Idyll Banter

YOUNG WRITERS ASK
me frequently if I keep a writing notebook. Invariably I disappoint them when I tell them I don't. In my library in my home there are no journals with snippets of dialogue I have overheard or sketches of characters I might someday create. Occasionally I save the small (and long) sections that I have chosen to delete from a novel I'm writing, but once the book is complete I tend to recycle even those papers. (Yes, I know: The archivist at the college where my papers are preserved is going to call me the moment she reads this, and explain to me in no uncertain terms what an egregious and irresponsible mistake I am making. She may be right. But I can't help but shudder when I envision some poor soul wasting months or years of his life in a windowless room in the bowels of a brick monolith examining the passages from my books that I chose to expunge.)

And I have never kept a personal diary.

Last year when I explained this to a reader in Vermont, she corrected me. “Your weekly newspaper column is your diary,” she said. “That's your diary and your writing journal.”

I had to ponder this for about a nanosecond before I realized she was absolutely right. My Sunday column, “Idyll Banter,” has indeed been both a chronicle of my personal life and a compendium of set pieces that have shadowedâforeshadowed, actuallyâscenes and themes from my novels.

I have been writing “Idyll Banter” for the
Burlington Free Press
since February 1992, and the column has appeared in the newspaper's living section every single Sunday but two: once when we used the entire section for a lengthy year-in-review, and once when we profiled the steamboat
Ticonderoga
and needed every square inch of the section's front page for a diagram of the nineteenth-century paddlewheel steamer.

My original charge was, in the words of a paper's editor back then, “to write something that would make people who've lived their whole lives in Vermont smile. And people who've just come to the state. And, I guess, people who are visiting from out of town.”

It's instructions that precise that make a columnist smile. I had a latitude that was agreeably broad, and twenty-one column inchesâor roughly 675 wordsâa week.

I had lived in Vermont not quite six years at the time, a stretch that felt impressively lengthy to me then: It was, after all, about as long as I had lived anywhere else. I had two books behind me (including the single worst first novel ever published, bar none, an ill-conceived mystery about recent college graduates with the appalling pun for a title,
A Killing in the Real World
), and a third scheduled for publication that spring. With the hindsight of a person who has lived in one place now for close to two decades, I understand how swiftly six years pass and how little a person can know about a place in that time.

And place has always mattered greatly in my work, both in my fiction and my nonfiction. Certainly it has influenced these columns, in large measure because they are so keenly autobiographic. As Wendell Berry said, “If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.”

I grew up in iconically Cheeveresque suburbs around New York City, while my wife spent her childhood in Manhattan itself. We arrived in Vermont as proudly downwardly mobile New Yorkers, essentially swapping a co-op in Brooklyn for a century-old Victorian with a slate roof and fish-scale trim in the middle of a Vermont village called Lincoln.

Lincoln is a special place. I hope it is not a unique one, however, if only because barely a thousand people live here and with the population of the earth fast approaching six billion, I would hate to think so few of us will ever have the chance to savor the sort of community I experience daily. We are a place in which the ladies' auxiliary of the volunteer fire company still holds a bake sale with cream cheese brownies at the polling station each election day, and we vote there with number-two pencils on paper ballots twice the size of diner place mats. We have a preschool that teaches the kids to sing “I Am a Pizza” in French and brings in a justice of the peace to marry the children's stuffed animals. At the general store, neighbors actually gather to discuss an ailing Latino cockatiel, and the store's owners know exactly where to find someone in a heartbeat who can milk a nursing llama mama with a baby more interested in pumpkin pine than llama manna. And every year on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, our elementary schoolâall 106 kids and the 14 teachers and administratorsâwalk en masse to the local cemetery to remember family and friends and, perhaps, find a few rusted G.A.R. stars beside the tombstones of the town's Civil War veterans.

