4 June 2024

As I compose this account of my 3440-mile Southern Sojourn of last month, I am of course considering what happened then in light of what’s happening now.  Last evening I watched a mother snapping turtle make her way up from the woods to our lower yard, where after a couple of false starts at digging, she finally chose a spot at the driveway’s edge and labored there for the next several hours.  I had seen a turtle on the move across Town Hall Road a couple days before, and felt guilty about not crossing her myself.  But she was large and those turtles can bite and claw quickly, so I did not interfere.  Ms. Turtle’s presence in our yard confirmed that this is procreation time for turtles:  I remember several occasions when the egg laying happened on my mother’s birthday, 17 June.

I was happy to see Nature performing more or less on schedule, and to be reminded of who’s been digging up parts of our yard.  Unfortunately for this laboring turtle, this morning I found she wasn’t the only one doing the digging:  her nest had been breached and many eggs punctured or scattered.  So it goes.  But when I tuned in to Boston Public Radio after noon, what I heard was a discussion of Republican attempts to take control of human reproductive rights, not just abortion, but also contraception.  Ms. Turtle’s brood’s bad luck was some predator’s sustenance, but wresting reproductive choices away from American women?  That’s not Nature; that’s Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale.  So, my account of the first two big events of my Big Trip, a celebration of two graduations 50 years apart, inevitably invites comparison between the world as I knew it in 1974 and what is happening now in 2024.  More on that in subsequent posts.

On May Day I got a later start than I had planned, first because I needed to jump online to order one of the limited number of non-resident parking passes for New Castle Common (which I did), and second because I was 45 minutes on the road before I realized I was not wearing the earrings central to several of the outfits I had planned for the next three weeks.  Vanity outweighed prudence:  I went home to collect them and departed for the second time closer to noon.  Making my way across New Hampshire headed for Buffalo, I wasn’t even out of NH when I passed a slower car on the two-lane road and suddenly saw the flashing lights of a police car gaining on me from behind.  I pulled over of course; the conversation went like this:

Officer Dexter:  Do you know why I pulled you over?

Me:                      I think it was because I was speeding.

Officer Dexter:  Do you now how fast you were going?

Me:                      Probably about 72.

Officer Dexter:  You were going 78.  And the guy you passed WAS doing the

speed limit, which is 55. Where are you headed?

Me:                      New York.

Officer Dexter:   I should arrest you just for that.  License and registration.

On checking my record—this was, after all, only the fourth time in my life I’ve been pulled over—the wry Officer Dexter gave me only a warning, together with the information that there’d recently been two fatal crashes on that highway, and a caution:  slow down!  I thanked him for stopping me, said I would be more prudent, and went on my way.

I made it to Cheektowaga via the Mohawk Valley that evening, 483 miles along on my journey, and had a nice conversation with a Pennsylvania oncologist as I waited on line at Chick-fil-a, both of us confessing how much we liked Chick-fil-a; she, a 36-year cancer survivor, admitted this was her third visit in as many days.  She speculated about how much someone who brought a really good New York-style bagel to Miami could make.  How much info two women meeting in a line can exchange!  I took my sandwich back to the Holiday Inn Express, watched a PBS program I’d never seen before, A Brief History of the Future, which among other segments showed how to 3-D print a house (!).  I went to sleep feeling optimistic about what lay ahead.

The next day proved more taxing, partly because of a loudly screeching child at a less-than-appealing breakfast, and partly because of the cumulatively tiring effect of adding 517 miles to the previous day’s 483.  The New Hampshire trees I’d left the day before had not yet leafed out, and driving south to Wytheville VA I was driving into spring.  But I was also driving into the mountains both my mother and my sister were once so sorry to leave, and where my own heart was broken for the first time.  I discovered my E-Z Pass transponder was not working, a concern at the start of so long a trip, and I kept thinking of things I needed to do back at home.  A Wendy’s taco salad for dinner and a VERY nice and VERY reasonable night at my first Sleep Inn managed to put things to right, though a quite disagreeable, very sexist pre-code movie on IMDb, 1933’s Man’s Castle starring Spencer Tracey and Loretta Young, left me wondering about how much metaphorical distance we’ve all traveled since then.

