Life, love and literature

In 1996 my sisters and my niece and I took a trip to Boston. We did as much sight seeing as we had time for, loving the history there ;every day we saw something new – from Paul Revere’s house and the cemetery where he lies, a day tour to old Cape Cod and to Provincetown, staring at the harbor water where the Mayflower had anchored for a time and William Bradford’s wife had fallen off of the ship and drowned. I suppose my favorite day trip was to Concord, Mass. Of course, I had to visit Walden Pond to see the replica of Thoreau’s hut – to sit underneath a tree there and write a journal entry of my own! I even watched a few ants and imagined they were descended from the red and black ants that Thoreau had found so fascinating as he had written about their battle and compared it to various battles of men! We took bread and cheese and grape juice and spent some time in meditation. It would have been perfect except for the myriad of swimmers in the pond! No quiet time to observe a lonely loon and contemplate its existence! We drove over to the “rude bridge that arched the flood” and saw the memorials to both the American farmers and the British soldiers who died there when the shot “heard round the world“ was fired! History came to life as I stood there. The Old Manse still stood its watch over the scene. Apparently some of Emerson’s ancestors had  lived in it when the war began. I knew it from teaching Hawthorne in preparation for reading THE SCARLET LETTER. He had lived in The Old Manse for a time. We saw the window where Sophia Peabody had scratched a message with her diamond ring; it was a good day that culminated in a stop at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to visit the author’s row of famous American writers! I was impressed that there were fresh roses on Thoreau’s grave and a small American flag on the grave of Louisa Mae Alcott. It was Memorial Day Weekend of ‘96. No other authors had any flowers or flags, but it is a beautiful cemetery, filled with flowering bushes — a fitting place for our earlier men and women of letters. I am not surprised that Thoreau had roses; he is still very timely. People have used his writings about civil disobedience as a spur to their own political agendas. I have read that Gandhi was influenced to bring about change by peaceful protest. I realize that I am a fan of literature-have been since I discovered Zane Grey, and I do find pleasure in the written word of the classics. I am almost snobbish in my desire to wish that everyone would read them first; I used to give my students a list of the books they should read; the list was books that have withstood the test of time – the classics!