The Amazing Corolla

 The view from the back seat

 The Corolla in Columbia, MO

We're traveling in a 2001 Toyota Corolla that has over 315,000 miles on it. Ellen just had a new clutch put in before we left - replacing the original. Now it drives like a new car. The other amazing thing is that despite the fact that it is winter, we have snow tires, we're going 65 m.p.h, running the heater all the time, it's getting 38 m.p.g. In the summer it gets over 40 m.p.g. The other peculiarity is that we took out the front passenger seat when I had knee surgery a year ago, so that I could sit in the back seat and stretch out my legs, and now we've gotten so accustomed to it, that we've kept it that way. There are a lot of advantages. It is very handy for me to have things next to me on the back seat instead of having to reach into the back from the front seat to get something. We keep the food box in the well of the front seat which I can also reach easily when we want a snack in the car. I read aloud a lot while Ellen is driving, and my voice carries fine into the front driver's seat. Every now and then I drive, but Ellen does most of the driving on our trips, which she is happy doing. We just toodle along in our amazing Corolla and are having a wonderful time.

Katie the photographer

We've just had a lovely visit with my granddaughter, Katie Shay, who is a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. We met her at her dorm last evening, heard all about her recent trip to New York City, saw her album of photos from that trip, then went out to eat in neaby Jackson, MO at the Tractors Bar and Grill where her friend Brad is a waiter and had a good meal there -- huge portions, reasonable prices, tasty food! Katie is a vocal performance major and photography minor at SEMO, so she is really busy with voice lessons, piano class, photography class, dance class, plus French and English, making costumes for theatrical productions, wow! It was great to have a chance to see her in her setting, see her room, meet her roommate, all that. Now we're headed for Columbia, MO where my daughter Betsey (Katie's mom) lives.

Bears and Packers

Boy, we have hit the Chicago area at just the right moment! Tomorrow is what is being billed as the biggest sports event in the history of Chicago! Imagine it! And we're here! The Chicago Bears meet the Green Bay Packers Sunday afternoon to decide who will go into the Super Bowl. The streets will probably be deserted after 3pm everywhere. Sports Bars will be overflowing, and there will be game parties in literally 100,000s of homes. The amount of snack food that has been purchased and will be consumed staggers the imagination. It must run into the $10 millions. Meanwhile Rahm Emmanuel has built a commanding lead in the run-up to the mayoral election. Wow, what a time to be alive!

Earlier today I went with Jerry Hochburger (my brother Stewart's ex wife Maggie's husband and our host), to help with what was billed as a work party to "clean out the undercroft" of their Episcopal Church in Batavia, IL. I had imagined a basement area crammed with an accumulation of church junk from over the years - old hymnals, relics, files of old sunday bulletins, leftover church bazaar items, Sunday School curriculum books long rendered obsolete. I was wrong. It all had to do with one large wide-screen TV set - not working, I presume -- which needed four people to get it up out of the basement into a pickup truck. Now this thing was HUGE -- maybe five feet wide, and almost as tall, and heavy. We had to open an old bulkhead that looked like it hadn't been used for a decade, rusty, overgrown with weeds, and of course covered with snow. The concrete steps leading up out of the bulkhead were dirty and covered with an old plastic. The wide-screen TV had absolutely nothing one could really get a good grip on, and it turned out that this work "party" was me, Jerry, the sexton, Joe, and a woman named Hannah who opted out of wrestling with the TV. So the four-man job turned out to be a three-man job. Jerry and I thought this TV was a piece of junk headed for the landfill. But Joe seemed to have other ideas. He seemed to want to get it out unscratched and upright. This was not easy to do! But we managed it, and got it into the back of his pickup in one piece. We suspected Joe was going to see if he could get it working. Maybe he was hoping to use it for a Bears-Packers party tomorrow. It would sure be the ideal screen for a football party!

