This last March had
its anniversaries. Snakeskin celebrated
its one hundredth issue, in which appeared my
seventy-fifth Suburban Soliloquy. It was also my
seventeenth wedding anniversary and the fifty-third
anniversary of my birth. (It was my suggestion to be
wedded on my birthday so that I should never forget
the date.)
Ms Keogh and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding
anniversary with a long drive to Boston, staying at a
Bed and Breakfast in adjacent Brookline. The Samuel
Sewall Inn, with its many rooms, was a Victorian home
built 117 years ago. This comfortable inn, tucked
into a side street, has an outstandingly friendly
staff.
The inn is named for the English colonist, Samuel
Sewall. He achieved great wealth and importance in
Massachusetts. Sewall was an abolitionist, and, what
I thought particularly interesting, a penitent for
the part he played as Magistrate in the witch trials
of his time; he publicly proclaimed his involvement
and the error of his judgment in the tragedy, setting
aside one day a year to atone with fasting and
prayer. The town of Muddy River eventually adopted
the name of Sewall's vast estate, Brookline, it
sounding more elegant.
The fourteen rooms of the inn are number one through
fifteen, with thirteen being conspicuously absent. We
lodged in room twelve on the third floor, formerly
the billiard room. The incline of the roof encroached
into the room over the king-sized bed. Every room in
the inn was furnished to reflect the Victorian Age.
Our large room had a big oak dresser with a mirror
running the length of it, velvet curtains on the two
windows overlooking the street, and an oriental
carpet on the plank floor. There were still gas
fixtures mounted in the walls, which is not to say
they were functional. As with every other room, we
also had a private bath, as well as the seemingly
anachronistic television set with DVD/CD player.
Brookline has changed from when I lived there nearly
thirty years ago. I had followed one love interest
into Boston and left the city in love with another,
but Boston/Brookline was a parcel of the history from
my time before meeting Ms Keogh.
The inn was only two very short blocks from my old
apartment. I led my present wife about the
neighborhood in which I first met my previous wife,
Matsui-san. The community still had happy memories
for me, but the place was not the same. Papillion,
the bistro where Matsui-san and I drank bottles of
wine, argued Marxism, listened to a young musician
playing jazz on vibraphone, had vanished. Chardas,
the Hungarian restaurant where I discovered crêpe
suzette, but have not found it on a menu since, was
also gone. When I lived there, that part of Brookline
was down on its luck and dilapidated. The
neighborhood has since been gentrified, having
two-dozen coffee shops and two-dozen Japanese
restaurants. I wrote to tell my Japanese ex-wife
about it. There had been no Japanese restaurants when
she lived there.
On Sunday, before we left for home, Ms Keogh took me
to see Jamaica Plain, which is cater-cornered between
Brookline and Boston. She showed me the house in
which she had an apartment. It was strange to think
of the places we enjoyed in common, like the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum and the Boston Public Library.
I had left the city just before she moved in and it
would be years later before we would meet.
The good folks at the Samuel Sewall Inn provided me
with their letterhead stationery so that I could
write a few letters to friends. An exhausted Ms Keogh
climbed into the soft, bouncy bed. After bathing, I
stayed up to write a few letters at the desk beside
the bed. As she slept, I was inspired to write her a
love letter, even though she was only a few feet
away. I addressed the envelope to our post office box
back home and concealed it in my raincoat.
Later the next day, while we were walking through a
very windy Copley Square, on our way to visit the
Boston Public Library to see John Singer Sargent's
murals, I intentionally walked past a mailbox. Then,
as if just remembering, I announced I had letters to
mail. I ran back to the box while Ms Keogh walked on,
her back to me, and I surreptitiously removed that
one letter to her from the inner pocket of my
raincoat and included it with the other letters I
mailed.
This month's essay results from having been recently
asked, in a casual query, what was the most important
thing I have yet to write this year with a fountain
pen. It was that letter to Ms Keogh. |