Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey

23. Sunday in the Country

23 Sunday in the Country ILINGER IN THE NEW YORK AREA for several days. Winter sud, denly arrives, a severe storm riding the jet stream. Temperatures drop into the thirties, torrential rains fall, high winds cause several deaths, killer tornadoes cut through the South and the East. It is a week before Thanksgiving, and I feel growing apprehension about trying to make it across the country this time of year. Snow has started to fall around the Great Lakes. I take a Sunday drive up the Taconic State Parkway, once such a marvel of a road, this scenic highway that was begun in 1940 and featured picnic tables with design work by one Franklin D. Roos, evelt. The setting is still bucolic as I head north away from New York, rolling hills, forests, farms. I enter the town of Catskill, not far from a Hudson River bridge with a perfect name, the Rip Van Winkle. Because this town where my grandfather was born appears so unchanged. The 1886 bank on Main Street still has golden doors and a golden eagle perched at the crown of the building. The brick fire, house still has "A. M. Osborn Hose Co. No.2" painted above the garage doors. I cross Catskill Creek, then drive up Division Street, where the Marshalls lived when my grandfather was born, still not the better part of town, a steep street lined with big rambling houses, now in various stages of disrepair. "We were not poor in Catskill," my grandfather remembered once, "we just had no money." I try to find the brick plant where Caleb Marshall had worked and discover an old bricked,up hulk of a building beside the creek. 250 SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY 251 But a utility worker tells me no, the brick plant was tom down years ago. Then she utters the lament of preservationists everywhere: "All the most important buildings have been turned into parking lots." This seems horrendous overstatement in a town so untouched by time, but then she rushes off and brings back a calendar filled with historic pictures of "Catskill Remembered." And her comment no longer seems so overdrawn. The Catskill Armory. Gone. The Smith House Hotel. Gone. Catskill High School. Gone. St. Patrick's Academy. Gone. The Saulpaugh Hotel. Gone. Time no longer seems so benign in this town with fewer than 5,000 folks. I still leave Catskill with a sense of accomplishment, and com' pleteness. My little Sunday drive in the country turns into a 235mile trek, but I have now visited all the places where my grandfather was at crucial times in his life. I have looked at the houses where he lived, have walked sidewalks he walked, have seen what he saw, or at least what is left of it now. And all these places have helped me bring him back to life, a figure from my memory transported to this street or that square, a new connection with my family past. I head back to New York City and spend time in Scarsdale with Susan and Sanford Sacks. Three decades ago, I sat in Susan's class' room in seventh and eighth grade, social studies with a social con' science. She was unlike any teacher I had had before, relentlessly challenging, frightfully tough, an absolute perfectionist, but also young and pretty. I was thirteen, that awakening time, and I was touched by Mrs. Sacks and her views. Truth was, I had a crush. We were, I suspected, the only supporters of John F. Kennedy in her classroom that year. I argued his position in a class debate and what I said fell mostly on deaf ears. This was suburban Cleveland, where there were broad lawns and Republican views. But I did not stop arguing for Kennedy in class. I came home from school with a mission, to convince my parents to vote my way. I had a Kennedy campaign poster plastered on my bedroom door, his image many times larger than life, and I never missed a chance to tell my mother and father what a great man Kennedy was, what changes he would make, how his positions made such sense. I was insufferable, but they listened patiently, although when November came, they made it quite plain that they were not about to vote for a Democrat. But I still had iearned an important lesson, although I did not recognize it 252 RECONCILIATION ROAD until much later. Mrs. Sacks had shown me for...