Books read to the end: Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell.
Books read in part: Game Misconduct: Hockey’s Toxic Culture and How to Fix It, Even F. Moore & Jashvina Shah; It Happened One Summer, Tessa Bailey; The Deep Blue Good-By, John D. MacDonald; Moby Dick, Herman Melville.
I read Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of a Friendship after a writer friend of mine recommended it to a group of us. Not just to me. “It’s a beautiful portrait of a friendship,” she said. “Everyone should read it.”
Caldwell’s story portrays her friendship with Caroline. When they were first introduced, at a literary party in Boston, they nodded with courtesy. Their friendship did not spark until they chanced to meet again, two years later, as each walked her dog around Fresh Pond in Cambridge. Two single writers who loved dogs, books, and exercise, they discovered a friendship that nourished them both.
On page 10, when Caroline’s surname first appears, I realized that Caldwell’s friend had written a book I’d read 28 years ago. I read Caroline Knapp’s memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, in 1996, the year it was published, and the year I quit drinking.
Knapp was born two years before me, almost to the day. Her memoir about awakening to her alcoholism in her 30s arrived in my life as I was awakening to my alcoholism. Knapp wrote with power, and her story moved me. Just weeks before I turned 35, I read it in the Brown University bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island. When I saw on her book’s back flap that Knapp had attended Brown, I figured her book was local. Her memoir spoke to me like poetry. I read it like medicine.
That summer, I sublet my apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn to a journalist from Africa. John, a 35-year-old white man, was born and raised in southern Africa. His first language was Afrikaans, yet he spoke English too. John sublet my Brooklyn apartment from June through November, 1996. I spent the summer leading bicycle camping trips for an outfit based in western Massachusetts, and I spent the autumn living with my parents in Rhode Island, where I taught SAT prep three days a week at a school three blocks from the Brown University bookstore.
Mine was one of two apartments on the top floor in a three-story walk up building in Brooklyn. Across the hall lived a family of three: dad, mom, and their six-year-old daughter. The dad and I enjoyed friendly chats on occasion. Like me, the dad-next-door was in his mid-30s. His wife called him Darryl, but when my neighbor introduced himself to me, I said, “Darrow?” His eyebrow rose, his lip curled into a mischievous grin, and he said, “You can call me Darrow.”
With November, that year, came my divorce, my decision to quit drinking, the re-election of incumbent US president Bill Clinton, and my return to Brooklyn from Rhode Island, where I’d commuted by bicycle to teach test-taking tips to teens.
A day after my return to Red Hook, my neighbor Darrow and I crossed paths in the hallway. He asked me about the man who had sublet my apartment, and Darrow referred to John as “the German.”
“John’s not German,” I said. “He’s African, from Zimbabwe, the country they used to call Rhodesia.”
Darrow, a black man, had lived his whole life in Brooklyn, born and raised in East New York. With a glint in his eye, he said, “He’s German to me.”
Darrow’s calling John the sub-letter German is akin to someone calling me Irish. My father’s father, Andrew, was born and raised in Ireland when Great Britain ruled over all 32 counties. Great Britain’s colonial boot rested on Ireland’s neck in 1914 when the war our history books call World War One began. My grandfather, then 22, did not want to be drafted by Great Britain’s army. On the down low, like many young men in rural western Ireland, he joined the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They had no guns, so they trained with broomsticks. He loathed Great Britain, yet he was a British subject. In November 1915, he emigrated, sailing to New York with the coins in his pockets and his sixth grade education. Four months later, on Easter Monday, 1916, his Irish brethren rebelled, yet my grandfather, 23, had a job cleaning toilets in Manhattan. He became a US citizen in 1921, at age 29. On paper, my grandpa’s citizenship switched from the UK to the US. In person, he was neither British nor American. He was Irish.
The story of the friendship between Gail from Amarillo and Caroline from Cambridge in Let’s Take the Long Way Home reminded me of the season, 28 years ago, when I read Drinking: A Love Story with an open heart.