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I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, sleepy-summered New Jersey town the Manhattan rich used to use as a refuge from various epidemics, in a house with odd-lot closets and secret stairs, and in the eighties, I spent a lot of non-homework time IN the odd-lot closets, reading stories in which secret stairs figured heavily – secrets of all sorts, really, fortunes and poltergeists and seven-year-olds who were really seventeen. I was a weird kid in a town with inattentive librarians, which you know already, but I mention it again to explain how we got here.
“Here” is the (somewhat incompatibly) grand house at one end of our street, the kind of house that had a name – and this one DID have a name: “Roanokes,” of all things. Not a bad name, on the one hand, given the name of the street (Rowan Road, awkwardly chopped into the side of a hill above Watchung Reservation) and the constellation of ancient, massive trees that shouldered all the houses along it. On the other hand…talk about leaning into neighborhood chatter.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though, because 40 years ago, on the one occasion on which I found myself IN Roanokes, I didn’t know it had a name. I knew its owners’ names – the Gordons – and that they didn’t come to the door when Girl Scouts or trick-or-treaters rang the bell; a polite, faintly accented manservant in a snug Izod, one of two of them, would be dispatched to dismiss us. I knew grown-ups used words about them that nobody had used in half a century (“tycoon,” chiefly, but a babysitter dropped a “nabob” on them once; also “manservant,” of course). I didn’t know anything else, and I certainly didn’t know why I “got to” come along with my father to invite them in person to the block party some keener on Oak Ridge Ave. had decided should occur. Possibly my facility with my grandmother’s friends was considered of value, although that derived primarily from watching the same ABC soap operas they did and despising the same characters thereon, and the Gordons didn’t seem like they owned a television, but in any event, Dad and I trooped dutifully over to the Gordons’ with event flyers in hand, expecting to hand one to a manservant and hear it hitting a mid-century waste-paper basket (…see what I mean with the heritage lingo?) before we’d gotten off the front steps.
The manservants (“menservant”?) must have had the day off, though, because Mrs. Gordon answered the door herself, and invited us in for a glass of iced tea. I don’t remember MUCH about our visit, except the truly delicious tea, and the frosted glasses it came in, and the little silver claws used to serve the sugar cubes. The house looked and smelled like a museum and was kept at rare-books temperature – for good reason, as the Times noted in 2011. Mrs. Gordon sat on the sofa with perfect posture; she was very kind. I THINK she explained that they couldn’t attend because Mr. Gordon was ill, but that could be a pattern-recognition thing – that that’s just what rich, mysterious ladies say in the early part of a fable, the part that maps onto a reality the reader has also experienced. Mr. Gordon may already have died by then. I don’t think she attended the block party. I don’t think I ever saw her again. I don’t think ANYONE in our neighborhood ever saw her again, only the manservants (“menservant”?) and their incongruous chest hair, bustling around near the Gordons’ garage, or smoking coatless by a side door – and I got the impression that nobody else in our neighborhood had ever seen Mrs. Gordon at all, much less a second time.
And this is how a comparatively unremarkable old lady becomes a myth. She is seen only once, and then the portal to her world closes, leaving her alone with her artifacts of a bygone age and her attendants from a faraway land, and leaving her neighbors – bored, ill-bred gossips waiting for the internet to be invented – to construct the Union County version of “A Rose For Emily” all around her.
Or Jane Eyre. Gatsby elements, sometimes. My own version, shared with Agent Weiss around the way, was that the manservants (“menservant”?) (…I’ll stop it with that now; I forget who started calling them “the Greeks,” but that is in fact what we called them back then) had decided to put the “kill” back in “Achilles” and murdered Mrs. Gordon. Or just…didn’t bother reporting her death of natural causes and stashed her remains under a roof eave, the better to continue enjoying the pool and grounds. But the striking part, to me, isn’t that we jackasses came up with a slanderously over-the-top explanation for a quotidian absence. It’s that most of the rest of the neighborhood ALSO did this, independently, and that the stories shared so many elements…not to mention a certain implausibility. Mummies forging checks. A tunnel under the swimming pool — which was tiled with gulden, by the way, like, what? Where did we get this shit? Why? Mrs. Gordon was probably in there painting her nails and watching One Life To Live just like my grandma’s friends and I were.
