Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things
Copyright
Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed, whether or not so noted in the text.
Copyright © 2017 by Amy Dickinson
Map illustration here by Anne Leuck Feldhaus
Photo here courtesy the author
Cover design by Amanda Kain
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ISBN 978-0-316-35258-1
E3-20170210-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Map
Introduction: Welcome to Freeville
Chapter 1: We Played with Matches
Chapter 2: Romance: A Brief History
Chapter 3: Dating Blindly
Chapter 4: Night of the Chipmunk Hands
Chapter 5: Journeys End in Lovers Meeting
Chapter 6: Meeting Mr. Darcy
Chapter 7: The Antidote for Longing
Chapter 8: Let Me Get My Puppets
Chapter 9: Life Renovation Offer
Chapter 10: The Grenade in the Kitchen
Chapter 11: Paying the Piper
Chapter 12: We Did
Chapter 13: The Powdered Wife
Chapter 14: Real Housewives
Chapter 15: All the Single Ladies
Chapter 16: What the Dog Did
Chapter 17: We Abide
Chapter 18: Heroic Measures
Chapter 19: The Fallacy of Closure
Chapter 20: The Rising Tide of Things
Chapter 21: Does It Spark Joy?
Chapter 22: Imperfect Pitch
Chapter 23: Counting Sheep
Chapter 24: How to Use a Saw
Chapter 25: Next of Kin
Chapter 26: Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things
Chapter 27: Mother’s Day
Acknowledgments
Newsletters
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother,
Jane Genung Dickinson, and also to my family
of daughters, sisters, aunties, and cousins.
The best way out is through.
—Robert Frost
Life is a memory.
—Jane Dickinson
Author’s Note
This book is a work of memory. The experiences I write about are told from my perspective. Much has been left out, but nothing has been added. Some names have been changed.
Introduction
Welcome to Freeville
I come from a place that seems to nurture two kinds of people: those who stay and those who leave. I grew up in a family of stayers, but I left. And now, as far as I know, I am the only person in the entire history of Freeville, New York (aside from my own grandfather), to leave—but then return again.
Like me, my grandfather Albert grew up in Freeville, moved to Washington, DC, for his career, and moved back to Freeville later in life. My grandfather died in the house in which he was born—our family homestead on Main Street—where his daughter, my ninety-year-old aunt Millie, currently lives. As I write this, I am sitting in my own little house on Main Street, twenty feet away. Looking out my window, I can see my elderly aunt toddling around in her kitchen.
Freeville is a good place to be from. The village of 520 people has one stop sign marking the end of tree-lined Main Street. Children ride their bikes to the village school, and in the summer you still see kids carrying fishing poles as they walk to the old Mill Dam to fish. On summer evenings, people sit on their porches and slap at the mosquitoes that swarm the lights.
That’s what a lot of people probably think about when they remember their childhood in Freeville. But they do their remembering mainly from Florida, where everybody who leaves seems to wind up. The Freeville-to-Florida diaspora is fed by a pipeline powered by low wages and high taxes. Our former citizens are also blown south by the blizzards that rip through the region from Halloween to Mother’s Day. Freeville lies near Ithaca, New York, on an axis between the small cities of Binghamton and Syracuse (ranked by the Farmers’ Almanac as being the fourth- and fifth-worst weather cities in the United States).
Even if you have the constitution to shovel your driveway for five months every year, there is also the cloud cover to contend with. The sky hangs low; much of the time it is gray and gloomy. My mother, Jane, used to call this a “lowery” sky, and while she always claimed to love it, she was alone in her affection for those dusky months, when the sun’s low passage in the sky tended to be completely obscured by clouds. When it finally set, you arrived at the realization that it was probably time for supper.
My family has called this place home since 1790, when the first of my mother’s family, the Genungs, pushed west after farming for over a century—first in Flushing, Queens, and then in New Jersey. My far-off ancestor was given a land grant in the frontier of the Finger Lakes district in exchange for fighting in the Revolutionary War. The area where he settled and where our family took root and grew is rugged, hilly, and interrupted by spectacular glens, streams, lakes, and waterfalls. Then there are the Finger Lakes—glorious narrow glacial gashes that create miles of shoreline and spectacular vistas. Surely when he arrived in our county with his two oxen, my ancestor felt some ancient Scottish tug in his cells. I know I do.
