In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Several years ago, maybe in 2007 or
2008 Sam Lowell, the locally well-known lawyer from the town of Carver about
thirty miles south of Boston, wrote some small pieces about the old days in the
town, the old days being for him the 1950s and 1960s. At that time the town was
mainly a rural outpost, a place where instead of the usual rural occupation of
farming the cranberry bogs and boggers (as kids we called then “boogers” not knowing
what the hell bogs were about although knew what nasty boogers were) held sway
and dominated a fair part of town life, ran the town politics and determined
the ethos, determined the ethos to the extent that was possible in post-World
War II America where the older cultural norms were rapidly being replaced by a
speedier and less homespun way of doing business. In the teenage life line-up,
the only one that was important in Sam’s world then, since he was not a bogger
and had no bogger roots he had gravitated to those whose families like his that were connected with the shipbuilding
industry about twenty miles up the road. So you would have seen Sam and his
corner boys on any given Friday or Saturday night if not dated up holding up
the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street daring, with the
exception of Jack Callahan the great school football running back and fourth
generation bogger who hung with them because he thought they were “cool,” any of
the bogger clan to do anything but go in and order food or play the jukebox. (Seemingly
every boy in town from junior high on, if not before, had his corner boys for
protection against a dangerous world outside the corner, or something like that
if you asked them. If you wanted an explanation more than self-preservation professional
sociologists and cracker barrel philosophers of the time spent endless hours of
their time analyzing that angst-driven night and could give you their take on
the phenomenon).
Sam had seen that small town Americana
all change over his long association with the town, including a few terms as a
town selectman, although the boggers were still there, still moaning about
their collective water tax bills, and still a force on the board but the drift
over the decades was for the town to become a bedroom community for the
sprawling high tech industry running the corridor about ten miles away. Sam
though hung up with some old age nostalgia twist wrote about the old
neighborhood now still intact as if time had passed that hell’s little acre by (the
new developments were created on abandoned bog lands to the benefit mainly of
Myles Larson, the largest bogger around), largely still composed of the small
tumbledown small single family homes with a patch of green like that he grew up
and came of age in on “the wrong side of the tracks (along with three brothers
all close in age in a five room shack, Sam had never, except in front of his
parents, ever called it anything but that). Sam sighed one time to his old
friend from that very neighborhood Pete Markin after they had put the dust of
the old town behind them for a while on the hitchhike road west that the “acres”
of the world will always be with us. Markin, in his “newer world” turn the old
world upside down phase did not want to hear that, blocked it out when Sam would
bring the idea up on the road. That said a lot about Markin, and about Sam as
well.
Wrote too about the old (painful, the
painful being that the school drew the more prosperous new arrivals staring to
come into town leaving the boggers over at John Alden Junior High and
subjecting him to lots of taunts about his brother hand-me-down clothes, stuff
like that) days when he attended the then newly built Myles Standish Junior
High School (such places are now almost universally called middle schools)
where he and his fellow class- mates were the first to go through starting in
seventh grade. In that piece he mentioned that he was not adverse, hell, he
depended on “cribbing” words, phrases and sentences from many sources. One such
“crib” was appropriating the title of a six-volume saga by the French writer
Marcel Proust for one of those sketches, the title used here In Search of
Lost Time as well. He noted that an alternative translation of that work
was Remembrances of Things Past which he felt did not do justice to what
he, Sam, was trying to get a across. Sam had no problem, no known problem
anyway, with remembering things from the past but he thought the idea of a
search, of an active scouring of what had gone on in his callow youth (his
term) was more appropriate to what he was thinking and
feeling.
