Below the Turnpike

The title of this post was originally the title of this book, but by the time I got 

around to publishing it the Woke Era had begun and I decided to rub it in.

Never understood all the New Joisey jokes when I was growing up. Everything south of Exit 1of the Turnpike was distinct from everything above. Old towns dating back to the 17th century, mile upon mile of back roads and colonial architecture and history, and the real Delaware River and mostly unspoiled Atlantic shoreline (excepting the honky-tonks of Wildwood and Atlantic City). Where my mind was created in an amazing 13 years of childhood.

No need to over-analyze this. Best just to take my word for it for now.

Later on, of course, I learned the why’s of the Joisey jokes and made peace with the variety of people and geography that made the state a collection of its own provinces rather than a slab of similarities like, say, Pennsylvania. I even got to be a Tom Waits fan, whose knowledge of NJ was heavily NY-tainted. No matter. I loved his “Jersey Girl” more than I ever did any song by Bruce Springsteen, the phony motorhead from Asbury Park. A couple years ago, I even slapped together my own homage to Waits in the form of a music(?) video written and, um, performed by me. (Consider this a self-deprecating inoculation against what other content in this post might seem to smack of a swelled head.) 

Happy ending? I finally got it right when I married my own Jersey girl.

Beginnings were happy enough too. I grew up loving all the waterways and fields full of tomatoes, asparagus, and sweet corn, all of which I could pick for dinner out back of our carriage shed. The houses were, many of them, living history, including ours, built in three different stages, one in the 1730s, one in the early 1800s, and a frame kitchen and shed from Civil War years. Nearby Greenwich had its own Tea-Burning Monument and an avenue to the Cohansey Harbor still called Ye Greate Street lined with Revolution-era survivors, including a Pirate House. As a matter of simple fact, history was what we breathed without even thinking about it.

Not apologizing for the song. It’s Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quittez Pas, 

which means “Never leave me” and hits the right note for me.

All four of my grandparents were alive and close by in Salem County. We saw all of them multiple times a week and stayed over with them on weekends. Still, the central figure of that time for me was my namesake grandfather, Robert F. Laird, Sr. I thought God probably looked like Boppa, which is what his six grandchildren called him because the first of them couldn’t manage “grandpa.” Her “Boppa” became his name for all of us. I’m the one to got to spend the most time with him. Four cousins lived in Ohio and only visited a couple times a year, and there was a good reason why I was alone with him so much.

You can just imagine him if you want. No need to see him here. 

One thing to know. His hair turned snow white when he was 21.

He died during my first year away at boarding school, when I was 14. It didn’t strike me until recently, with the perspective on old age I now have, that I may have been part of the reason he hung on for so long and finally felt he could let go, his job well done.

My other granddad lived into his nineties. I had many rewarding hours and days with him as well. 

Him I was able, finally, to repay just a bit with a book of his own.

My sister and I were fortunate to have friends and near family of many fascinating people in our rural neck of the woods. 

We wound up having our own tennis court too, built by hand by my Dad 

and me during one of his summer vacations Hard work and drama too.

Reluctant to include the next selection because it contains a flagrant error of fact I should have caught during the recording. The 1952 election anrguments are not eyewitness accounts by me but repeated stories my parents told us about. I very probably confused these with similar arguments they had about the 1960 election, when my parents would have been with Nixon and the hardline Caldwells would already have been agitating for Goldwater. Same fight, different year. But the rest of the account is faithful to the facts, and I love the cover pic because it’s a painting of the barn behind our house by Alexander Lee the ‘Communist.’

All three of us R. F. Lairds are in the mix here now, plus the province of New Jersey where we lived most of our lives. I’ll end this with just two more selections that shed a little more light. Not long ago, I was thinking of all the people I’ve known who have lived inside some kind of narrowly constructed box, and the word “box” inspired me to build this as a back and forth between a poem and an image set that changed one another in the process. Here it is FWIW.

Click on the pic for the Rumble video.

Last word? No. This is more like that. A selection from the final book of The Boomer Bible’s Present Testament in which I imagined my own Dad’s point of view about a son whose closest thing to an autobiographical novel was a work in which that son cast himself in the starring role as an Antichrist. Only half true, but where did that half come from?