Anchors and Arrows: a Memoir of Seven Decades: Halfway up the Mountain: a Travel Journal

By Helen Neswald

Anchors and Arrows: A Memoir of Seven Decades follows the author through the ordinary stations of life, including coming of age, marriage, parenting, disability, and loss. This brief account of an essentially happy life, which moves from a background of urban living to a rural outpost in southern Vermont, is festooned with adventures, humor, and derived wisdom.

Halfway up the Mountain is a colorful account of a backpacking excursion on Vermonts Long Trail, in which a middle-aged couple, conducted by their two young adult offspring, are led through triumphs and defeats, mud traps, and slippery slopes before returning to the stodgy respectability of middle-class living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543480689

Book preview

Anchors

and Arrows

A Memoir of Seven Decades

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Halfway Up

the Mountain

A Travel Journal

Helen Neswald

Copyright © 2018 by Helen Neswald.

Library of Congress Control Number:             2018900944

ISBN:                   Hardcover                                   978-1-5434-8070-2

                            Softcover                                     978-1-5434-8069-6

                            eBook                                            978-1-5434-8068-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/30/2018

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CONTENTS

Author’s Preface

Jungle

Desert

Grounded

Marriage

Italy/Brooklyn

Vermont

Summing Up

Halfway Up The Mountain A Travel Journal

for my children

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

T his memoir of my life to date employs false names of many referenced characters, while retaining factual accuracy.

Jungle

O ur house was small; the world was large . Such was my first perception of a hilly geography, the east Bronx of the 1940’s, which, having no horizon, seemed infinite. Armed with nothing more than an injunction against accepting candy from strangers, from an early age I was permitted to explore it at my discretion. Like the song-celebrated bear, I and my companions were always climbing or descending endless mountains, always approaching new unknowns, with few restrictions as long as we were home for dinner.

The quiet streets, like that where my small house was rooted, not only could be safely forded but served as open expanses for childhood games, in which children of various ages, ethnicities, and economic niches played with discarded bottle caps, pieces of ordinary chalk, or a length of rope, long before sweltering loads of cheap toys defined childish play. Although there was well-marked gender segregation -- the boys shot skellies’ in chalked fields mid-asphalt or roamed in unknown byways, while girls jumped rope for hours or played potsy" (hopskotch) on the narrower sidewalks -- we felt ourselves to be a single and, for the most part peaceable, community. Roller skates were my introduction to wheels and, in a pre-jeans age where girls’ legs were sparsely covered, I almost always had scraped knees. A little later, an older girl, recruited by my parents, taught me to ride a bicycle, a skill rarely practiced, as I didn’t own the means.

But grownups were rarely visible, and we children felt at liberty to do as we pleased. The varied buildings, a mix of styles and sizes, from older wood-framed homes like ours to mammoth brick apartment buildings, offered alluring shadowy alleys, dim entranceways and stone columns to climb and jump from. At home, I was allowed to explore our darkly mysterious coal cellar while my father struggled to keep a devouring furnace going. As he was a bookwormish man, much more at home in the world of the intellect than with physical operations, that task was sufficiently daunting to grant me time enough for a thoroughgoing tour of that intriguing underworld.

Outdoors, the busier thoroughfares did present barriers. Even at that sparsely motorized time, there was a chugging avenue I could cross only with adult steerage and a hand clasping mine, not as a gesture of intimacy but as protection across a raging river where trolleys, cars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons were swept by currents to unknown distant places. Once I crossed it, beside my least favorite aunt, wearing a vermillion sweater that might have been an amulet against the oncoming arrival of the new sibling I would find when I returned home many days later -- clearly a momentous event requiring the absence of my mother. Though I was old enough to have been given some account of what was happening, none was forthcoming. Rather I returned to find a curiously swaddled package on the parental bed. It was pink and though I was a normal three and a half year old it seemed to my measuring eyes bigger than I. The parental nightmare of the life threatening infantile diarrhea that had infected that bundle in the hospital was not shared with me till much later in life, long after my sister Alice had been spared by the daily home ministrations of Dr. Carroll -- a woman whose devotion and name became legendary in our family. Some years later, that savior tended me through a feverish bout of measles. I remember being vaguely aware of her presence, like a guardian angel, during my delusion-fomenting fever.

The bundle safely lodged in the ground floor apartment our family of four shared -- my paternal grandparents having a proportionately larger space on the second floor -- I proceeded with the business of everyday, punctuated by rites of passage, the most dramatic being my first day at school, an exercise in regimentation that to a four-year-old represented overweening authority. My mother reinforced that perception by the powerful role she attributed to it. Children had to go to school, she would remind me (no matter that I was glad to go at first), an admonition all the more paradoxical when I later learned that she had been compelled by her widowed mother’s financial duress to drop out of school in early adolescence, creating a gap in her development she attempted to close only when she and my father were in their retirement years.

Once accustomed to the strictures of standing in line and having to know your right from your left, at risk of never getting to use the bathroom, kindergarten was a grand place to play, an indoors much bigger than our tiny home, with blocks I might pile so high I could barely see the handsome co-builder who was my first love on the other side. A precocious sense of foreboding informed me that such joyful play would be cancelled by later academic regimens.

The sprawling masses of chattering children who poured out of that brick building at the end of the day and slowly moved off in directions other than mine testified to a world that radiated out to destinations I might never see, piqueing my curiosity.

No matter, as I had my share of playmates on our street -- most intimately an adventuresome, lawless ragamuffin named Dorothy, whose freedom from parental constraint and bold temperament enabled her to levy predations on the local Woolworth’s and other stores. I rapidly acquired that skill, until my growing interest in books prompted me to a reckless thievery in a local bookstore that led to my father’s taking me by the hand -- an effective moral investiture -- and bringing me silently home. No punishment could have been more eloquent than that grim wordlessness.

I must have been old enough to read by then, and as fond of words and their rules as was my father, who used to tell us stories and read from favorite children’s classics. I remember being treated gently by the proprietor as well. Perhaps stealing books rather than candy or toys elevated me to a higher status than the usual riff-raff (Dorothy would not have found books so appealing!) in the eyes of adults who were unaware that until that transformative moment I had also engaged in stealing doll clothes and other tiny items with apparent impunity. That untutored thievery was never brought to light, though it must have been suspected by a mother who frequently tidied up my meager store of possessions.

My mother never let on she knew about my delinquency, but the maternal silence, so different from my father’s, seemed a posture of denial, in keeping with the absence