Ronan in Vermont
When I was sixteen, my mother and I drove to Vermont. She and Dad had already bought their piece of land in Vermont, and we went there to see about getting a cabin there. We stayed at the Lyndonville Hotel, a musty old barn of a place but the only one on offer in the off-season (Burke was just developing then). It was my spring break from high school and, while she went off to talk to the builders, I was left with nothing to do; Lyndonville, VT was a dull place to be alone and cold in early April. That evening she told me that she was working with a young man, I think his name was Ronan, close to my age and working with his father’s contracting business. Ronan had said that I might be interested in double-dating to a sugaring-off party. What did I have to lose?
Ronan was 19, and planning to enter college in the fall. The two girls who joined us were both about to go to college, too. The sugaring-off ‘party’ turned out to be just the four of us, and a dull time it was — there was no real sugaring-off going on with the evaporators, and we ended up heating some syrup on the gas stove and dribbling it on a dish of snow. Bored with that, we all bundled into Ronan’s car and drove up to Canada for Molsons. I was thoroughly bored, as I’m sure those girls were with me. Later, after we’d dropped the girls off, Ronan drove around for me to see the sights, although it was quite dark, lit only by the stars, until the moon rose over the mountains. We parked by the side of Lake Willoughby where a waterfall splashed down, and as we sat there, I was overcome with the beauty of it all, and also with an incredible sadness. I cried. Ronan let me let it all out and when I was done sobbing, he drove me back to the hotel in Lyndonville, and I expected never to see him again.
So I was surprised when the next year Ronan called our house in Des Plaines. He was in the vicinity on business for his father’s firm, had to drive to Charleston to deliver some plans, and thought I might like to drive down with him and see Charleston and Washington, D.C. My mother thought this was a great idea, and I jumped at the chance; at seventeen, I was starting to know myself, a little, and Ronan seemed a likely sympathetic companion.
Soon we were driving through Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. We stopped somewhere along the way, at some motel with a vacancy sign. As Ronan went into the motel office to rent a room, I hid on the floor of the car. (Imagine two young men taking a single room, in the South, in 1959.)
I discovered a lot that night. And the following two nights, as we made our way to DC and then toward home in Illinois.
My mother died some 24 years ago. I dearly wish I could talk to my mother, now, about that trip I took with Ronan. She had been so enthusiastic about my going! Had she no inkling? What was she thinking? Did she know me better than I knew myself then?