We who live here are granted four sharp and thrilling seasons (although spring and summer tend to be brief), landscape to make your heart swell, and—when the weather breaks our way and the clouds part—a glorious sky that inspires a full-bodied gratitude just to be alive. On a rare sunny day, you basically want to tear your clothes off and run down the street, crazily rejoicing. We natives do not behave this way, however. Overall, we are a tamped-down, noneffusive people with New England–style reserve and a belief in the power of bootstraps to pull oneself up—as well as the utility of good fences to make good neighbors. We are not huggers, nor lovers of nonsense or drama. We do not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.
When I was a senior in high school, I told my mother that I wanted to go to Cornell University, just twelve miles away. She responded that of all of her (four) children, I was the one who most needed to leave. Temperamentally, I am a gamboling baby goat pastured with strong and steady draft horses. My mother might have detected a restlessness inherited from my father, who was always on the move but never satisfied. I followed her directive and left home for college in Massachusetts when I was seventeen. After that, I moved from city to city as my life and career dictated,
but I always came back home to Freeville. I brought my daughter Emily home for every Christmas and Easter, and for the bulk of many summers. Those years when I lived in New York City and Washington (four and seven hours away, respectively), I would drive back to Freeville for Halloween, just so I could see the trick-or-treaters begging for candy up and down Main Street. I chose to move home permanently when I was forty-eight years old, and it is likely that I will stay here in Freeville for the rest of my life.
During the 1930s, my home county—Tompkins County—was declared officially part of Appalachia. Its poverty seems Appalachian, with rusty trailers and sway-backed farmhouses and sad little settlements ringing the larger and more prosperous county seat of Ithaca.
Freeville is one of the villages that prospective Cornell University students drive through on their way to its sprawling campus in Ithaca. Aside from our handsome brick school next to the old white Methodist church and our busy post office across the street, most of the houses along Main Street are in need of a fresh coat of paint. Two of these houses were half painted a shade of strawberry red by an itinerant crew of housepainter brothers several years back. The brothers took off with their down payment and never returned to finish the job. Will these houses be fully painted before they fall down? Unless the brothers return as suddenly as they disappeared, it seems unlikely.
Next to those structures is a half-built home that has been under construction for fifteen years. The gentleman who owns the lot lost his original dwelling to a terrible fire, and now he, too, seems headed for Florida, leaving his half-built home behind. Fire has also made its mark farther along Main Street. Our little fire station, now rebuilt, burned to the ground when the village’s one fire engine caught fire while it was parked inside.
Surely prospective Cornell students and their families look around and wonder why Freeville exists at all and why the people in those crowded clapboard houses choose to live there.
I am one of those people. From my white house on Main Street (freshly painted, thank you very much), I write the “Ask Amy” advice column, syndicated to 200 newspapers throughout North America and read by an estimated 20 million people each day. I have lived in New York City, London, Washington, DC, and Chicago. Now I live here, working out of a tiny house next door to my aunt Millie, down Main Street from my aunt Jean, my cousins Nancy and Lorraine, and my sister Rachel. My sister Anne lives two hours away in Rochester, and my brother, Charlie, lives… in Florida.
Our mother died five years ago. After her death, I inherited her house, which is just up the road from the fallen-down dairy farm on the edge of the village where we lived during my childhood. So if you’re keeping track, I now own two houses in Freeville, which is two more than most people would probably want.
I got remarried in 2008 and moved in with my husband and his family of three daughters to a farmhouse outside of Dryden (population 1,900). This slightly larger town was named for the poet John Dryden and is four miles from Freeville. Dryden is where I went to elementary and high school, after graduating from the Freeville primary school. Clark’s Shurfine Food Mart is in Dryden, and that’s where people who live in Freeville go for groceries. Dryden also has a good liquor store and a wonderful library, and you can get yourself a decent slice of pizza there. On Friday nights, we might stop over at the Dryden Hotel for beer and hot wings. Dryden is where we go to set out our folding chairs along the curb on Library Street to watch the parades on Dairy Day and the Fourth of July.
Every day, I commute from my house near Dryden, where I live with my husband, Bruno, and drive four miles to my house on Main Street in Freeville to work on my column. Along the path of this short commute is the Dunkin’ Donuts, where I stop each day for coffee, and the Willow Glen Cemetery, where I drink my coffee from my car while looking out at the windswept graves of my kinfolk.
Once a month, I travel to Chicago to check in with my bosses at the Chicago Tribune (which syndicates my column). I also appear on the National Public Radio (NPR) comedy quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! While there, I stay in an apartment that is left over from when I was a single mother, and my daughter Emily and I lived there full-time. So if you’re counting, I actually have four homes, which if consolidated would be worth a little less than you would pay for a split-level outside Fort Worth, Texas. I also have exactly as many houses as pairs of shoes (boots, pumps, sneakers, and loafers).
