Torrington from the air

Didn't spend the morning, as I usually do, watching child prodigies at the piano keyboard, or Russian folk dancers performing Olympic level athletic moves with their superhuman young bodies. This morning I relaxed into some serious nostalgia.

A friend sent me a link to a Facebook site with a three-and-a-half-minute video of the town where I was born.  Somebody apparently got a drone to fly over Torrington, Connecticut, film it, and post the film on Facebook. In the wintertime, when industrial revolution-era New England towns are at their drab-most.  It really is ugly, when filmed from this perspective. An overgrown village, of about 36,000 people, 2010 census, criss-crossed by great swaths of long straight city streets, which remove any last trace of charm the village might once have had. Boulevards made for drag-racing, with names like Main Street, East Main Street, and South Main Street.

Thanks to the durability of my baby-sister-the-great-grandmother's marriage, my spousal unit and I had cause to revisit Northwestern Connecticut last month. My closest biologicals, as I call them (to distinguish them from my chosen family) were celebrating their 60th anniversary. In our free time we drove all over the place marveling at the changes a bit and marveling even more over how much had not changed in the sixty plus years since I lived there.

Torrington is the town where I was born. Where my mother, who came to America in 1923 with her aunt and uncle at the age of 8, grew up and lived until she married my father and they moved nine miles up the road to Winsted, where I grew up. Another town with one long Main Street, much wider than it needs to be, the main difference being Winsted's Main Street runs east and west, Torrington's runs north and south.

Sometimes these towns expanded their streets to include tree names. They and so many other New England towns all have a Maple Street, an Oak Street, an Elm Street or a Walnut Street.  As do American towns all over the country which took their cue from what I take to be the country's original Puritan appreciation of trees. Torrington doesn't have a Maple Street, actually, but it does have a Maplewood Street and a Maplewood Drive. And a Willow Street. Other names include things like Water Street, Prospect Street, Park Avenue, Park Drive and Church Street - pretty dull next to names like Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles or Madison Avenue in New York City. But that comparison is unfair. In small town New England there's no reason to get too big for your boots.

My father and his brothers grew up here as well, went to Torrington High School, because their father from Scotland and their mother from Nova Scotia settled there when they could no longer handle the hustle and bustle of Boston and my grandfather got a job teaching carpentry at the local trade school. Many of these folks died in the same hospital where I was born.

So as I look down on the Yankee Pedlar Inn and the Nutmeg this and the Nutmeg that (Connecticut is known as "the Nutmeg State") I am aware of how different the place where I have made my home is, with names like San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Rafael, and Sacramento, and how very English my American birthplace is. Torrington was named after a small down in Devonshire, in Southwest England, next to Cornwall. (There is a Cornwall, in Connecticut, by the way, a few miles west of Torrington. Their main street, if I can call it that, is Pine Street. It's a village of fewer than 1500 souls, has a lovely covered bridge, and was the birthplace of Ethan Allen, of the Green Mountain Boys, according to the town's website. A bit of a stretch, since the town didn't actually exist when young Ethan was born, but his family did settle there while he was growing up. Whereupon he went off to do his thing in the Revolutionary War. And established the state of Vermont. But I digress...)

Torrington, speaking of English colonial towns that birthed famous people, is the birthplace of John Brown, whose body lies a-mouldering in the grave.  It prides itself as being a center of the abolition movement from early days.  A lesser claim to fame is the fact that Gail Borden made the original condensed milk there, which fact you might have overlooked last time you opened a can to make Vietnamese coffee.

But boring as the names are and dull as the town looks, especially mid-winter, and happy as I am to have left the snow and ice behind, this drone's-eye view of the place fills me with nostalgia. I spent much of my childhood with my grandmothers, one of whom lived on Water Street, the other on South Main Street. I joined St. Paul's Lutheran Church - also on South Main Street - back when I wanted to be associated with my German roots and with Martin Luther. 

The road leading out of town to the north was called (and still is) the Winsted Road. We in Winsted called the same road the Torrington Road. Call it lack of imagination, if you will. New Englanders will call it simple practicality. Or common sense. The road to Litchfield carries the name Litchfield Road.  The road to Goshen carries the name Goshen Road.

You won't find a Winsted in England, incidentally. That's because it's a contrived name for the commercial village that grew up between the towns of Winchester and Barkhamsted. Win- of Winchester, -stead of Barkhamsted, in case you missed it. Winchester, England, despite its small population - barely 10,000 more souls than Torrington, Connecticut, is obviously a more substantial city than Torrington, England, and has a magnificent cathedral and the honor of being England's first capital city. Barkhamsted is named after Berkhamsted, in England, home to John Cleese of Monty Python fame.  Also Graham Greene, by the way, if your tastes go more literary. I assume the vowel "e" got switched to the vowel "a" in America because the Americans decided if you're going to pronounce it to match the way a dog barks, then maybe you ought to spell it that way.

Same goes for Berkeley, of course, except in reverse.

In any case, if you've been dying to fly over and look down upon a small town in New England, now's your chance.

Quaint, it ain't.

But it means the world to me, being the place I first got to express my feelings when the doctor spanked my bare bottom to make sure I was born alive.

photo credit - photo is of Charlotte Hungerford Hospital where I was born, 82 years ago.  5th floor, if I am not mistaken. Postcard and I were created at about the same time.