Rowayton Connecticut

If you imagined this place, it would not be more precisely replicated than the town that already exists. Garish flowers bloom everywhere; phlox, lilies, in brilliant shades of fushia, purple, snow white…colors that I don’t remember existing in my mother’s dusty begonia beds or in town shopkeepers planters. At each stop sign, at every traffic median or triangle over-the-top, “I Know-They just went Wild this year!” the fruits of garden club labor appear.
The Rowayton Market has set out cute bistro tables with umbrellas and a folding chalkboard with the day’s coffee and latte suggestions for customers lazing away their Connecticut weekend. Esso Gas station? Newsstand?? Bottle shop?? Forget it! Now, if you need a real estate agent, or an investment advisor, or a wine merchant, ok.…..Dogs are strictly leashed and tethered to the flimsy little tables, as if it were not possible that they, as dogs, could upend everything—table, lattes, the whole get-up-- Only the post office remains untouched. Untouched but tinier. Everything was as perfect as Speilburg himself could fashion it to be. No roaming dogs. No kids on black “English” bikes. Plenty, however, of adults in spandex, wired up to their vital signs and grooving to J-zee.
No longer is there a danger of your little kiddy being trapped while hiding out in the deteriorating and crumbling rubble of a three-story Victorian mansion, last lived in by an emaciated silent screen actress wearing 1940’s era bedroom slippers and two brilliant gashes of Max Factor Red lipstick. Twenty first century children won’t be mowed down by buzz-cut and pimpled teenage boys flying around the United Church curve and blasting through town going 80, or maybe holding out false hope to the town’s resident queer by groups of three or four stopping by his place in the early evening and joining him in a cocktail. No weird kids from the past will appear and terrorize the children of commuters, or wind up in the City Briefs in the “Hour” every Monday. All of these dangers are gone, the old houses, the jaded teenagers, the homo. Replaced by Martha’s Vineyard-issue homes, clear skinned, soccer playing 16 year olds ordering their own lattes, and family friendly gays. On Highland Avenue, a painted wooden sign preaches, “Neighborhood Kids Say “Slow Down!”
The streets of Rowayton and West Norwalk are so narrow that it isn’t possible to imagine the old days when we rode 2 or 3 abreast past stone walls in those summer pine needles or the times when I silently moved through the gray post-Thomas 5 pm air in thick falling snow. I’m certain there used to be grassy shoulders which we would gouge apart galloping our horses, or move onto if two cars going different directions happened to pass. As a matter of fact, when we became 16 and drove these suburban lanes, we poured it on, we flew. One time at the blind intersection of Fillow Street and Weed Avenue, Teri stalled her father’s new red Volkswagon in the snow and passed out, and though only 100 feet from my driveway, I threw up and fell asleep.
Two explanations, besides the obvious, explain the minute character of the streets. Maybe my town is dwarfed because I am in a vehicle at least 4 times bigger than the VWs and Saabs and Morris Minors of the 50s. Or it’s possible that, in a melodramatic cry to “Respect Our Privacy!” and boisterous anonymity, townsfolk have permitted shrubbery and trees to grow unchecked, and foliage that was newly-planted and strictly manicured in 1956 has gone feral, and engulfs the roads, driveways and property lines. Even the newest replacement houses on each block appear ancient, flaunting modest pea-gravel driveways, shutters and clapboard covered in humble blazingly colored annuals. “Us? Oh, We’ve lived here forever!!” Where there used to be 300 acres screening a stone house and barns, now there are 300 discretely positioned “homes”, which pretend to have been there for a century. Everything and nothing is new.
The Sherin’s place next door looked the same, smaller of course than the panoramic and holy stables, corral, and colonial house from my 12 year old memory, but stone walls, pasture, the brook-- they were all there. Missing only was Bonnie in the driveway where her date was already gunning his engine, shouting up to Susie or Debbie in a second floor window, “Twinnie, get me my blue cardigan, the one in the bottom drawer!” It was turning into the Jennings’ driveway that finally brought me tears, as you suddenly realize a fondly remembered old friend has been gone for decades.
The Jennings’ house, the first house I fell in love with- looked over the 100 Jennings acres from a flat knoll…the house and terrace and pool basked in light all day until the sun went down behind the stable and woods. I loved, I wanted to be the resident daughter of it! The brick-floored kitchen leading off the mud room, where we’d toss our riding boots and gloves and run up the front stairs to get in our suits and swim in the pool right outside the French doors. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings had 4 stair step sons Robbie Chris Jeff and Peter, so I recall her as often in a fog, and Mr. Jennings travelled as a VP for Bigelow Carpets, frequently to Paris for some reason. They always had a nameless cook or a maid, I don’t know which, and once Mr. Jennings brought 16 year old Teri a black bustier back from France. Even to me back then it seemed dirty, except I didn’t know the word.
I drive into the former driveway, now a paved street. My house looked over nothing now, the yards of the new-olds hidden by fast growing maples trees. In 1965 there were overgrown flowering trees and tall meadow grass on either side of the driveway near the mailbox. I hid there ,smoking, while I waited for my mother to leave the house for work on mornings I didn’t go to school. Susan Andrus and I waited there for Robbie’s mother’s station wagon to swing in and drop Robbie off before she drove on with the other three and the groceries to the house I loved. We would walk and laugh slowly up the quarter mile driveway.
Five houses now line each side, softened by the ubiquitous landscaping, where in 1960 there were acres of meadow grass, a clear brook running down the hill into a pond where I soaked Missy’s swollen ankle for hours one summer, and the remains of an ancient orchard. Mr. Jennings would sit on the slate patio near the pool with a martini in his huge fist and watch Robbie, the twins, Teri, and me playing spit-tag on horseback. White jump standards and rails had littered the treeless grass riding field, and the “homes” and lots made from this riding field were clearly grander. Designers had rearranged stone walls to respect the new settlers’ current boundary lines. In the parking area in front of the side entrance to my beloved house’s mud room, bordered by a fenced kitchen garden and a lane leading up to the barn and kennel, I see a huge contemporary style gray house, angled and vertical. The ancient rock wall marking the Ferndale cemetery behind this mess looked as though Mexicans had just come and pressure washed it. Robbie, Teri, Debby, Susie and me camped once in the woods behind Fox Run, tying the horses to trees holding hay bags for the night, like in the movies.
I drove down the driveway street and watched two 12 or 13 year olds jogging slowly uphill in the June heat. The remaining ferns and the moss and hemlock smelled like ancient forest. I wished for the girls to notice the scent of the old days. Piles of horse manure on the driveway. Ignored until they disappeared from rain or the dozens of cars cramming the parking area for a Bigelow Carpet cocktail party…The Learned girls painting the emptied pool with tropical flowers for their sister’s wedding. But the girls were on Ipods and it was hot.
Toward New Canaan on west Norwalk Road I approach the Merritt Parkway and slow down to locate the narrow entrance of the bridle path, but overgrown grass weeds hid any sign that a beckoning place of solitude once existed. I drive back but it’s not there.
Here are some other crazy things I saw on my trip:
The Ronald McDonald House ads featuring sick Mexican kids
The Men, Women, and Other restroom on the Connecticut Turnpike