Goodbye, ducklings
Robert McCloskey died this week. He wrote Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal, and half a dozen other wonderful books.
When I was a kid, I was awestruck by touching the cottonwoods Pa personally planted, at the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead in DeSmet, South Dakota. I've been mugged near Patrick Kavanaugh's bench on the Grand Canal, and dust-caked in Willa Cather's windswept Red Cloud.
And someday, I'd like to see a certain garage in South Brooksville, Maine. Call it a pilgrimage.
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Just a month ago, we took our little nephew, Clement to see the ducklings in Boston Commons. They are really cute bronze statues that kids love to sit on and play. Clem knows all the names for all the ducks. I have some really sweet pictures.
Even more wonderful were the two real ducks that waddled up and hung out with their bronze counterparts for a little bit.
New England is so full of literary references. Some summer when visiting Joe’s family in the Berkshires, I hope to wander up Monument Mountain and walk in the footsteps of Hawthorne, Melville and Oliver Wendall Holmes.
I’ve been to Walden Pond, seen Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau’s graves, (and we drive by Melville’s Arrowhead where he wrote Moby Dick, every time we go to visit Joe’s parents)
I can see the House of Seven Gables from my office window—I never would have thought that possible when I read it as a young girl.
We drive by the Longfellow house all the time but it’s still on my list of to see’s.
And in looking at a MA literary site, I see that I need to go do some drive by’s…
“Thoughout the years Cambridge has been home to many well-known writers. Drive-by visits can be made to the former addresses of: e.e. cummings at 104 Irvings Street, T.S. Eliot at 14 Ash Street, Robert Frost at 35 Brewster Place, Henry James at 20 Quincy Street, and Vladimir Nabokov at 8 Craigie Circle.”
I live within 5 minutes of all those addresses!
It’s interesting, how small the world is and how history can seem so compact sometimes.
Well, in New England. In Nebraska, history is spread “like butter over too much bread.” Ontario is a bit thicker, that way.
Literary pilgramiges can astonish me — not so much to see where the writer lived, but to see that a place that lives so vividly in your interior world also lives in the exterior.
That garage lives for me. I can’t be the only one. I’ll bet today there are flowers piled up.
Okay, what garage? I remember reading Blueberries for Sal, BTW, as a kid. That little girl with the short, straight hair looked exactly like me.
The one from One Morning in Maine, another “Sal” book. It’s about how our preoccupations shape our perceptions. Only, you know, better than that. Sal loses a tooth.
If you haven’t read everything McCloskey’s done, he’s worth checking out of the library. Try Time of Wonder, which is just gorgeous.
I hope someone brings out the complete McCloskey set. I don’t even have Ducklings, myself.