Let's Row Together

Summer days in Brooklin. That's Brooklin with an "i" not a "y." And it's in Maine, not New York. And that makes all the difference.

On my way into Brooklin, Maine, I pass by Charlotte’s barn.

As in Charlotte, the spider who wove in her web the words: "Some Pig", "Terrific", "Radiant", and "Humble."

To save her friend Wilbur’s life.

To keep alive the pig who shared the barn with her.

The one inspired by the barn behind E.B. White’s home.

In Brooklin.

Where Fern and Avery’s rope swing hung in the barn’s entry way.

Like it does today.

74 years after Charlotte’s Web was published. In 1952, when I was one-year old

I always slow down as I approach the barn and home, hoping no one is behind me.

I want to take a look.

One more time. Every time.

Doing so revives sweet memories of my parents’ reading Charlotte’s story to me.

And me reading it to Maya.

The barn is on my left as I drive into town.

Which I know by its General Store and library across the street.

Blink, and you’ll be through it.

On the weekend my book, Locker Room Talk, was published in August 2024, I went to Brooklin, Maine for a book talk at the library, moderated by my friend, Kathy Bonk. Three Wellesley College friends joined me that day for the talk, (left to right), Eleanor Hoagland, my first-year roommate, Toni DeLorenzo, my dorm friend, and Deborah Bedell, my Wellesley reunion friend.

Brooklin as a summer “home”

I never stay long In Brooklin since I’m always a guest.

Staying on a neck of land. It’s a road ending at the sea.

The bedroom I stay in is close to the sea.

So I get to watch the sky paint itself several times each day.

In Brooklin, I feel at home.

And when you read these words and see these photos, I’ll be there, in the midst of my second visit there this year. I went in January, too.

It was many, many years ago that Maya and I first drove to visit friends in Brooklin, Maine.

At the invitation of dearest friends, Terry and Chris, and their son, Lucas, who is Maya’s age.

Our families are the kind of close in which we have snapshots of our kids taking baths together in the same tub.

Given my annual visit + a few bi-annual ones, I feel like a local as soon as I arrive.

But as The New Yorker writer Roger Angell told those of us who were at Brooklin’s 100th birthday celebration for him in 2020, as often and as many times as he came to Brooklin, he’d always be “from away.”

“I am from away. I will always be from away, and I don’t mind.” Roger Angell, August 8, 2020 at the Brooklin library.

At the age of 12, Roger came to Brooklin for the first time in 1933. That was after his mother, Katherine, married his stepfather, E.B. White. Rarely did a year go by when Roger wasn’t in Brooklin, likely several times, and always in the summer.

One time Roger took me on a walk in the Brooklin Cemetery. There, he showed me the graves of his wife and children, then pointed out his name on a grave marker next to those family members.

It’s where he is today.

For several summers, I visited with Roger at his Brooklin home, on a point of land overlooking Eggemoggin Reach, with Deer Isle in the near distance. In the 1970s in New York, Roger and I often were press box seatmates at Yankees or Mets baseball games and he wrote a lengthy story about women in sports media, published in the spring of 1979 in The New Yorker, called “Sharing the Beat: Inside the legal battle that opened baseball’s locker rooms to women—and the fraught, funny, bruising adjustment that followed.”

Roger, it turns out, wasn’t the only friend of mine who lives in or near Brooklin.

As years went by, in this place I arrived as a stranger, except to those friends who’d invited me here, I kept discovering friends who were here, too.

I have so many friends there now that in advance of my arrival I need to set up a social calendar to fit in all the visits I want to make.

This “vacation” calendar is far more complicated than any I have back home.

Elfie, as I came to know her as my roommate at Wellesley College, lives down the road apiece from where I stay in Brooklin. We’ll have two visits this week — our customary one on her front porch, where I am reminded of my grandmother’s Cape Cod home’s portico. From Elfie’s porch, we admire gardens she’s tenderly tended through so many years, while we stare down to the sea.

And reminisce.

And Elfie and I will be together a second time on Friday night at the Brooklin Boat Yard, founded and operated for decades by Joel White and his son, Steve, yes, the son and grandson of E.B. White. We will be there with locals (and others like us) to honor Jon Wilson, the founder and former owner of WoodenBoat magazine and Brooklin’s renowned WoodenBoat School, along with the award-winning maritime photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz, whose huge collection of maritime photos will be housed in the under-construction wing of Brooklin’s library.

Thursday night I’ll have dinner with Kathy Bonk and Marc Tucker, at their home that I am told is up a steep winding road in nearby Brooksville. The Friday essay I wrote about the revival of the ERA fight gives you a sense of how and why Kathy Bonk and I are longtime friends … her women’s right activism is admirably unending! She inspires me!!!

Molly Schiot, the author of Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History, and I work hard to squeeze in a summer visit since she and her wife need to leave early each August to head back to Los Angeles so their daughter can be there when the school year begins. Molly grew up in Maine, and now her family has bought a home just over a bridge at the southern edge of Brooklin. After Molly talked with me for a profile in her “game changer” book, we’ve been friends.

I treasure our Maine visits since I don’t make to Los Angeles often.

Driving to Molly’s house I pass by the home of Phil and Karen. I’ve known Phil as long as I have any of my other Brooklin pals. We go back to the early 1970s when he was the health policy advisor to Senator Ted Kennedy in D.C.. We met on a plane that was taking a group of us from Cape Cod to New York City for a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial celebrity tennis tournament at Forest Hills. Since Karen joined his life a few decades ago, I’ve spent wonderful days and evenings at their Brooklin home, as I will again this week when I wish Phil a belated 88th birthday.

It was at Phil and Karen’s Brooklin home that I sat down one evening for dinner and found out that their other guests were Kathy Bonk and Marc Tucker. Presto, Kathy and Marc and I were reunited … we are, it turned out, all mutual friends. To Kathy’s surprise, I’d met Marc years before in Washington, D.C. when he and I were guests at breakfast at a mutual friend’s home.

Small world, again!

Then, my other longtime friend, Sophie, I’ve known since we were teens. We met when she visited her high school friend, who was also my friend, on Cape Cod. Since then, we’ve crossed paths tons of times including a 50th birthday celebration with a closeknit group of friends held at her home on Cape Rosier, Maine. That’s where she and her husband Peter raised their girls, and where we gathered to say goodbye to Peter when he died. I wrote about his wooden boat farewell in an essay about saying goodbye to friends.

I want to see Sophie, too, when I am in Brooklin this week.

Peter Chase build wooden boats, and so his wife Sophie (center, white dress, floral crown) and their two daugthers invited friends to follow Peter (his ashes in the burning boat) from their home to the sea, as the tide carried him and us out of their cove.

About a decade ago, I discovered that my Cambridge friends, Ellen and Derek van Bever, with whom I’ve engaged in climate activities with Ellen and in rowing at Community Rowing, Inc. with Derek, have a home at the northern edge of Brooklin. Spending time in their Adirondack chairs overlooking Blue Hill Bay is a must whenever they’re in Maine when I am.

Here’s to the annual renewal of these Brooklin friendships which form a joyous core in the circle of my life.

May the closing weeks of your summer be a filled with the kind of joy I know this first week of August holds for me.

In tiny Brooklin, where touchstones of friendship keep making a new kid in town feel at home.

Thank you, Terry, for knowing I’d love Maine.

Even if neither of us knew at the start what loving and wondrous friendships we’d create by being in together in Brooklin!!!

As with most things you’ve taught me through our years of friendship, you were right, Terry, who is with me, above, enjoying Maine and at Maya and Matthew’s wedding reception last September.