooked and cleaned for my grandparents, did the laundry, helped my grandmother in the gardens.

She used to run the carpet sweeper (remember those?) every day; would let me sit on the top of it, wrap my legs around the pile and hang on for dear life as she worked over the rugs -- boy, what I ride that was!

I sat on the steps down to the laundry room and listened to her tell stories of her childhood -- she used big bars of yellow soap and a scrub board for stubborn dirt and stains, then ran it all through the electric washing machine.

I was allowed to turn the crank for the wringer…

Those days are long gone, but I still have Mrs. Sagan’s cookbook, her rolling pin and her pie crust recipe, written in her own hand and glued to a larger piece of paper my mother kept for years.

“Mrs. Sagan made the best pie crust on the planet,” everybody said; it’s still the truth today, but my brother finishes a very close Second Place!