11. Reading Thoreau

Walden Pond

Sometime during the beginning of the Fall 1974 school year (when I was sixteen and living at the rectory of All Saints Church in Great Neck, NY), I met Dan, a fourth-year seminary student at the Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception in Douglaston (Queens) and a supervisor at the Great Neck Friendly Ice Cream store. Dan was a handsome, six-foot tall, blue-eyed blonde famous for working the Friendly’s grill during extremely busy lunch and dinner periods all by himself and with flawless execution. As new orders flooded the grill pipeline, he would efficiently break each order down into its component processes, initiate and accurately track the progress of each separate process, then, in a flash, assemble the completed order, presenting it for pickup piping hot and attractively displayed on oval platters with a retro red double-striped edge. It was amazing.

Admiringly referred to as Dan the Man, Dan was a person I immediately respected and wanted to respect me back. I threw my heart into being the best Friendly Ice Cream employee I could be and it got his attention.

“Sue Tiner,” he would say, hands on hips, beaming approval as I smoothly glided in and out of the bays of booths, clearing and setting tables, taking and delivering orders, making drinks and banana splits and replenishing coffee.

It wasn’t long before a romance developed.

In those days, I often had the whole church to myself when the rector and his family were away from the house, busily engaged in their respective work, school and extracurricular activities. I experienced beautiful times of solitude, spending hours at the grand piano in the social hall practicing Chopin pieces with sweeping arpeggios, first crescendoing then decrescendoing . I would read in my room, or the rectory living room or the office. I played hymns on the old organ in the sanctuary with just the light from the lamp over the music and the natural light from the stained glass windows illuminating the church interior.

Dan visited me at the rectory a couple of times a week. I would listen for the unmistakable chirpy putt putt of his 1960s era Volkswagen bug as it arrived and parked in the circular driveway of the parish. The rector and his family liked Dan very much, certainly because he was charming but also because he was Roman Catholic and had given serious thought to pursing a vocation as a priest. Dan and the rector would sometimes talk for hours about finer points of theology and faith that were way over my head. I think because they trusted him and trusted me, they also trusted us to make our own decisions about how to spend our time alone together and didn’t interfere. This essentially meant we were free to be lovers and so we were.

We spent time together working at Friendly’s, at the parish, and taking weekend road trips, especially to North Adams in Western Massachusetts to visit high school friends of Dan’s attending college there. We sang aloud to Linda Ronstadt cassettes on the way there and back, drank a lot of beer and talked and talked about anything and everything. At some point he mentioned reading Thoreau. At least I think it had to be Dan because I can’t think of who else would have brought up Thoreau. And he lived in Acton which is near Concord, and Walden Pond is near Concord. And he was the kind of person who would read Thoreau and tell you you ought to.

I started reading Walden that year. I read it slowly and then over and over again, looking up all of the Latin phrases and references to classical mythology and philosophy and politics and places. I wrote notes in my childlike handwriting in the margins, earnest notes such as “this is the truth for which I have been seeking.” It was my first encounter with a great work of literature that took my breath away, like when you hear the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for the first time and you know you are hearing something beyond extraordinary, not just another pleasing and cohesive pattern of notes and rhythms, but those particular notes and rhythms, that instrument, that unique voice, hauntingly beautiful and spare.

In Walden, Thoreau makes a great case for minimalism as a way of life. The text spoke to me directly. As I read it, I understood that I had everything I needed; that it was ok, in fact even better, to start over from scratch, safely ignoring the advice of my elders, fiercely defending my independence, living deliberately and with focus, finding happiness in the process of becoming my best self. To the born romantic that was me, it sounded really, really good and true. It also gave me the first inkling that there could be a life of the mind and spirit. Absolutely everything was possible.

At the end of that school year, Dan graduated and returned home to Acton. It was the next natural step in his life, though as a child-woman in love and on my own I did not easily accept the news. It hit me like a sucker punch of magnified disconnection and I wept for hours and hours. In between sob sessions, I tortured myself imagining he would reconnect with his former girlfriend at home. It seemed cruel, this kind of moving on, and I was cruel back, saying spiteful things, cutting off contact, dating other people before it was appropriate. In other words, chucking every good thing I learned from Walden straight out the window.

I visited Dan a couple times in Acton the summer of 1975, and one time, while he was working at the Concord Friendly’s, I visited Walden Pond with a friend of his. We came to the place where Thoreau built his cabin in the woods and I remember thinking I am here. We took off our clothes and swam naked in the pond. I told myself to remember this moment, my hair floating on the surface, my body submerging then emerging, taking in the moonlight and shadowy trees, the sounds of birds and of the fish plopping in the water all around me. It was a time to be still, to know without really knowing that everything would be ok.

My dog-eared, self-annotated copy of Walden served as witness to many fits and starts over the years, ultimately getting lost in a good way: opening the mind of an another young person in crisis. When I felt good about working on myself, it would be pulled down from the shelf and reread, always generating new and interesting thoughts. In times of denial, when I didn’t want to work on myself, it would be shelved, sometimes for years.

I am no Thoreau quoter. In fact I intensely dislike the frequent over-quoting of Thoreau. To me this would be like listening to snippets here and there of the Beethoven violin concerto, or just one movement of Mozart’s Requiem. It is a whole work to be read in whole.

The other day, when I decided to write this post, I went looking for the copy of Walden I thought we had on the bookshelf in our upstairs guest room. It was not there. It turns out we gave it to someone else a few years ago. Although it is a book that should be given to others, I was so mad that I couldn’t access it right then and there. It is one of the few books in this world that I always want access to and it was not there! Fortunately, the library had a copy so I was able to re-read enough of the book to recall that first experience of reading it so many years ago. Still in a snit over the missing book, I ordered myself a beautiful annotated hardcopy of Walden edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer and published by Yale University Press. I paid an extra $17.98 shipping to get it delivered today.

The book arrived this morning–it is a wonderful edition. I’m quite certain it has the distinction of being the first book about a minimalist to arrive by express mail.