After that job was done, the work party seemed to be over. There was a little sweeping to do, but we were out of there a half-hour after we arrived. The ride back to Jerry's house we went along the Fox River on Route 31 through Geneva and St. Charles. What an amazing route that was -- one beautiful riverfront mansion after another, interspersed with parks, nature reserves, vistas of the river, and the occasional quaint village center with lovely shops, old brick and stone Victorian era buildings.A very different view of this area from the usual one we have seen, which is one shopping mall after another.

And all of it so different from our Vermont life.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

We're near Lodi, OH this morning, having spent the night in a Super 8, snug and warm while the snow fell outside. We traveled from Swarthmore, PA yesterday, the second leg of our January-February western trip.We got off to sort of a late start from home on Wednesday -- Ellen had a new clutch put into the Corolla -- the original clutch lasted for over 310,000 miles! - but we couldn't pick up the car until Wed a.m. because of snow. So we left home after noon, but still got to Swarthmore by 7p.m., where Wallace Ayres hosted us in her lovely home. Thursday we went along the PA Turnpike all the way to OH and then on I-76 to the motel. It started snowing lightly by about 4p.m., and by 7p.m. was getting pretty slick -- Ellen was glad to stop. Today it is sunny and it should be ok driving to Bartlett, IL. Monday we're going to Columbia, MO and it looks like there may be snow showers then too, but after that it looks like clear sailing to WY. Yesterday I worked on a mailing to my "annuitants" in the car -- I am what is called the Annuitant Visitor for the Pension Board of the United Church of Christ, which means I keep in touch with 45 or so retired UCC clergy in Vermont. I should be able to finish up that mailing today and get it in the mail. I also read aloud from our biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which we read only in the car on a trip. We've been working on it over a year. What a complex and fascinating person, mostly misunderstood. His philosophical work was sort of the end of philosophy in a way, and no one, especially his philosopher friends (like Bertrand Russell) really wanted to hear that. People have taken from him what they have wanted to hear, but he himself tried in both his thought and his personal life to be scrupulously honest, which was not an easy thing for him or his friends. There is much in him to be admired.

Miracle of the Internet

Something amazing has happened which is probably not that unusual anymore but still seems remarkable to me. A woman in France was cleaning out the home of her aunt who had passed away in a village in Normandy, and she came upon a WW II U.S. Army/Navy Prayer Book/Hymnal. Inside the front cover was an inscription: Rev. Barney C. Crockett, with an address in Minneapolis, and a line that said in French: "write after the war." To make a long story short,she put out a request for information about this Barney Crockett which eventually found me, mainly through Ancestry.com networks. I responded that Barney Crockett was my father, and in due time I received the prayerbook in the mail. It prompted me to research where my dad actually was in Normandy and I found a fair amount of information and some photos. He was mainly north of St. Lo in the village of Cartigny l'Epinay, on the grounds of a chateau belonging to a M. Pagny. I have photos of the chateau, and what I think is M. Pagny's daughter, plus some group shots in front of the chateau and some of dad. I will post these photos later. I still have to learn if the woman who found the book has any connection with M. Pagny. But what a small world we now live in!

Photo 1 below is my father, Chaplain Barney C. Crockett
Photo 2 is the chateau belonging to M. Pagny near Cartigny l'Epinay

Resting in Ogunquit

Here we are in a lovely motel in Ogunquit, ME, enjoying a couple of days of sheer R&R after a very full December. A funny thing for someone who is retired to say, isn't it? But it is true -- all of our self-chosen volunteer work and activity can sometimes really pile up and we become overwhelmed. Katie and Savanna are downstairs, and we are enjoying walks by the ocean, the hot tub and pool, meals either in our room (we brought Christmas Day leftovers) or in local restaurants, reading, watching basketball in the TV (my favorite team, the UNC Tarheels had a great game against Rutgers in Madison Square Garden last night). We return home later today. Tonight we'll rehearse the Fonseca Afro-Brazilian Mass with the Brattleboro Concert Choir. Thursday we'll host the grandkids for an overnight and go to Northhampton on Friday to see Miriam in a dance program at The Academy and then return to Brattleboro for the wonderful New Years Eve concert by the Amidon Family and Nightengale.