Maybe she knew, played the part. Maybe she snuck out of the house huddled in the backseat with one of the Greeks driving, shopped at an Acme two towns over, told a manservant to struggle outside with a suspicious-looking rolled-up rug once every 18 months to give the rest of Rowan a thrill. Or maybe she didn’t give a tinker’s damn about us plebes, which is also fine, but I think a lot at this time of year about the ways we organize the world for ourselves, so that we can understand it in a livable way. And I think a lot in the last few years especially about the stories each of us builds, separately and alone, that end up being the same ones. We tell tales to feel less confused and alone.
And sometimes it works.
Happy birthday, Don. Grab a frosted glass and have a swim.
Tags: September 11th
This year and every year.
It’s a comfort to come here and read your words on this day; like hearing from an old, treasured friend.
Thank you, Sars, and happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sars, for helping us all feel a tiny bit less confused and alone, all this while, and for letting us all hang out by the pool together once a year. Be well and be comforted, friends of the ‘Nation. I miss chatting with you all.
Happy birthday, Don. I hope somehow you know how grateful we are to you, too.
Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you for sharing the tales you tell, Sars. Love to you and to all of us today.
Chills. Beautiful writing, Sars.
Happy birthday, Don.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Happy birthday, Don.
This is a necessary stop for me on this day. Thank you, Sars, for taking the time to share your stories with us each year.
Every year, I’m here with all of you, and the tales we tell.
Happy birthday, Don.
“We tell tales to feel less confused and alone.”
Thank you for still telling tales.
Happy birthday Don.
Happy birthday Don ?
My first stop every year. Happy birthday Don. Thank you Sars.
This is still the first thing I do every year on this day.
Thank you, Sarah. Happy Birthday, Don.
Another year goes by, and this year becomes part of the memory of all of those other years checking in here. I once tried to explain Sars and Don and his birthday to a class of 14 year olds, who did not especially remember 9/11, and who had no memory of the world before it.
Those students are all turning 30 this year.
Thank you for keeping this space for us, Sars, and happy birthday Don, wherever you are.
Hello, everyone. Thank you, Sarah. Happy birthday, Don.
As always, thank you for holding this space. And Happy Birthday, Don.
Grateful, as always, to stop by here today and see everyone, and feel the comfort of the familiar.
Thanks, Sarah. Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah, as always.
And for another year, Happy Birthday, Don.
Happy birthday Don.
Wonderful story. I felt like I was there.
I can’t believe it has been so many years…it seems like I was just reading your initial 9/11 post. Still re-read it every year.
Happy birthday, Don.
Thanks, Sars. For every year.
it’s a privilege to visit this talisman, to re-acquaint myself with the ever present yet nearly silent tone in my soul, struck by your words quite a number of lifetimes ago.
Sarah – thank you.
Don, hope your birthday is one of joy and happiness.
ciao,
scott
Thank you for some light yet mysterious reading on what is always a somber day. I absolutely would have come up with stories too if I had lived in this neighborhood. Happy Birthday, Don, wherever you may be!
Thank you Sarah! And HBD, Don.
@Maura – I would encourage you to read (and if my crackerjack HTML skills are broken, look up For Thou Art With Us in the archives). Don was Sars’ disaster buddy on 9/11, they’d never met before and I don’t believe she’s found him since. Today, that awful day 22 years ago, was his birthday.
First stop every year.
An article in yesterday’s paper said 21 years and I asked myself why I was so angry at the typo – was it a typo or did the person writing the article just get it wrong, maybe not even born yet. The article was about a service yesterday, we’re in the Bay Area the scheduled destination of Flight 93, but without it, the day might have passed unnoticed by so many now.
Thank you for keeping this memorial and writings of healing Sarah, Happy Birthday Don.
@Jen, pretty sure she knows and that question mark was a busted emoji ;) but! Thanks for linking just in case.
And thanks to all of you for coming by. I wouldn’t mind a swim myself today, the humidity in NYC just won’t quit.
Thanks for all of the tales. And Happy Birthday, Don.