My sense is that Lincoln shares certain universalities with small towns in (for example) Nebraska, New Mexico, and parts of New York: a powerful feeling of kinship; a tolerance for human eccentricity that is often unappreciated; and a glorification of neighborliness for the simple reason that it is easier to be civil than ornery when on any given day you're likely to run into someone at the library, the post office, or while watching the annual outhouse racesâfaux outhouses on wheels, a single person insideâthat precede the local parade on the Fourth of July.

Besides, we need each other.

In the years since my wife and I first arrived in Vermont, there have been enormous changes on our planet, as well as here in the small world of Lincolnâand, of course, in the even tinier sphere inside our yellow house on the corner of Quaker Street. Our nation has fought in Panama, Haiti, Iraq (twice), Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. The country has had four presidents, economic expansions that induced euphoria, and economic busts that produced despair.

The Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union expired.

The cell phone was born; the rotary phone diedâexcept in my mother-in-law's apartment, where a pair exist like endangered animals in a zoo. Someday they will be moved to the Smithsonian.

The number of stoplights between my home in Lincoln and downtown Burlington has climbed from six to nineteen. The number of Wal-Marts in Vermont has gone from zero to four. The dairy industry in Lincoln disappeared completely: It went extinct on an appropriately wet and gray day in December 1992 when Tom Densmore, the last dairy farmer in town, packed his herd into the trucks that would take the cows to the auction barn three hours away.

My wife and I have had two parents and three grandparents die. We've become parents ourselves. We've owned nine cats and four hermit crabs (so far, we have yet to lose a crab to a cat), and eight separate cars (though, thank heavens, never more than two at a time), including a used 1983 Colt we bought when we first moved to Vermont for $1,100. I drove that car until the passenger doors rusted shut and I had to climb into the vehicle through the hatch in the back.

Though I hadn't envisioned this column would become a diary, it's clear to me how it evolved into one: I was simply recording what was going on around me. Yes, I wrote about the cataclysmic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001âwhen my wife was younger, she worked on the 104th floor of one of the World Trade Center towersâas well as what meaning might be found in my Armenian grandparents' bewildering courtship. I shared with my readers my Manhattan sister-in-law's fanatic determination to have a vegetable garden three hundred miles to the north, regardless of how much those carrots would cost her.

But on any given week I was more likely to chronicle my daughter's birth or my mother's death. Or the pleasure my neighbor Don Gale, an engineer by day, gets from boiling maple sap into syrup. Or the way Don's teenage daughter, Jennifer, memorialized her dead horse, Gumbo Tiger Lily C. The animal had to be put to sleep, and I will never forget what Jennifer's sobbing mother said to me after the veterinarian had euthanized the animal with a syringe the size of a thermos, and Jennifer was gently stroking the dead horse's broad but lifeless neck: “It's easy for her to be strong. She doesn't have to see her daughter's heart breaking.”

I have learned so much from these people.

Perhaps because this is a book about a town, I have divided the columns into sections that reflect some of Lincoln's notable points of interestâor, perhaps, those parts of the village that I have always found most interesting. I have not dated the pieces, but they proceed roughly chronologically within each section. That means, for example, that my daughter might be a fourth-grader in one group of columns and a toddler in the next. She does not, however, travel backward in time within any one section.

Likewise, careful readers will note that the number of dairy farms in Vermont in one case is 2,300, while in another it is closer to 1,600. The first reference is from 1993, the second from 2001. Make no mistake: The dairy farm is beleaguered in Vermont.

There are also occasional references to Bristol, the town next to Lincoln. It is a veritable metropolis compared to my modest hamlet, with a grocery store, a pharmacy, and a wonderful little bookstore. An eye-widening 4,000 people live thereâfour times the population of Lincoln.

Finally, not all of these columns appeared originally in the
Burlington Free Press.
The longer pieces appeared in the
Boston Globe,
most in that paper's Sunday magazine but some in the travel section or the opinion pages, too.

It would be hard to thank my neighbors for all that they have given my family and me over the years, but I hope this bookâan inadvertently public diaryâexpresses a small measure of my profound affection.

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