After An Eclectic, Adventurous Early Part Of My Life...

By James Taber

After an eclectic and adventurous early part of my life I set my sights on a college degree which from my area and early life circumstances was quite unheard of generally. When news was slowly spreading around that I would be departing that fall to start my college career one of my peers said to me in disbelief you're going to college? You're going to work in an office? But you have tattoos!?.

* writing this actually brought back a memory when I was in a classroom in college and the professor was raging on about not hiring anybody for his business who had tattoos as I was sitting in the front row directly in front of him with a long sleeve shirt on covering my tattoos. After class I had a moment with him and showed him my tattoos and said somebody like you who would not hire somebody because they had tattoos probably would not hire somebody if they had slanted eyes or a different skin color than you either. He had no response for that.

This being back in the time when tattoos were not mainstream like they are now and mostly military, convicts and bikers had tattoos. In preparation for pursuit of my degree I gave notice at my job and my apartment and made the move to the big city, well semi big city, Concord, New Hampshire. The whole event was fly by night edge of the sea adventure.

I moved to Concord on Saturday with nowhere to live and by luck at the college campus of New Hampshire Tech I found a room for rent poster on a bulletin board and found a nice reasonable room to rent within walking distance of the campus as I had no vehicle, from a wonderful lady named Joan Wentworth.

Coming from living in Newbury, VT4o Concord was a bewildering intimidating array of traffic and endless roads and places. Fast forwarding about six years I achieved my A.A.S., B.S. and M.S. By then I was fully integrated into living in Concord, and knew all its nooks and crannies, shortcuts for traffic, places for a great meal or a cold beverage and lived and worked there for the next 30+ years.

I had a high-pressure job and living in the city itself could be stressful with things such as heavy traffic pretty much every day everywhere. So, it was often with a sense of anticipation that I looked forward to the weekend so I would head back north to visit the family, fish, hunt etc.

It was with a wonderful sense of freedom and lightheartedness that I would take a right turn out of my driveway and hit exit 16, 93 North, and head for the hills! My first objective on my journey was hitting the Plymouth, New Hampshire exit. As soon as I hit that my next move was to punch in WYKR on the radio and keep heading north. I would often stop at the Quonset Hut and do some browsing and pick up some unusual gifts for the family.

I would also usually hit a few fishing spots with my fly rod on the journey. In Warren, I would often stop and visit my college buddy and wonderful musician Russell Hurst and his awesome family. When I got to Pike, New Hampshire I would usually swing left and go visit my brother, Cliff English, affectionately known as Spiffy Cliffy, although I'm not so sure he was affectionate about that nickname. We would have some great conversations on a variety of subjects from Bruce Lee to tiger salamanders.

Then I would head for Mountain Lakes where I would always stay at my baby sister Rosie Farr's house. It is a rural legend in the family that I had an uncanny knack for showing up at her house exactly at suppertime. I loved coming up here on the weekends and now I live here permanently and I still love it, it is a wonderful area.
Now if there was just a Taco Bell and Burger King....

The leaves are dropping and so is the temperature, it's that time of the year when the holidays are approaching. To me it's a time to reflect and focus on family. I have been blessed with a large family my whole life and I especially enjoy them during the holidays. The family members that are still here and the ones that have passed on.

The one that I especially miss during the holidays is my beloved mother Maddalena Grace (Profita) Taber. It was about this time of the year when I stopped by her home in Newbury, Vermont to pick her up and just go for a ride together. At the time she was 82 years old, getting a bit frail physically but still sharp as a attack mentally.

I remember helping her up into my Ford Explorer and thinking how tiny and light she was. We decided to go on a nostalgia tour so we took a right turn to Wells River and then a left turn heading towards Groton. Along the way we swung into Blue Mountain Union School and I told her some of the naughty things we used to do when we were in school and mostly got away with... ha ha.

We pulled into South Ryegate and took a drive up by the Fiske Farm and then over the little bridge to her old house on the left where she and my father lived for many years. It still looked in great shape. On the way back out to 302, we looked at the old South Ryegate store, my mother always liked Steve and Tom the proprietors and so did I for that matter... great guys.

Then we headed on to Groton which hasn't really changed all that much since I was a kid except for the people. We took a ride up to the old place where I grew up which is still in the family and is now used as a camp and sat there for a spell and reminisced about all the years we spent there. On the way back through Groton, we pulled in and looked for a moment at the old building that my parents had a little market in for a few years.

And we started circling back towards home but then decided to take a left turn in South Ryegate and head up through the back roads a little bit and stopped and checked out a little plot of land that we had lived on briefly. That hadn't really changed much either but we did not linger there as across the road in a pasture there was a massive pile of cow manure and we were down wind of it!.

Our last stop on the nostalgia tour was going straight up the road from there a couple miles to what used to be the old Aldrich farm. Along the way we saw a beautiful pair of Palomino horses running around a field. We did a drive by the farm chatted about a few of our memories from there and then headed home.

To finish off our tour we stopped for ice cream in Wells River. When we pulled up to my mother's front door and parked, she said you know Jimmy, your vehicle rides a lot nicer than Bryan (brother) and Brads(brother-in-law) trucks!.

And to me that was the end of The Perfect Day!

James Taber is a frequent contributor to The Bridge Weekly. He lives in Woodsville, NH.