I grew up in Winsted, a small out-of-the-way town at the end of the Naugatuck branch of the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad line - so out-of-the-way, in fact, that the branch shut down the last few stops up to Winsted in 1958. If you want to take the train to New York, you still can, but you have to drive thirty miles south to Waterbury, then park and hop on for the three-hour trip to Grand Central. Or you can drive the whole distance from Winsted in two. Years later, Winsted was again an "end of the line" kind of town when the Highway 8 freeway was extended to Winsted - and ended there.
But for all the boonies aspect of the town, it had a wonderful public school system, including a private high school the town's kids all went to. It was established by William S. Gilbert, whose name was on all the Gilbert clocks manufactured in Winsted, and the town paid our tuition for us. Included among the faculty was Katherine Morehardt, my junior and senior year English teacher who got us to read The House of Seven Gables. She used to get lost, at times, in talking about the lead character, Hepzibah Pynchon, and we used to make fun of her, as she appealed to our better natures to appreciate the life fate had tossed Hepzibah's way. Our better natures had yet to develop and our teenage imaginations naturally assumed she was talking about herself. I had no idea how in time I would come to be inspired in part by her teaching to become a teacher myself. And when I started blogging, some years ago, to name my blog after that Hepzibah character she had brought to life. She is at the source of my early interest in literature, and when I see what kids nowadays spend their time on, I can't believe she had us reading Shakespeare and Byron and Shelley and Keats and made us aware of Addison and Steele and publications like The Tatler and The Spectator. Not that I remember much about them, but it was an introduction, important in retrospect, to the notion of public literary commentary on social and political affairs.
Maybe even more important was the presence of a woman named Elizabeth Sonier. "Ma" Sonier made the rounds of all the public schools to introduce us to music, a gift from the gods I first got at age 6 in the first grade. Ma Sonier was still my music teacher twelve years later when I graduated, and in the meantime I got to know her as I accompanied the Gilbert High School Glee Club, which she organized and directed. Another stroke of luck was the fact that she was the church organist at the First Church, which was the center of my social life through high school. Her organ lessons led to a job as church organist at the local Methodist Church at age 16. Ma Sonier was also my introduction to orchestral music when she took me and some classmates to Hartford to hear my very first symphony concert. People sometimes marveled at my ability at the organ and I heard lots of sighs of disappointment when I made it clear I would not be striving for a career in music. What they miss is the fact that Ma Sonier gave me an appreciation for music that has gotten me through some rough times and today is among the best of many good reasons for getting out of bed in the morning. I spent the better part of October 2021 rooting for 刘晓禹 (Bruce Liu, if you prefer) of Montreal to win the top prize at the Chopin competition in Warsaw, remembering Ma Sonier all the while. She died in her 90s in the 1990s and probably never knew the full extent of the impact she had enriching my life.
Also at the First Church was a woman named Ruth Ells. She was the adult supervisor of the Pilgrim Youth Fellowship which was the center of my life. She was also a Middlebury College graduate and she pushed me to apply and coached me through the transition to life outside of Winsted. While at Middlebury I got a chance to spend my junior in Munich, and that opened to me the life of bright lights and big city - all of which I took for granted at the time, and all of which I now see as connected and fostered by good mentoring.
In graduate school at San Francisco State many years later I got a job working with other students of linguistics on a Peace Corps project, writing text books for teachers in Ivorian languages. And even more years later I got a job as assistant to a linguistics professor at Stanford who published a journal in Pidgins and Creoles. Worked my ass off at this job, but learned a ton, which helped solidify my conviction that I belonged to the world of Applied Linguistics. Again, neither of these projects were my primary activities of those years, and it's only in looking back that I realize how lucky I am to have taken a path which would intersect with these interests.
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Want to see something super cute? Have a look at these kids singing Aruba, dushi tera, their national anthem.
You need to know that dushi means beautiful in Papamiento. That's the Creole language spoken in Aruba. Tera you will recognize as tierra, or land, from Spanish and Portuguese. Papamiento is a Dutch/Portuguese/Spanish creole.
I trust that, like me, you appreciate the fact that not every national anthem in the world is somber or, as in the US of A, an unnecessary challenge for the normal voice range. In Aruba they've chosen a waltz! Not like the Australians' unofficial national anthem, "Waltzin' Mathilda," which is actually a march, but a real waltz that makes you want to get up and one-two-three one-two three around the room.
Here's another version, with words in Papamiento to follow along with - and Korean, if that's helpful to you - sans the sentimentality of singing kids.
And, just to round it out, a third version, which takes itself a little more seriously, with the kids again, but this time backed up by a full orchestra and chorus.
And a melody which is now an earworm it's going to take me days to get out of my head.
Hopefully it will help me pick up my feet, at least.
photo credit: beach in Aruba
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