Introduction

The Past Remembered Anew:

How Childhood Moments Reveal   

Who We Are Now

Bill

The Past Remembered Anew is about two kids growing up at opposite ends of Massachusetts who eventually meet in college, get married, have kids and write this blog together. I’m Bill.  You’ll hear from Gin shortly.

Back in the 60's I met Gin at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She lived in Pittsfield in the far western part of the state, a city I knew nothing about. I lived a hundred and forty miles to the east of Pittsfield, in Boston, a place Gin was aware of but not familiar with. In high school Gin did travel to Boston once or twice.  Until I went to college in Amherst  I had never been further west of Boston than Framingham.  Gin lived in the provinces but I was the one who was provincial.

I remember as a kid listening to WBZ on the radio while I was getting ready for school.  "This is WBZ, Boston, and WBZA, Springfield," the announcer would say.  Massachusetts has a large city located about every fifty miles east to west. I'd heard of Worcester, fifty miles away; a tornado had spiraled through there a couple of years before, but Springfield is further, ninety miles west of Boston. Aside from the reference on 'BZ I knew nothing about it, or the famous river it was situated on, the Connecticut.  Pittsfield was another fifty miles or so west of Springfield.  Thanks to that tornado and 'BZ at least I had heard of Worcester and Springfield. Not the case with Pittsfield. Until I met Gin I didn't know the place existed.  Too bad WBZ didn't have a repeater there as well. "WBZB, Pittsfield".

Gin was familiar with my ignorance and that of others from the greater Boston area.  “Whenever anyone talks about Massachusetts, all they know about is Boston. They all think Massachusetts ends at Worcester," she used to complain. It's true. Most people in the state live east of the Connecticut River; Boston is where the legislature is, where the laws are made, laws which some allege favor the eastern half of Massachusetts over the rest. Some people casually refer to western Massachusetts as "the western part" as if that region is some sort of vague netherworld.

When we first met in Amherst in the "western part”,  Gin and I talked a lot, brought each other up to speed, sharing with each other what we had been doing all those years before we met at college.  As anyone in a passionate, surprising, first time relationship knows, you hang on every word; you listen, you learn, you're fascinated, you're in love.

It was that, and more. Gin told me of her childhood, her teenage years, about her school, her home life, stories about her brothers and sisters, of life in Pittsfield, about her feelings and experiences and adventures, the good, and not so good, the moments that string together like enormous carbon links transforming her into the person she was to become and the person she is still becoming. I responded with stories of my own life in Boston.

Eventually a picture began to emerge not only of who we were but also of the places in which we grew up.

Aside from Pittsfield and to a slight extent, Boston, there was another city which influenced Gin's ordinary life. New York City. Gin's parents went to New York for  vacations, going to the theatre and visiting jazz clubs. New Yorkers came to the Berkshires which had become a summer playground for many of the state’s well-to-do residents.

Gin's parents watched the Yankees. Occasionally she'd go to a movie in nearby Albany. Her family read the New York Herald Tribune and the New Yorker. Teenagers would drive "over the mountain" to nearby Stephentown, New York where the drinking age was lower than in Massachusetts. Gin knew more about New York, the state and the city, than I did about any place other than Boston.

As a kid, Boston was the only city I ever knew.  I thought of it as the real thing. It was big and bustling and special.  My father worked there. My brother's team was the Red Sox.  Our paper was the Boston Evening Globe.  As little kids my mother would take my brother and me "in town" for shopping and paying bills. At Christmas the whole family would go there to look at the holiday display windows. Boston had subways, tall buildings, department stores and palaces known as movie houses. To me, even at that age, Boston was a special part of my life.

As for Pittsfield, Gin never thought of it as a Boston-type city. It was smaller of course.  Going shopping or to a movie or just being with friends was never "I'm going into Pittsfield."  It was "upstreet" or "North Street",  the city's commercial center.  Pittsfield had an elevator or two and a good bus system but never a subway. No matter. Pittsfield had everything Gin could want in a city.  She didn't need Boston.

So there it was: big city/small city, a different family, different experiences, a different perspective, a different take filtered through being a boy, being a girl, the boy living first in a house next to a school in Jamaica Plain and then living in a house on top of a hill in Hyde Park; the girl moving from one local Pittsfield neighborhood to another local neighborhood every few years.  And yet...

In spite of all the differences, there were many things that connected us in those early days of discovery at college.  One was that we were born just three weeks apart in the same year. I arrived on March 5; Gin waited until after spring arrived, March 30. The year was 1945.  It meant we were in the same grades in school at the same time, we saw the same TV shows, had access to the same movies, reacted to the same news events, all from the perspective of being the same age. To a certain extent, allowing for the differences in boys and girls, we developed along the same timeline, the same grid.  

Part of our common link was our schooling, each different but still under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Department of Education which insured we would read the same books in English, study the same formulas and equations in math, traverse the same nationalistic road in history and geography, and suffer the same indignities in physical education.  (Wait. That last one. That could have been just me.)

And we both knew what gimp was.

There may have been a distance between us as we grew up, but there were also remarkable similarities which to a great extent determined our future paths, and perhaps also set up the forces that led to that powerful attraction so many years ago in college that still continues, in its many guises, to this day

This then is the story of that distance, long in miles, close in the entanglement of two people growing up, apart, but together.

Gin

I was walking with my husband to be, Bill, on the college campus where we met.  We were in the first flush of our relationship; words pouring out of me because I wanted to tell him everything about me and learn everything about him.  As we talked, I formed images comparing our lives. I was fascinated by our differences. 

I grew up in a small town in the rural western end of our state; he grew up in the Boston area.  I walked to the main street to go to movies; he took a train. We had one television which received two channels and those not consistently.  He had access to three TVs, one on each level of their house,  They could choose not only from the major networks but several independent stations as well.  My parents eschewed formal religions before finally settling on the Unitarian Church; Bill and his siblings were raised as Catholics.  My parents rented one side of a two family house; his family owned their own place. 

To me his life sounded faintly exotic.  All these differences.  The distance between us felt wide.

Then he started to talk about Ethan Frome.

“I read that in 10th grade,” he said. “I wondered why they let us read it.  It had such a strong undertone of sexual longing. It was adult. It didn’t seem like other books we read, Julius Caesar, Lady of the Lake…”   “…and Ivanhoe and Evangeline,” I piped in continuing the list.  Suddenly we realized, thanks to the Board of Education, our public school reading list was the same. Even more striking there is a scene in the book in which one character is injured in a sledding accident.  I told Bill, "That hill in the book is based on a real hill in Lenox, a town just a few miles south of Pittsfield." The distance between us had shrunk.  With these experiences we had a common tie.

This blog is about our growing up at opposite ends of the same state at the same time.  How our lives were the same and how they were different.  Corner stores, penny candy, movies, playgrounds, school yards, bike riding, friends, teachers, radio stations, TV shows, brothers and sisters, department stores, schools, newspapers, libraries, Sunday dinners, summer vacations, family life. All the aspects of everyday living.  The similarities, the diversity, the triumphs and tragedies, the rich complexities of life that made each of us the unique individuals we are now.