They say rituals ground us, connecting us all as we try to seek peace. I’m glad you’re all a part of mine.
Happy Birthday, Don. Thank you, Sars (always).
Happy Birthday, Don. <3 Hope you're out there in the world somewhere.
Good to hear from you, Sars.
Every year. Thank you.
I was guffawing out loud–it was the line about the rolled-up rugs that got me–and had to explain to my husband what I was reading.
I told him about the wonderful blog I happened upon back in the late ’90s, when one still happened upon things on the internet. I told him about how I went to work (where there was internet, unlike home) early every Tuesday so I could read the latest essay by this absolutely marvelous, funny, deep, always original writer.
I told him how she’d written an iconic September 11 essay I have probably read a hundred times, including a dozen or more times aloud to various people. I told him how every time I’ve had access to any kind of database in the course of my professional life, I’ve gone Don-hunting, usually in violation of company policy.
I have promised to read him the original essay later, when he’s not preoccupied, and I know it will make me cry because it does every time.
I am so, so glad you come back every year, Sars and all the rest of you.
Happy birthday, Don.
For some reason the paragraphing in my previous comment didn’t show up. I’m sorry about the wall of text!
Thanks for always being a place to come and take a moment to remember.
Here we are again. A whole generation, no matter how a person figures generations. People born on that day have been able to drink for a year, vote for four, join the armed forces, graduate. Live a whole life. Every year we get that much further–away? Along? But it’s still so clear on the horizon. A pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night. With Sars and the Nation taking notes, writing stories.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Happy Birthday, Don. Love to the Nation, both fuzzy and tall.
Here today, next year, and always.
My oh my how the stories have changed over the years – mine and everyone’s. It’s a comfort to come back to this one again and again.
Thanks, Sars.
Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah.
Tales and stories sustain us.
So thankful you’re in the world.
Happy Birthday, Don
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thanks for keeping the lights on, Sars.
Happy Birthday Don. I hope you know you have a community of well wishers sending love your way on this day every year.
Thank you Sars for keeping the tradition going. A bright spot in a somber day.
Happy birthday, Don. And thank you, Sars.
Thank you for meeting us here every year, Sars.
Happy birthday, Don.
I love coming back here every year on September 11. The tears always well up, and I find it therapeutic. I wonder if there will come a year when I don’t cry?
Thank you, Sars. I’m so glad I can come here every year and be quietly together.
And happy birthday, Don.
Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sars, for intriguing us on this somber day with a wonderful tale. And thank you for still being here and maintaining this site. My 13 year old son doesn’t quite “get” 9/11 yet; I’m thinking this is the year we read your account together.
Happy Birthday, Don. Hope you are well.
Happy birthday, Don. Best wishes, Sars.
Happy Birthday, Don. Thanks Sars. Next year- same time, same place.
It is hard to imagine that the oldest people who never lived in a world where this hadn’t happened will now be turning twenty-two, which is the age I was that day. Happy Birthday, Don, and thank you, Sarah, for keeping up tradition. The world has been so full of unimaginable things my entire adult life. Stories are powerful and necessary.
We were in NYC last month, my 10-year-old daughter’s first visit, and ended up down at the memorial on our way to Battery Park. I realized for the first time that I wasn’t even sure how much she knew about what happened at all, which is surreal when it is such an ever present memory for so many of us. So much so that all of us are here again today to share a quiet space with apart from whatever is going on in our lives today.
Thanks for keeping this, Sars, and a very happy birthday to Don.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sars, for keeping this space for us.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Something seems to happen every year between my end-of-August birthday and this particular anniversary that explicitly triggers a memory of your story, and so for 21 years I’ve always made my way back here to read about what you’re thinking and see if somehow, some way, maybe Don has found you again.
This year, my most book-obsessed friend gave me, as has become his custom, a pile of nostalgia-inspired selections. Among them this time was a colorful hardcover called “A Very Special 90210 Book.” My mild amusement turned to sheer delight when I saw the authors. “Oh my god! It’s Sars and Wing Chun!”
Thank you for being one of my touchstones all this time. And happy birthday, Don.
AHHHHHH please thank your friend for us! (…jfc, that book turns three next week)