The Moultonborough General Store

Labor Day used to mean school was about to start. It still feels that way 60+ years later. It makes me think about every teacher’s annual assignment to write about what you did over the summer.

For us, it was all about New Hampshire. My mom’s parents had a house up there on Lake Winnipesaukee. We’d leave Philadelphia early in the morning in our over-stuffed Oldsmobile, cross the George Washington Bridge, stop for a hamburger at a Howard Johnson’s off 95 in Connecticut, and get to Wolfeboro in time for dinner. Our three cousins and their mom would be there too. Nine of us kids would sleep on springy metal bunks on the screened porch off the second floor. You could get there through our grandparents’ bedroom, or better still, climb into it from an old window off the landing on the stairs. There were swings on the first-floor porch where we read comics and real books. We played Hearts and Spit and did puzzles on the dining room table, swam what we thought was a heroic distance to our next-door neighbor’s diving board, paddled the lake in red canvas canoes, ate hot dogs made by Aunt Pat on butter-grilled buns, and on the luckiest of days, water-skied behind our grandfather’s double engine Chris Craft Cruiser, maker of giant wakes. The biggest thrill was watching my mom ski. She was beautiful in her floral suit, strong and confident, crisscrossing back and forth, dropping a ski to slalom as Moompah, our grandfather, zoomed past us on the dock. She’d slip her ski-less foot into the slalom ski and take off, sending out a giant arching spray, jumping both wakes (two engines, two giant wakes) then flipping around to come back. She wasn’t mom out there; she was something else and it was her!

Earlier this year, someone in our Tuesday poetry writing group suggested we write about our childhood summers. The first thing that came to mind for me was all of us kids and our mothers piling into two cars and driving 30 minutes north to the Moultonborough General Store, home of penny candy. They sold everything a kid could want. We went once a summer, each of us given one kid-sized brown paper bag to fill up. It was heavenly.

When I finished my poem back in January, I sent it to my four older sisters and younger brother. Within a few minutes, Bill had written back with what sounded to me like his own poem. Here’s what the two of us remember:

(You can listen to the poems here).

Moultonborough General Store, 1966

Goobers and Raisinets
Red Fish and Fire Balls
Sweet Tarts and Smarties
Bazooka and Juicy Fruit

Three Musketeers
Milk Duds, and Twizzlers
Wax lips and Butterscotch
Reese’s and Snickers

Necklaces made to eat from elastic
Cigarettes tipped in yellow, fantastic!
Maple leaf sugar
And Jellybeans, too

Candy Corn, Licorice, tongues turning blue
Jaw Breakers, Sugar Daddy
Good ‘n’ Plenty, Dots
Starburst and Neccos
And Green Lollipops

Milky Way, Mike and Ike, Jujubes, Zotz
M&Ms, Kisses, the best of the lot

And here’s my brother’s response with his memory of trips to The General Store:

Your poem focuses on the bright objects and misses the dull ones. I want a re-write!

Where is the tale of the approach on Governor Wentworth Highway, watching the pines through curved-roof windows from the rumble seat of our Vista Cruiser, still smelling of dog vomit from the nine-hour trip to New Hampshire?

And what about the store’s ancient porch creaking under the weight of my six-year-old feet, or all those bees who made honey there, who’d flown in from nearby clover, but couldn't sting me through the glass. Or the pocketknife (with a fold-up fork and spoon) that Moompah would buy me in an instant then instantly forget, but to me, would still smell slightly of his aftershave when I opened it fifty years later?

We were very, very lucky. I still visit that lake and that house more than any other place in my dreams at night. There was goodness there, and innocence too.

Enjoy today. Love, Bar

PS: Right after I checked my recording of the poems just now, one of my songs started to play unexpectedly. I love when things like that happen. This song’s about a lot of things, including my dreams, but it starts out at the bottom of the big hill behind my other grandparents’ house where we used to sled. There was an abandoned well down there that became a metaphor…

This recording’s a little louder, so turn your speaker down a bit…

The song’s called “Ah ha ha” from a 2014 album called Journey.

I was born near a wishing well
overgrown when a red oak fell
hidden in the view
no one else ever knew

Looked down into the wishing well
wished I may when I heard myself
fell under its spell
all my wishes held

I sing Ah ha ha, hmm, I sing Ah ha ha, hmm, hey hey hey

Someone said you can never tell
“Won’t come true, you could go to hell!”
Don’t know what to do	 
if I can’t tell you

I Sing Ah ha ha, hmmm, I sing ah ha ha, hmmm, hey hey hey

One-hundred-thirty-one buckets of water drawn from that well
Each sip I took made me thirstier for more and more of myself

I was born near a wishing well
far away from here
Oh, it seems so far away
when I turn, if I turn, to look
Oh no no, it’s not so far away
when I turn, if I turn and look
I sing Ah ha ha, hmm, I sing Ah ha ha, 
when I turn, when I look
I sing Ah ha ha
when I turn, when I look
I sing Ah ha ha
when I turn and I drink
I sing ahhhh 

Peter Tomlinson, Lou Pappas, Manuel Quintana, and me recorded this together.

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