The Indian Summer

 

Growing up my favorite time of year was early September.  I enjoyed the crisp air and the freshness of the school year.  I liked looking at the dew on the grass as I waited for the bus or coming home from school those first couple of weeks, before the pressure of the year mounted, playing a game of Minus 5 at the basketball hoop with my brother (it was a variation of Horse my dad taught me).  So, it would be this time of year that I returned home.

 

One year and six days after flying out of Manchester, NH, I flew into the airport to be picked up by MB.  We visited with her grandmother and headed west to the Berkshires.  Everything was easy and breezy.  It was good to be back home.  We even ate dinner at a Friendly's.

 

The next day we went to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.  The first time I was introduced to his work I was flipping through a coffee-table book of his.  It was a collection of Saturday Evening Post covers my mom had bought.  I was struck by the detailed craftsmanship and realism of his work.  I had always had an interest in that style of illustration and painting.  I thought at one point my life might take me in that direction.

 

When I got older I learned of his reputation as something of a less serious artist.  He didn't take himself that seriously, he thought of himself as a commercial illustrator, and nothing more.  In popular culture, he's known primarily, often with a touch of cynicism, as someone who presents an idealized portrait of Americana.  At best, this is inaccurate.  I always saw him as a humorist and a storyteller.  If you examine his later work he moves into more socially conscious work addressing religion, race relations, the Bill of Rights, and presidential portraits.  His pictures truly are worth one thousand words because every detail, every facial expression, every weathered item in the picture tells its own chapter of a much larger picture.  I think he did for painting what Samuel Clemens did for the American novel.

 

From there we had lunch in a coffee house/wine shop that seemed to be almost a stereotype of New England, but in a good way.  We would then head to Amherst to visit Emily Dickinson's house.

 

Poetry has      never been          my          thing I'm afraid      to say

It's always been a     bit alien      to me in format

The words themselves are often intriguing,

but I usually can't comprehend them

I just don't have the mind for it

In the absence of that ability

I try to write with creative

word choices.  I've always

thought poems should be

read not performed

Words as visual

artistry

 

But I like interesting people.  No one could accuse Emily Dickinson of being less than interesting.  I also enjoy being transported to a different time, as can happen when you go to a museum, or visit a house with historical significance.  And one is when they go to her house.

 

The tour we went on was actually of her house and her brother's.  Our tour guide started by explaining how passionate she was about her subject and she didn't need to say so; it showed.  She took us all from room to room where we had some folding chairs.  I pulled some out for some of the others on the tour and sat and listened to the stories.  MB laughed at some of the more inside jokes and then whispered their meaning to me.  I asked her for little bits of supplementary material on the architecture, the time period, the person to fill in the gaps left by our tour guide.

 

When we got to the second house we realized it was in poorer shape.  Emily's house was owned by a well-to-do family as recently as the 1960s and significant changes were made.  Once the museum acquired it they decided they wanted to restore it to what it looked like in Emily's time.  That has not yet happened.

 

Her brother's house stayed in the family until the 1940s and was occupied until the 1980s.  Just a few years ago the museum acquired it and are still in the process of cataloging its treasures.  Her nephew, who died from playing in the mud, had a room that was left closed from his death in 1883 until 1988.  Most of the house is in disrepair.  The cracked plaster walls were held together with metal tacks.  So, in addition to our ticket fees, we threw in a donation of four dollars each, and we chipped in to buy my parents some Christmas ornaments.

 

We drove back down I-91 to my hometown of East Longmeadow.  In Springfield, we saw the Basketball Hall of Fame across from Springfield's modest skyline, in Longmeadow we saw Forest Park, in East Longmeadow we saw its notorious rotary.  We saw the bowling alley I went to on Saturdays growing up.  We saw the public library, now unrecognizable after major remodeling.  We saw the Boston Market, that was the site of my first job.  We saw my high school where I tried to restart our school's drama club.

 

I was home.

 

Dinner was nice, of course.  We ate and talked and I slept in my old room.

 

The next day we all went to visit my brother, Matt, at UCONN.  He's a grad student teaching and studying very complex math at a very different kind of campus than Emerson, where I went to school.  Emerson College was integrated into the city of Boston gripping downtown like tendrils letting Boston's character peek through.  It was the perfect place for me to go to school.  Matt went to undergrad at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  That college, like UCONN was a self-contained campus, a world unto itself in a suburban New England setting.  It was the perfect place for my brother to go to school.  We were happy in our environments.  And I was happy to take a peek into his world.  We ate at his favorite Chinese restaurant and saw his apartment and all went back home.

 

I decided to show MB a few places I went to on field trips in elementary school.  The first place was Laughing Brook, an animal sanctuary in neighboring Hampden, MA.  It's an Audubon Society location best known for its connection to children's book author, Thornton Burgess.  Thornton Burgess is best known for writing children's books reflecting the wildlife of Western Massachusetts, books about Peter Cottontail and Old Mother West Wind.  As I thought, it was now closed to the public, so we pressed on to another location that naturally seemed much closer than it did growing up.

 

Echo Hill is an apple orchard just off the road in Monson, MA.  Like many places from childhood, I remembered it to be much bigger.  It was a destination for field trips and for family day trips.  It was still early in apple-picking season, so there were no hay rides, and it was quiet, since it was the end of the day.  But we went into the store and picked up some wine for her parents and a bag each for picking apples.

 

All week I realized just how much of a country boy I must have been growing up.  I've always loved the city, but my home was the relatively more rural main roads of WMASS.  So, ironically, MB, the city girl, guided me through the orchard, helping me pick the proper apples, of the ones we were instructed to pick.

 

We then drove back to East Longmeadow for one more field trip.

 

Until middle school, I played Little League baseball.  Besides bowling, baseball was my favorite sport.  So we drove to Heritage Park, home to many a baseball game and rain-out.  The rain had somewhere to go, the small pond where an annual fishing derby was held.  As we contemplated the ethics of dumping a bunch of fish into a pond to be plucked out by pole each year, I told MB that this was also the site of a springtime field trip in sixth grade.  I remembered seeing parts of the park I never had before and listening to the theme song to "Cops" (the show on FOX, not the Buster Keaton short), on my friend Ed's Walkman.  Ah, 1993.

 

The next day was the last full day of my brief trip.  We would visit my Aunt Sue's and see several other members of my family.  My mom was the fifth of nine, so I have a lot of cousins, some of whom were there.  We caught up with my always intriguing relatives.  We played Uno and then some of us at at Uno.  I don't think they have Pizzeria Uno's in LA.

 

When I got back, my first day at work was slightly chilly.  I suppose I brought some New England autumn with me.  I snatched my brown corduroy blazer and headed back to Santa Monica.

 

Note: I'm writing to you on September 19th, 2007--exactly one year after moving into my Los Angeles apartment.

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.

Upcoming Gigs:

 

September 30-Andy Dick Theater.  6:30 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.

 

October 7-Andy Dick Theater.  9 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.

 

October 14-Andy Dick Theater.  6:30 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.