Living in the Past

I worked at the Fitch House at Old Sturbridge Village for a year or so as a part-time job in summers and on weekends.  This was at the same time I started teaching 10 years ago. If you don't know about Sturbridge Village, it's a replica of a village from the 1840s, and all the houses, stores, the church, and even the covered bridge came from old New England towns. The village is about 20 miles from Worcester, and we used to go there on class trips from Northboro during elementary school.  The Bake Shop is my favorite and only memory from those times--it was full of the smell of ginger and molasses, and butter and sugar browning in the oven.

  Lots of people make fun of you when you choose jobs like being an interpreter in a place like that. They say you want to live in the past.  There's a certain truth to that.  I was part of a group of women who cooked over the fireplace all morning, baking cakes and pies, and  even roasting coffee beans which we ground up for coffee break.  The museum visitors traipsed through, watching us sweat over the fire to finally unearth a cake from the tin baker that we placed  in the fireplace. Little kids, and even some adults, thought we slept and lived there year-round.  We dressed in 1840s style, in woolen cloaks and flannel dresses in the winter and light cotton dresses in the summer.  The dresses were a real handicap when it came to the fireplace cooking.  You had to be careful that you didn't catch on fire and create a real treat for the museum patrons.  Sometimes the minister would come to dinner on Sunday, and we had to cook our asses off all morning, roasting lamb or beef.  The interpreters with acting ability would stage the meal in the dining room, Mr. and Mrs. Fitch playing host while the minister droned on, the men all twitching their mustaches and fondling their beards while the women hustled the food to the table.

But it was sort of romantic to work there. I loved it on late November days when the near freezing rain would pour down, no visitors would come, and we'd just build a big fire in the fireplace, as usual, and sit and gab while baking something delicious for ourselves. The men would come in, looking for food after a morning of splitting wood or herding the oxen around.  It was a slowed down kind of job in general.  Even on the busiest days in the summer, when the visitors constantly passed through, we'd sit in the family room at the front of the house and sew.  I was trying to learn to do buttonholes by hand and several stitches that were necessary if I wanted to become an official "mender" for the costume department.  After having spent nearly 10 years at IBM, working my way up the ladder, this was now my only goal.  What a relief.

More than anything, it was the clothes that slowed me down and made me a little more dreamy.  Wearing a little white cap under my bonnet, carrying a hand-woven basket, and hearing my feet ripple my hem as I walked across the common made me more present.

Guilty Pleasure

This is a sketch I made from a balcony in Barcelona where I spent a few crippled days with  bandaged feet.  I drew it after walking half of the Camino de Compostela in 2003.  It reminds me that some people don't have to walk 15 or 20 miles a day to have fun.  One of my childhood friends is retiring from Worcester Public Schools in May...I'm jealous. I take fun very seriously and I seem to need projects, such as walking across the top of Spain for a month, to have a good time.  So maybe it's just as well that I continue to work.  I'm at work now, as a matter of fact, working my "duty day", which entails a satisfying 14 hour day at school.  Too bad there's nobody home, except those other teachers, to guilt trip.  I'm manning the library after a day of teaching indirect objects, the Latin root MOV, schwa unaccented syllables, and research papers. I'm a saint. 

I grew up in a workaholic family.  Dad ran the family book bindery where even the most addled or underaged family members could perform some task.  I was in there cleaning the bathrooms at 11.  There was always an angry sign in the women's room demanding that Kotex should be disposed of in the basket, and if that wasn't enough to convince any woman to conform, the glares of the men after reaming out the toilet was enough.  A few years later, I was trained up for most of the jobs that didn't involve guillotines or pressurized machines that could flatten your arm for good.  Every dime I made went into my college education. I worked in the Dura Book Bindery in Marlboro, MA from the ages of 11 to 21, when I was finally released from Dad's clutches when I landed a job as a reporter for the "Worcester Telegram and Gazette." All through the book bindery years, I was pressed into service in my "spare" time, after school and bindery,  to help Dad plow, cultivate, harvest, or sell in his market garden.  When we did take a day off once every five years to attend a family reunion, my mother and I could be seen hidden away in the kitchen, vigorously wiping plates with a clean cloth, or degreasing pots.  This was strategic--we looked like angels, the big helpers, when it was really about avoiding anything social.  Social  fun was tough for the Kimballs, but work was easy. 

The habit of using my work as a hiding place has been successful until now, but as my peers retire, I'm going to have to figure out a different approach, if I ever get to retirement myself.  How can I continue to be virtuous and without reproach?  I've certainly enjoyed laying a guilt trip on others, such as the last man with whom I lived.  He was older, and he had early retirement, so I would come dragging home from work and ask in a slightly haughty voice what he'd done with himself all day.  Worked like a charm!  He'd get all weird, blustering, and rapidly point out all of his projects while I'd cackle in the corner.  I don't want anybody doing that to me,  unless I can figure out a way not to care anymore.                                                         

December 5, 2010

I grew up near Worcester, MA.  The sketch opposite is from Salisbury St. in Worcester, where we used to ride around and gawk at the rich peoples' houses from our Hudson Hornet.  We did a lot of gawking from a Hudson when I was young.  After the tornado ripped through Westboro around 1954, not too far from my house, we piled in so we could, hopefully, ride victoriously through the devastation of other people's lives.  We were disappointed when angry cops diverted us from the tragedy we'd missed by a few miles.
The Hudson Hornets that came and went from our ash-filled driveway (we burned coal, no doubt the last people north of Appalachia to do so in 1960, and Dad paved the driveway with the ashes) were numberless.  My dad was a convert to those cars because they were luxurious in his mind.  I did like the radios in the Hornet, which I blasted with the music of The Animals.  But luxury or not, Hudsons never started, or worse, our latest incarnation would start, and it would take me uptown to buy my dad's Winstons, and then it would die for the return trip.  I guess my love of walking long distances began then because I was often trudging the backroads home on a weekend afternoon.  It was so common for the car to die that I stopped considering it to be a problem.  To this day, though, I am left with a phobia about cars breaking down.  I obsess about it, obsess about my children's cars, and I'll obsess about your car if you are in need of my services.  Apparently the "bad boys" from the Lyman School in Westboro liked our Hudsons as much as my father did.  Dad worked over there; he was in charge of the dairy farm.  No doubt the farm was considered to be therapeutic in a Yankee way for restless adolescent thugs.  This was back when the state would house orphans as well as murderers all in the same place; they just needed to be under 18.  My father taught the boys how to run a dairy farm, and it was a dangerous job.  I remember sitting over codfish gravy and mashed potato and having Dad tell us how the night watchmen had been killed by a bunch of escapees who hit him violently over the head.  Anyway, Dad had earned a reputation at Lyman School with those murderers and orphans.  They knew where we lived and they knew he always left the keys in the Hudson Hornet that sat on an ashpile near the road.  They always headed straight for Davis St. and stole our car.  I remember one Easter, the only time we ever really went to church, that we discovered the car was gone.  Luckily those boys would go only as far as there was gas, then abandon the car.  As far as I know, the succession of Hornets never broke down for any of our thieves. They'd typically run out of fuel about an hour away--my mother was a skinflint about gas and she'd only put in $1 worth every four or five days. So we always got the cars back, although they drove funny afterward, the energy of those criminals imbeded in the steering wheel.