All of this is important because homes and landscape and people—and moving around and between them—are part of my story. In most isolated small places where people stay put (rural villages and islands, for example), houses change hands back and forth as the property flows through families via inheritance, financial bailouts, or marriage.
For instance, the white house on Main Street where I am sitting as I write was my great-aunt Jane’s home during my childhood. Great-Aunt Jane lived near her sister (my grandmother, next door), just as I live near my sister now (Rachel, five houses down). My mother lived down the street from her mother, and that is what I chose to do in midlife—to live down the street from my mother. I am on the verge of turning over the house on Main Street to my cousins Jan and Roger, who are moving back to Freeville after fifteen years away. Jan is Aunt Millie’s only child, and I will vacate this house so that mother and daughter can live next door to one another. Soon I will begin the process of relocating my Freeville workspace around the corner to my mother’s old house on Mill Street, and the family population in this little place will gain another two members.
My decision to leave Chicago, where Emily and I had lived for several years, and move back to my hometown changed my life in every way imaginable. It brought me back into the realm of the women who had raised me. It brought me into the orbit of the man I would choose to marry. And it is where, smack in midlife, I resumed the lifelong job of growing up.
This is what it feels like to come from a tiny place: You feel known. My neighbors may not know my inner thoughts, but they know the headlines of what has happened in my life. If I am teary in the checkout line at Clark’s Shurfine Food Mart, Mike Clark (who was in my husband’s and my sister’s class in high school and who I have known for almost fifty years) might assume that I am missing my mother that day. He might clap one of his big hands on my shoulder and ask me how I’m doing. Mike knows many things, and he also understands the void left by loss. We don’t need to have a soulful or revealing conversation, because we both know the same important things about each other.
Donna, Donna, and Jean work at the Freeville post office. (We call them Donna #1 and Donna #2. And Jean.) Our postmistresses know who’s having a birthday or who’s sick or who just died, because of the uptick in the volume of cards being delivered to a resident. They also know that the advice business is booming, because they deliver bins full of letters sent to me from readers (although most of my queries arrive online, via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail, some people still put a stamp on their question). Whenever I stop in, our postmistresses are patiently talking to one or another of the many elderly people who live in our town, whose daily trip to the post office is a meaningful outing. I am happy to wait until their conversation is done, because what they are doing in that moment is much more important than what I am doing.
There are no doubt people around me who do bad things, who hold terrible secrets, who are unkind and lie, cheat, and gossip—or worse. People around here are fond of their guns and have committed violent crimes and suffered tragic accidents close to home. As I write this, somebody less than a mile away is probably trying to cook up a batch of meth on his camp stove. Bad things as well as good things happen everywhere, but coming home has helped me lend context to life’s tragic turns. Small everyday graces make the bad things bearable. Back in Freeville, I’ve learned to lean toward these graces as I make my way in the place where I was born.
When people challenge the advice I dole out to my readers, they often do so by questioning my credentials. Such as they are, my credentials were earned the way most of
us earn—or learn—anything: through experience. I have lived in poverty and prosperity. I’ve dodged and settled debts. I have fallen in and out of love, dated blindly, survived infidelity, and blended a new family together. I drove the back roads through marriage and divorce and raised a child as a single mother in distant cities. I’ve started new jobs, wrestled with unemployment, and struggled to get the bills paid. I have cared for my mother until her death. I’ve seen things fall apart, and tried to pull them back together. I have lost my faith and found it again. I have loved and lost and been undone by grief. Now, at the tail end of my midlife, I am learning to let go and live on.
The author, top left, with her family in 1963: mother Jane, Rachel, Charlie, Anne, Buck (center)
Chapter One
We Played with Matches
When we were children, my siblings and I almost burned down the house. Not long after that, our father almost burned down the county. Both times our mother helped put out our fires, and both times, she forgave us.
A surprising number of my most potent memories from childhood involve fire. Most of the questions I continue to wrestle with throughout the rest of my life seem to hinge on the infernal complications set in motion by being raised by one parent who set fires and another who put them out.
Back then, children played with matches. You knew you weren’t supposed to, but you did anyway. Matchbooks were everywhere in the 1960s—in the kitchen junk drawer, wedged in the Naugahyde crack of the front seat of our car, rattling around in the bottom of my mother’s pocketbook, and in the messy cab of my father’s truck. My three siblings and I had ready access to matches, since both of our parents smoked and because we used both a fireplace and a woodstove for heat. There were also a few occasions when our mother illuminated the house with kerosene lamps and candles because our electricity had been cut off.