Prior to writing those pieces Sam had
contacted through the marvels of modern technology, through the Internet, Google
and Facebook a number of the surviving members of that Myles Standish
Class of 1962 to get their take on what they remembered, what search that they might
be interested in undertaking to “understand what the hell happened back then
and why” (his expression, okay). He got a number of responses, the unusual
stuff that people who have not seen each for a long time, since the old days as
school and so are inclined to put up a “front,” show that trajectory toward
state prison or whore-houses had been put behind them long ago, so endlessly
going on and on about beautiful houses in beautiful neighborhoods putting paid
to the dust of the dingy old town, what they had done with their lives in
resume form, endless prattle about grandchildren (Sam admitted to a certain
inclination that way himself so he was more forgiving on that issue) and so
forth who also once Sam brought the matter up wanted to think back to those
days. One of those classmates, Melinda Loring, whom Sam in high school although
not in junior high something of a “crush” on but so did a lot of other guys, after
they had sent some e-mail traffic to each other, sent him via that same method
(oh beautiful technology on some things) a copy of a booklet that had been put
out by the Myles Standish school administrators in 1987 commemorating the 25th
anniversary of the opening of the school. Sam thoughtfully (his term) looked
through the booklet and when he came upon the page shown above where an art
class and a music class were pictured he discovered that one of the students in
the art class photograph was of him.
That set off a train of memories about
how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every
student a chance to take art in school and outside as well unlike today when he
had been recently informed that due to school budget cuts art is no longer
offered to each student but is tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes
at the out-of-the-way community center, when Mrs. Robert’s encouraged him to
become an artist, thought he had talent (later at Carver High Mr. Henry thought
the same thing and was prepared to recommend him to his alma mater, the
Massachusetts School of Art in the Back Bay of Boston).
Art for Sam had always been a way for
him to express what he could not put in words, could not easily put in words
anyway and he was always crazy to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to
see some artwork by real professionals, especially the abstract expressionists
that he was visually drawn to (and would leave after viewing feeling like he at
best would be an inspired amateur). The big reason that he did not pursue that
art career had a lot to do with coming up “from hunger,” coming up the hard way
and when he broached the subject to his parents, mainly his mother, she
vigorously emphasized the hard life of the average artist and told him that a
manly profession (her term, although she did not mean the law but like all
second generation Irish mothers in that town when they got their tongues
wagging some nice white collar civil service job to support a nice wife, nice three
children and a nice white picket fenced house outside the “acre,” such were
motherly dreams) was better for a boy who had come up from the dust of society.
He wondered about that after seeing the photograph, wondered about the fact
that after a lifetime of working the manly profession of the law all he could
conclude was that there were a million good lawyers but far fewer good artists
and maybe he could have at least had his fifteen minutes of fame in that field.
He resolved to search for some old artwork stored he did not know where, maybe
still in the attic of the old house which after his parents passed on his unmarried
older brother, Seamus, took over, to see if that path would have made sense.
Sam had had to laugh after looking at
the other photograph, the one of the music room, where he spotted his old
friend Ralph Morse who went on in the 1960s to some small fame in the Greater
Boston area as a member of the rock group The Rockin’ Ramrods. Many an after
concert party found Ralph and Sam drunk as skunks talking about the old days when
rock and roll music was not even let into the Morse household (his parents were
Evangelical and hated “the devil’s music”) and barley tolerated in the Lowell
household (a truce declared when his parents purchased a transistor radio for
him one Christmas at the Radio Shack so they could not hear the music). Ralph
had eventually headed west to seek his fame and fortune but kind of fell off
the face of the earth and nobody even with today’s technology has been able to
find out his whereabouts, if any.
That look too set off a train of memories
about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered
every student a chance to take music in school and outside as well like with
art classes unlike today when he had been informed recently that due to school
budget cuts music is no longer offered to each student but is also tied to some
cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center.
However unlike with his art teachers Mr. Dasher the music teacher often went
out of his way to tell Sam to keep his voice down since it was gravelly, and
off-key to boot.
At the time Sam did not think much
about it, did not feel bad about having no musical sense. Later though once he
heard folk music, the blues and some other roots music he felt bad that Mister
Dasher had put a damper on his musical sensibilities. Not that he would have
gone on to some career like Ralph, at least Ralph had his fifteen minutes of
fame, but he would have avoided that life-long habit of singing low, singing in
the shower, singing up in the isolated third floor of his current home where no
one, including his longtime companion, Laura Perkins a woman with a
professional grade voice that would make the angels weep, would hear him. The
search for memory goes on….
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