How I lived in a story book

When I was very small, I loved the Golden Book, Scuffy the Tugboat, by Gertrude Crampton. Scuffy, a red painted toy tugboat sulked away in the toy store where he was awaiting a home, refusing to straighten up his blue smokestack, and complaining, “A toy store is no place for the likes of me.” The man with the polka dot tie, who owned the store, brought Scuffy home to his little boy, where they placed him in the tub, but Scuffy still will not sail upright, as it is no place for him.
Finally, exasperated the man and his boy took Scuffy up into the hills and put him in a brook, where he escaped from them, happy to finally be where he should be. As he sailed along, driven by the spring runoff, he became dissatisfied with the size of the brook, and rejoiced as it joined with others and formed a small river, which joined again with other rivers. Because it was spring the water ran high and fast, and Scuffy was driven along until finally he entered a large harbor and before him lay the sea. “There is no beginning and no end to the sea,” he lamented, realizing that he should have been careful for what he wished. It is at this place where the man in the polka dot tie found him and brought him back home to the bathtub, where he realized that was where he should be.
When I was small, I also lived in Plymouth, NH which was my father’s home prior to the War. It lies on the west side of the Pemigewasset River where it joins the Baker. It rises up to the top of a ridge and looks across the river at a parallel ridge occupied by the Town of Holderness. As a child, the view across the Pemi, from Kite Hill, was to heavily forested slopes. Those heights, I was sure, was the mountain the bear, of which my mother used to sing to me, went over. Like the bear, I wanted to see what was on the other side, but when we would get their on Sunday rides, one side looked pretty much the same as the other: steep slopes covered with maples, oak and pine. I saw no curious bears, even though I was convinced Bongo, from one of my other books was up in there with his girl, Lulubelle.
Out in the hills to the north and west of town the streams came tumbling down out of the hills, running quickly with the warming spring. They babbled through the woods and down into the small rivers, the Beebe, and the Mad, where they joined with the Baker and the Pemi, flowing through fields where cows came to drink, just as on Scuffy’s voyage and then into the forests where the wild animals drank or fished. The villages along the streams grew increasingly larger with little mills and factories until it became a larger river in Plymouth. The Pemi there was not like the larger rivers I knew nearer the coast, but I was convinced it would become that way further south, perhaps past Ashland, the next town downstream.
When I would visit my grandparents on the coast of Maine, my grandfather would take me in his 14’ skiff down the bay through the narrows at Gun Point and out to where the sea widened to horizon three sides and the ground swell made the little boat rise and fall. This is what Scuffy had seen at the end of his journey.
Whether specifically chosen by my parents to reflect my life, I do not know, but much of my early life was lived in my story books. I still have them, and I’m still convinced Scuffy started somewhere north or west of Plymouth, NH.

For Don Murray

In 1977 I had finished the draft of Where is Crusader Rabbitt, Now That We Really Need Him? typed out on the backs of old quizzes I had scrounged from the waste bins at York High School in York, ME. From the time I had started it in 1973, I had gone from being poor, single and living in the slum of Portsmouth, NH (Those of you familiar with Portsmouth might remember Seacrest Village) to being married to a wonderful lady who was a nursing instructor on the faculty of the University of New Hampshire.
One of her extra duties was to represent her department on the Faculty Senate. Among her fellow “senators” was Don Murray, perhaps one of the most popular faculty members who ever walked the halls of UNH.
Don had dropped out of high school to work in a logging camp, and at the outset of WWII had enlisted as a paratrooper and served throughout the war with the 82nd Airborne Division. Upon being discharged, he returned to school on the GI Bill, received a BA and MA, and also won the Pulitzer Prize.
At one meeting, Susan told him about my project, and he replied that he would like to see it. So at the next meeting, she presented him a ratty assortment of various colored paper bound up in four term paper folders. Not long afterward I received a call, asking if I could come over to his office some afternoon after I was done teaching, an invitation I accepted with some trepidation, considering the stature of a man like Don Murray.
We spent a pleasant afternoon, during which he waved off a stream of visitors, sharing stories about living in the mud and eating out of tin cans. Then he cut to the chase and asked what I planned on doing with the manuscript. My response was that I was happy I had written something that long, when no one else I knew had. And besides, trying to get something published was shooting in the dark.
He leaned forward, looked me square in the eye and asked, “Tell me, do you like sex, or do you like to masturbate?” I responded that after years of being single, the former was my preference, or words to that effect. “Well,” he said, “If you don’t try to publish this, you’re just masturbating.”
Well, I’m slow, but it’s finally been done. I only wish he were still around to see it. I quit when I needed glasses.