At the All-Star game, it’s halfway finished

Thirty years ago, a summer like no other dragged by. My mom, Jenny, Joe and I spent all of July at my grandmother’s house in Westport, Connecticut.

Before I go too far – Westport. One of the 10 wealthiest towns in the country. It supposedly influence F. Scott Fitzgerald when writing The Great Gatsby (F. Scott and Zelda did live there briefly in the 1920s).  You must wonder what that says about me. My grandfather was a plumber, and in the mid-20th century, people of different incomes still lived in the same ZIP codes. Westport always possessed huge income, but there were tracts open to the middle class following World War II.

By the 1980s, Westport squeezed out its middle class. In my grandparents’ neighborhood, people bulldozed modest houses to construct McMansions on half-acre lots. The same fate awaits my grandparents’ house, a structure that will always appear regal to me. It might be diminished from its heyday, but I cannot forget the muted gold paint, the hedgerow, the shades and the massive garden my grandfather constructed.

For Westport's wealth, we only encountered one local celebrity – wrestler Sgt. Slaughter, who drove round Westport in a camouflage limousine. On several drives around town we passed the peculiar vehicle. As for Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and soon-to-be-famous caterer Martha Stewart, we never heard a peep. My grandmother’s television had all of five channels. We got our afternoon cartoons, watched the morning talk shows like Regis and Kathy Lee and summer reruns at night – Thursday was always a treat when Cheers came around. I first saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in a severely edited network TV cut that summer, falling asleep before the climactic party in the mental ward.

With three bedrooms, I slept on the couch. I liked the couch, but I preferred the lounger on the screen porch. Neither sleeping spot felt like home, and the porch felt like an entirely different world. On cool nights, I watched Yankees games on the four-inch TV on the screened porch. What I wouldn’t give for a porch so scenic in my own yard. A few years before, my grandparents purchased air conditioner units for the kitchen and living room.

The porch was not as cool, but the air temperature still bested our south Georgia porch by 20 or more degrees. For me, this porch worked much better. One of our last nights before the long drive home, Mom and Uncle Frank left to pick up Dad. I stretched out on the porch lounger, the Yankees winning on a home run by Gary Ward. I turned off the TV, curled up only to wake up on the inside couch in the morning. I had not aged past where my dad could hoist me off to the bed of my choice so he could sleep on the porch.

Events of the previous year cast a pall over this summer. My grandfather died the previous November, and his absence hung over the proceedings. Despite outliving him by 23 years, my grandmother would never really recover from his death. At that time, the wound was raw. At the July 4 family reunion in Uncle Richie’s massive backyard, we received a painful reminder. Uncle Dominic, slipping rapidly into the grip of Alzheimer’s disease, repeatedly asked, “Where’s Frank?” My grandmother wept, and I couldn't blame her. Uncle Dominic wasn’t talking, the disease was.

After the party, the summer slipped into Connecticut routine. Dad flew home to work for the rest of the month.We spent a whole month in Connecticut, a miserable month where I never encountered anyone my own age after the family reunion the week we arrived. Even then, the distant cousins I barely knew took pleasure in wrestling me into submission. I was weak, and fine being alone. 

We had surrogates eager to entertain us kids. My grandparent’s friends, Angelo and Millie Zullo, took us to the beach. One time I protested, not feeling like going to the beach, and my Mom said, "These people want to do something nice and you won't disappoint them." Other times, Angelo took me on his daily errands – it beat sitting around. He provided me a bicycle during the trip, but it was too small for my frame, so I only took limited rides around Reichert Circle, my grandparents’ street. The nearby streets were too dangerous for biking, and my interest waned. I read voraciously. I would rather be playing baseball back in the neighborhood league we developed in Dublin.

We drove up to Aunt Carol and Uncle George’s house in New York multiple times. The previous year, we stayed in the guest house on the property. For some reason, that wasn’t an option for 1987. They had a pool, so my sister and I longer for trips to Hopewell Junction. Several post-church Sunday excursions took us up to New York. We followed with weekday trip with the great aunts with lunch and swimming. The last night was a 10th birthday party for me, the last time we’d visit that bucolic house, easily my favorite house ever owned by my aunt and uncle.

Mom had other purposes during our trip. She helped Uncle Frank clean out the stuffed garage and helped organize a giant garage sale of the junks my grandfather accumulated through the years. We sold off a dinghy abandoned in the yard, countless sets of oars, tons of boating equipment and other items. In two days, the wares earned $800. When I marveled at the figure, my grandmother told me she had bills of $1,000 to pay off, putting the flurry of sales in perspective.

We spent an afternoon at my grandfather’s grave. Nine months earlier, we stood around the site enclosed by as tent due to the wintry weather. Snow too light to stick fell that morning. We watched the casket descend after a final salute from military personnel to honor his World War II service. When I asked Mom why she planted flowers and prettied the gravestone, she said it was because Grandpa took great care with his flowers and garden. While she did not say so, she clearly wanted time alone at her father’s final resting spot. I wandered the rows of modest stones until I found the grave of my grandfather’s identical twin brother, who drank himself to death in the six months following his wife’s abrupt death in the mid-1960s.