I arrived at my first destination, Greenville, South Carolina, the next day, after having a nightmarish time negotiating the approach westward via I-77 and I-85, and encountering for the first time in decades a large Confederate flag proudly raised just past the SC border.  This brought back a memory from 1975 when coming back from Travelers Rest SC one night I saw an actual flaming cross burning on a hill.

But oh, the changes in Greenville since I left!  There were only two restaurants in town when my roommate Leta and I attended Furman, Iris’s Greek Restaurant downtown and the Peddler Steak House where we had treated our parents to a 1974 graduation dinner.  Ellen, friend of my youth and responsible for my attending Furman University (she invited me along on her visit to campus and I was charmed by the red brick, the fountains, and the gardens) and her husband Mike, whose Greenville wedding I had attended in 1974, generously treated me to a lovely, extravagant dinner downtown at the bustling upscale Italian restaurant Ináco.  We caught up on family news, hers and my late sister’s (Ellen remained a stalwart friend of Jane’s to the end), and then they returned me to the Marriott Courtyard Greenville Haywood Mall, its environs, 50 years of sprawl, completely unrecognizable to me.

Then Graduation Day, 4 May 2024, arrived, and my first reunion with college roommate Mary Leta Preston Bosc and her husband Larry in 50 years.  They had married in Charlotte on the same day in 1975 as Ellen’s Greenville wedding.  Leta and I had lived together for four years, three at Furman and one more in Charlotte after we simultaneously realized that living at home as a college graduate was just NOT a workable plan, and Leta invited me to share an apartment with her in her home town.  It was Leta who had persuaded me to attend our 50^th reunion at graduation because Larry’s reunion the previous year had been such a gas.  That morning I did some nostalgic driving around on campus and my old Greenville neighborhood before meeting up with Leta and Larry back at the Courtyard. 

Meeting there at the Marriott, Leta, Larry, and I took off for Furman together, first to a very nice dinner laid on for us in the Football Complex by the Alumni Association, and then to a precariously orchestrated appearance at the Class of 2024’s graduation ceremony which rain had displaced from the outdoor stadium to McAlister Auditorium at the other end of campus.  The logistics of getting us onstage—58 of our graduating class of 430 made it—were challenging.  There was much hilarity as we donned our regalia, climbed laboriously into high-riding vans (without a step up!), waited in a very warm classroom, a hallway, and a stairwell for our brief moment on stage—and then returned to the Paladin Plaza for dessert.

Over the evening I recognized very few classmates, though several recognized me.  “So what happened to you, Georgeann?  Did you end up an English professor?”  This from a man who’d been in London and Stratford-Upon-Avon with me in the fall of 1972.  Nailed it!  I guess what was not obvious to me in 1972 was to others.  Not until later did I scrutinize the list of 61 fellow Paladins now deceased and discover only one I knew:  the beautiful and talented Anne Friddle, who cast against type (she was a blonde beauty queen) played Miss Prism to my Lady Bracknell our senior year.  I would not have recognized the matron I later found when I googled her obituary.

Being re-united with Leta and Alice—we three who slept side-by-side in the Furman Dining Hall Apartment living room we adapted into a bedroom via clothes racks providing our three little single beds some privacy—was indeed a gas. How often I recall silently reciting all my lines before falling asleep, comforted by their proximity.

All of us in that apartment had gathered on the Dining Hall roof to appraise the boys who unknowingly gave us quite the show when they all met there to disrobe for a mass streaking event in the spring of 1974.  No one streaked at the 2024 graduation.  More’s the pity.

The long day made me request an early night for this 71-year-old graduate, and even then I overslept my alarm the next morning.  Still, I was able to get myself and my stuff together quickly enough to meet Leta, Larry, Alice, Carl, Bill and his charming wife for brunch the next day at the Gray Moon:  WONDERFUL biscuits and veggie omelettes, great service, and very jolly gemütlichkeit.  We parted in good spirits, and with considerable help from gps, I found my labyrinthine way to Leta and Larry’s suburban Charlotte home, more reminiscing, Larry’s signature frozen gin-and-tonics, salmon pasta, the new Bob Marley movie, and a most welcome bed.