A Full Life

Friday, Dec. 17th: I’m writing as we ride along on I-287 heading toward the Tappen Zee Bridge on a quick trip to Philadelphia to hear a concert of Piffaro, a favorite early music group.  We just stopped in Stamford, CT to carol our friend Calvin’s 100-year-old father who lives in a nursing home there. Calvin and I have been in the Blanche Moyse Chorale together for 35 years and just had a concert last weekend: Vaughn-Williams’ Nine Carols for Male Voices, Britten’s Ceremony of Carols and Palestrina’s Missa Hodie Christus Natius est, plus eight well-known carols which we asked the audience to sing with us. Calvin also sings with us in both the Guilford Community Church Choir, the Dummerston Church Choir (which I now lead one Sunday a month), and in the Hallowell Singers, the Hospice-related group that does bedside singing.  Last night we had hoped to be in Chestnut Hill, MA at the service of nine lessons and carols at Church of the Redeemer (where Betsey, Rob and Katie sang in the choir when they lived in MA), but car troubles delayed our departure and we gave that up. We’ll return Saturday night so we’ll be home for church in Guilford Sunday a.m., go to the first half of a New England Youth Theater production of Fiddler on the Roof (we know many of the youth actors), and then zip up to Walpole, NH where I’ll lead a Taizé service at the Unitarian Church (Ellen will decorate the altar Taizé style while I rehearse the chants with people). Wednesday evening at the Dummerston Church we collaborate with John and Cynthia in a contemplative service of music and silence. Sprinkled all through this are rehearsals of our up-coming January concert of an Afro-Brazilian Mass by Carlo Fonseca with the Brattleboro Concert Choir.
And there you have a snapshot of what seems to have become our lifestyle: words like full and rich but also busy and even hectic come to mind. And I haven’t mentioned yet the 1000+ cookies Ellen baked for the Church Christmas Bazaar (and the afghan she knitted and the felted bags she made), my singing arias in the Messiah sing and the River Singers concert (those three things were all on the same day!).  Plus there have been three memorial services that Hallowell has sung at in the past two weeks.  You get the picture. This life, as much as she loves parts of it, sometimes drives Ellen to despair: too much of too many good things. She feels I thrive on it, and that is partly true, but I also long for more quiet. Some of the best times for me in the past month have been spent in the woods, cutting up fallen trees, splitting the logs, pulling them out to the road in a garden cart, loading them into the station wagon and stacking them by the house. The woods are quiet and beautiful, and I love the physicality of the work. One night late, a few days ago, under a bright moon, I dressed warmly and went into the woods with the cart to haul out a couple a loads of wood. I felt like a character in a fairly tale – “the old woodsman trudged slowly through the moonlit woods pulling his heavy load of logs, when suddenly there appeared in his path a ……” Fill in the blank. A wolf? A fairy? An angel? Nothing actually appeared in my path but it was a magical time nonetheless.
LATER, 12/23
Another magical moment was last night. We collaborated with John and Cynthia in leading a service of music and silence at the Dummerston Congregational Church. John and Cynthia played their beautiful music on harp, cello and whistle; I led a Taize chant Within Our Darkest Night, and the lovely round Celtic Blessing ("Deep peace to the running wave to you..."). There were long stretches of silence in the candle-lit sanctuary. Ninety people showed up to participate in this service and it was beautiful and much appreciated. An oasis of calm, beauty and silence in the midst of everyone's hectic pre-Christmas season.
Another way we have of dealing with this good but overfull life is to get out of town. We’re planning to do that in later January, after I preach in Guilford and we sing the Fonseca Mass. We’ll be making the grand rounds of visiting my brother Stewart’s family in Illinois, Betsey in Columbia, MO (and maybe Katie in Cape Girardeau), and Ellen’s son Paul in Wyoming (and of course sweet little Max, and all other beloved family members connected with them, plus friends along the way).  But in just two days we’ll enjoy Christmas day with Ellen’s extended family in Shutesbury, MA – a day that includes helpings of Ellen’s wonderful flaming plum pudding. And with mouths full of warm pudding we will think, if not actually say, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” to you all.