Even without visits to the cemetery and spending most days around people 60 years or more my senior, the summer was mostly rough. But I was nine years old, a month away from 10, and age 10 seemed in no hurry to arrive.

We had family dinners every night. In retrospect, the month flew by. At the time, every moment crawled. My summer league with the neighborhood kids in Dublin, Georgia went on without me. The Connecticut sabbatical had moments of excitement among the expanses of boredom. We drove to Mystic Aquarium with Uncle Richie’s wife, Laurie. The aquarium and its small pod of beluga whales highlighted our 1985 trip to Connecticut, and the return visit did not disappoint.

We weren’t the only ones who got out. Grandma and Laurie drove to western Connecticut to see Perry Como. By virtue of sleeping on the couch, I awoke when Grandma hustled into the house, bursting at the seams after being too self-conscious to use a public restroom. We all laughed about it the next day, but she burst into the house that night.

The more I look back, the more Westport’s offerings stand out. There was Carvel, the ice cream parlor that defined my childhood summer and never followed us back to Georgia. There was Arnie’s Place, the arcade with rows and rows of video game machines (it closed in 1994). In deference to Jenny, we went to children’s productions at the Westport Country Playhouse, the famed theatre which regularly held productions with famous actors (Joanne Woodward was later its artistic director, and her husband Paul Newman appeared in several productions). I was too old, but Jenny was just five and Joe always delighted at the music. Mom even bought Joe audio cassettes of the performances.

Some days Mom dropped me off at the city library, where I devoured books and ignored the outside world. Millie and Angelo took Jenny and me to Compo Beach, a trip never offered by my own grandparents. Angelo died 10 years later, a death that gripped me as badly as my own grandfather. Millie held on for a few more years. They were good people.

In the late 80s, they enjoyed going to Compo, one of Westport’s town beaches. Set on Long Island Sound, it always hummed in summer, and the waters were thick with people. Once the lifeguards cleared the waters when a school of bluefish. A wisp of Long Island clung to the horizon. Several small Connecticut islands loomed closer. I could never separate thought of Westport from Compo Beach.

Westport hides a few other outdoor gems. We took several trips to Westport’s Nature Center for Environmental Activities (in 2002, it became Earthplace, The Nature Discovery Center), where I admired their resident Burmese python Barney and the New England coastal pool exhibit that included lobsters and crabs of unexpected colors. Birds of prey filed outdoor enclosures and several trails crossed the forests and wetlands of the reserve, one of Westport’s few wild spaces.

But it wasn’t home. Nor would Georgia be home for much longer. During our Connecticut interlude, Dad called one day, delivering news about his job. In the fall we would move back to Ohio; he secured a transfer my mom long sought. I would go home and tell my Georgia friends I would leave later in the fall. How did I cope? Children are creative. I colored and wrote, I played with my GI Joe and Star Wars guys. My great-aunt Evelyn gifted me a handful of GI Joe comics – prior to that, I did not read comics. Three decades later, I still read comics every week. That seemingly minor gesture is not lost on me. I took to the visual medium and immediately grasped its narrative abilities.

Better still, I leaned on the radio. I listened to Mets and Yankees games in my grandfather’s former workshop in rear of the garage. To better visualize my grandparents’ house, it was built on a hillside, with a garage, storage rooms, wine cellar and laundry below ground level, a main floor above and an attic that grew too steamy for anything but brief visits in summer.

The baseball highlight of the summer was the All-Star Game. The game meant more prior to interleague games. Only in the midsummer classic did players from both leagues compete. I expected a good game. I got a shutout through regulation. Around the 10th inning, I crashed. In those pre-Internet days, I waited for the afternoon paper, the Norwalk Hour, to bring news of the final score. The game ran into the 13th, when a two-run triple by Tim Raines, one of my favorite NL players, broke the scoreless tie. As an Indians fan staring down a 100-loss season, there wasn't much baseball left to look forward to.

Soon Dad returned and the end of the Connecticut trip loomed. On our last day, they brought Millie Izolde down the hill of Reichert Circle. She was 95 then, an old lady who seemed spry in previous visits but seemed off. Her visit was brief and awkward, our van already loaded for the return trip to Georgia. Millie would not make it to next summer

I’m not sure about the length of our return trip to Georgia. Sometimes we took three days, sometimes Dad powered through, finishing the drive late on the second day, the three of us sound asleep in the back of the ban. I feel this year wrapped on a lengthy second day, since we stopped at South Carolina’s South of the Border hotel complex on the way to Connecticut.

After first glance, the summer seemed immensely boring. But pick away at that theory long enough, and there are enough threads that spring from those quiet days in Connecticut. Thirty years onward, I see a surprising amount of loaded days and nights on the quiet porch that I don't mind revisiting.