Loose Leaf Notes

1. “I feel like an island.” That’s what I said to Joe when we were in  Massachusetts and I looked at a picture of the Redman siblings that was taken at our niece’s wedding.

2. We used to be 9 but now we are 6. I was the third oldest before we lost our two oldest sibliings, Jim and Kathy, and the brother just under me, Dan, so I’m the oldest now and the lost siblings around me seem to symbolically separate me from the rest of the line.

3. Our two days on my hometown pennisula after the wedding included a sentimental journey by bike through the lengh of the town (Hull) where an air of saddness permeated my visits to old haunts and left me with a surreal feeling of being marooned from my childhood, a magical place in time.

4. The home I grew up in was taken by eminent domain by the town and burned to the ground to make way for a sewage plant. I didn’t stop to take a picture of the plant when Joe and I passed by on our bikes. I had my big cry over that years ago.

5. We did stop at our second family home that was sold to another family after my dad and then my mom passed. Joe asked me to pose in front of the house (that still had the wooden seagulls on the porch that my dad made) for a picture but that felt too sad, like posing with a gravestone.

6. It was strange to stay in a hotel and not my mother’s house while in Hull. The hotel, the Nantasket Beach Resort, was built on the site of the old Surf Ballroom where I grew up dancing to live bands when all the girls loved to slow dance with the boy they liked.  They had a “Surf Ballroom” venue room on the 3rd floor of the hotel. More nostalgia to ponder.

7. I walked to the site of our town’s old Paragon Amusement Park that was taken down in the 80s and took some pictures of the now empty old Putt Putt Golf attraction, which I called the Putt Putt Golf Graveyard.  The people of Hull saved the Paragon carousel and I always visit it when I’m home and usually take pictures. This visit I walked around the carousel ground looking for my sister Kathy’s memorial fundraising brick and found it.

8. It wasn’t all nostalgic. There was plenty of in-the-present fun both at the wedding and in Hull and in particular when my sisters came to visit to swim in the hotel pool and eat the best shirmp cavatelli we’ve ever had via the chef at the Red Parrot, now called The Parrot.

9.  I also had a great visit with my fisherman brother John, the only sibling still in Hull. His home is his castle and he has all his gear, comforts and paperwork spread out around his favorite chair, just like my dad did.

10. Joe and I did visit actual gravestones, my parents and brothers Jim and Dan, which Johnnny now takes care of. I have lots of pictures of those but never have enough of Hull sunsets. This one was taken of Joe and I at the A Street Pier (notice the Boston skyline in the distance) by a young man who gives tours at the Lifesaving Museum, which I remember well when it was the Coast Guard Station. The museum is right next to the sewage plant where my childhood home was. I told him about our house and he mentioned Floretta Vinning, an influential figure in Hull history who lived where the sewage plant was in the late 1800s. I asked him to please include the Redman home and several other family homes that were taken in  the late ’70s to make room for the sewage plant in his tours.

11. “Mad Max City” is how I describe driving to Boston and in the city. So much of what I remembered was gone, but my favorite fountain by the Boston Common that I saw every day when I came up from the Park Street subway on my way to the boutique I used to work at was the same.

12. Joe had never ridden on the swan boats before.

13. Make Way for Ducklings is on my reading list!

Check out Rachael and Adam Get Married HERE and The Pilgrims Were HERE.

______________Thirteen Thursday