The Road Trip - Chapter II: On to the Berkshires

It was good to shake the dust of Poughkeepsie from my feet. The place baked in the relentless sunlight and just looked tired, dusty, and best seen in the rear-view mirror. The road (U.S. Route 44) then took me north and east, through Millbrook and Amenia in Dutchess County and across the line into Connecticut. In Canaan, U.S. 7 meets Route 44 and heads north into Massachusetts. I had programmed my GPS device to take me to Southfield, Mass., the home town of my dear departed law school friend and classmate Jim Stevens, seen here in June 1978 with my daughter Lindsay, then just a year and a half old, at the top of the World Trade Center (remember?) in New York City... And with your humble correspondent at the Scottish games in Round Hill, Connecticut, in July 1991... A tiny village in the southern Berkshire Hills, Southfield has come a long way since I visited Jim there first in late 1974. We were both first-year law students then and had bonded in our mutual bewilderment at the utterly baffling stuff we had been studying for the past several months. Jim was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and his academic abilities sustained me through many a bout of despair over the mysteries of Marbury v. Madison and other landmark Supreme Court decisions he'd already studied in his undergraduate history courses. In those days, Jim worked holidays at the Southfield village store, which then did double duty as a general store and the municipal post office. Today, new owners have turned it into a Yuppie-chic gourmet cafe and restaurant catering to the burgeoning throngs of urbanites who have established vacation homes in the area... Ultimately, Jim Stevens's story is a tragic one (in keeping with the tone of my road trip? I hoped not). After a long and hard-fought battle with a recurring brain tumor, he died just about 13 years ago to the day, the father of a wonderful son, veteran of many years of criminal prosecution work in the Manhattan District Attorney's office and then a well-respected country practitioner in Great Barrington. It was fond memories of that friendship, so many of them centered on Jim's beloved Southfield, which had brought me there on my 65th birthday, to lay a wreath (figuratively) at his resting place in this idyllic little town seemingly in the middle of nowhere...

My daughters called him "Uncle Jimmy." He was godfather to Lindsay, and honorary godfather to Janet. I was godfather to his son, Armen. While were were at Villanova, he was an almost regular weekend guest in our home, where we tried to feed him up a bit from the diet of cold cereal and freeze-dried mashed potatoes which sustained him during the week in the rooming-house where he lived. His boyhood hero was John Wayne; I remember giving him for his birthday in 1975 a big book of photo stills from movies in which the Duke had starred -- and snippets of whose dialogue Jim could rattle off by heart.

This was another rather melancholy stop on my sentimental journey into New England, but in the end an uplifting one, so I thought. Sometimes it's good to remember places and people who have held vast tracts of one's interior landscape.

Now, it was time to drive up through Stockbridge, Lenox and Lee, get on the Mass Pike, aim the car east, and make a beeline the 112 miles to Boston, then Cambridge, then Harvard Yard, and to turn away from the land of the melancholy to a place of joy, youth, energy -- and Nora Jeanne Molyneaux and her parents!

The Road Trip - Chapter I: Darkness at Midday

All right. It's time to stop crying over unexposed film and get on with the story.

The first destination on my road trip was 139 Academy Street, Poughkeepsie, New York, an historic Hudson Valley farmhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was the home where my first wife was raised with her four siblings in such a Bedlam of chaos and dysfunctional relationships that sanity was in critically short supply (if the family folklore is to be believed). Of course, many things become clear only in hindsight. Things seemed normal enough in the Poughkeepsie homestead during most of the two decades of that marriage (1970-1990) -- if one disregarded my ex-mother-in-law's penchant for collecting strange derelict characters and lodging them on the third floor, a kitchen which might have been condemned by the public health authorities (the refrigerator especially), and enough misery and weirdness to have filled a fat novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

So what drew me back to the place? Curiosity, plain and simple. Morbid curiosity? Perhaps. The house has been out of my late ex-wife's family for a good many years now. From outward appearances, it's in the process of falling down, like the House of Usher. It's hard to tell if the place is even inhabited (by living human beings, I mean); certainly no one challenged my walking onto the property to take pictures. It exhaled darkness and decay, even in the middle of a bright day in June 2010.

On this side porch, guests gathered to go through the receiving line after our wedding in August 1970. After looking at the pictures, you may decide for yourself whether or not you'd be willing to set foot on that porch for any purpose. The front of the house, facing Academy Street, was once an imposing specimen of Hudson Valley Victorian architecture; now it's just a specimen of faded glory.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. So far, my epic sentimental journey was looking a bit shabby and melancholy around the edges. You can't go home again, wrote Thomas Wolfe. It has something to do with time and the river.