"The View from My Window"

By now you should have digested your Thanksgiving dinner, paid off the football pool, and are recovering from injuries incurred when your played touch football with your grandchildren. It is time to sit back, forget politics for the moment and contemplate the world outside your window. I hope this brief essay sets the mood.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The View from My Window”

November 29, 2025

 

“She opened her curtains, and looked out toward the bit of road that lay in view, with

fields beyond the entrance-gates...Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she

felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.”

                                                                                                                                George Eliot (1819-1880)

                                                                                                                                Middlemarch, 1871

 

Having lived in two apartments and six houses over sixty-one years of marriage, my wife and I have looked out at the carcass of a butchered deer from our first apartment in Durham, New Hampshire, to watching our Chocolate Lab “Bundle” chase her tail across the lawn in Greenwich, to observing flights of marsh birds from our home in Old Lyme. Now, for the past (almost) ten years, our sight is of the comings and goings at Essex Meadows, a view of a parking lot and distant hills, framed by a nearby oak tree. 

 

It is life we witness, (or in the case of the deer, what was once life became sustenance for the hunter and his family). What better vista than a window can there be to see life in all its variety. Who can forget Jimmy Stewart in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” where his curiosity solved a crime but almost became his demise. Nevertheless, I empathize with the Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat ildan, or at least with the quote attributed to him: “Your desire to be near to a window is your desire to be close to life.” 

 

Of all the places we have lived, the scene from our windows in Old Lyme was the most spectacular, but also the most serene. We looked across the Connecticut River to Old Saybrook, a mile or so distant. On the far side of the river we could see, but not hear, power boats. Nearby were tidal marshes that surrounded our dock, marshes that teem with life, nature’s urban centers. Osprey swept to and fro, as they fed on menhaden that thrive in the marsh rivers that separated us from Great Island. And nothing could compete with the beauty of a crimson sun sinking below the horizon across the River – its rays reaching out above the houses and trees in Old Saybrook – an omen of “sailors delight” for the next day.

 

Today, our view is quite different. But all windows unlock a lookout on a world of wonder, as Hannah Sheldon-Dean inferred in her 2023 children’s book, Windows to the Wonders of the World. It is life we witness, from the budding of plants in the spring, to birds welcoming a summer morning with song, to squirrels putting away food for the winter to come. Before we arise each morning crews are on the job, making our lives more pleasant. Early on a few dogs are walked by residents, or is it the other way around? These are people we know, people we care about and who care about us. “Set wide the window,” wrote Edith Wharton in Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, “let me drink the day.” And so we do.   

"Sixty Years of Marriage"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Sixty Years of Marriage”

April 13, 2024

 

“Marriage, N. The state or condition of a community consisting

of a master, a mistress, two slaves, making in all, two”

                                                                                                                                Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914)

                                                                                                                                The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

 

“There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming 

relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.”

                                                                                                                                Martin Luther (1483-1546)[1]

                                                                                                                                Table Talk

Published posthumously in 1566

 

Two days ago Caroline and I celebrated sixty years of marriage.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………….

 

Winston Churchill once allegedly said: “My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.” Whether Churchill said that or not, the statement is true of me. I still marvel that Caroline accepted my marriage proposal. I was, at the time, a college drop out with no prospects. Military service was in my future, as was finishing college. Yet, she said yes.

 

Sixty years is a long time. Sixty years before we were married was 1904 – the year construction began on the Panama Canal, the year fingerprints were first used as an investigative tool, and the year Cy Young pitched the first perfect game in modern baseball, as the Boston Americans beat the Philadelphia Athletics 3-0. It was three years before my grandparents were married and six years before my father was born.

 

The last sixty years – because we lived through them – do not carry the same weight as earlier ones, though they might for our grandchildren. When we married Lyndon Johnson had been in the White House less than five months, the first major battle between U.S. Forces and the Army of North Vietnam was seventeen months in the future, the moon was unblemished by human footprints, a postage stamp cost $0.05, college tuition was $1,700, the average cost of a house in the U.S. was $18,900, and a gallon of gas cost $0.30. My starting salary at Eastman Kodak in June 1965, however, was $6,000.00.

 

But marriage cannot be measured by historical events or the effects of inflation on goods, services, and income. It is, when one thinks of it, amazing that so many marriages endure. Courting, even for two years as we did, does not offer the time to really know the other person. In fact, we never stop learning about the person we wed. Sociologists and marriage counselors have long pondered which maxim best applies to marriage: that opposites attract, or whether it is birds of a feather. More likely, it is love, luck, temperament, and tolerance that play key roles. Peering back into the mists of sixty years, I am thankful we never thought deeply about such matters. The future arrived one step at a time.

 

We had grown up differently, Caroline in New York City and I in the small New Hampshire town of Peterborough. But we fell in love, that indescribable (and delightful) condition that defies definition. There is no question that we are different in many respects, but we also share common interests, the most important being devotion to one another, our three children, their spouses, and our ten grandchildren.

 

Our first home was a 500 square foot, $85.00 a month, apartment in Durham, New Hampshire where I was finishing my degree at the University of New Hampshire. Because of my initial conduct in college (completing one year of credits in two years), I had to pay for my room, board and tuition when I returned following military service. So, in the next two years I completed three years of credits – while working three jobs – finishing in February 1965 (proof that the proffered hand is not necessarily as productive as the calloused one). With a job at Kodak[2] starting in June, and as we had had no honeymoon, we took $2,000.00 we had saved, bought round-trip tickets to Paris, and spent eleven weeks traveling around southern Europe in a rented Volkswagen without an itinerary. It was a memorable start for our marriage.  

 

Our voyage since has taken us through five Connecticut towns: Glastonbury (one year), Durham (four years), Greenwich (twenty-four years), Old Lyme (twenty-three years, along with a small one-bedroom apartment in New York for seventeen of those years), and now Essex where we have lived for the past eight years. 

 

We met on New Year’s Eve of 1961 at a ski weekend near my hometown. My sister who had known Caroline at Garland Junior College in Boston introduced us that afternoon. That evening I monopolized her. We saw each other regularly for the next several weekends, until on March 11 in North Conway, New Hampshire I asked for her hand. She said yes. The next day, on our first run down Wildcat Mountain, she broke her leg. At the time I was working in a laboratory outside of Boston. I spoke to my father, who was with my younger sister Betsy who was racing at Cranmore Mountain. I told him what had happened, including my proposal of the night before. He told me my duty was to stay with Caroline even if it cost me my job, which it did; for, as he said, you can always get another, which I did.

 

In his 1922 novel The Adventures of Sally, P.G. Wodehouse wrote: “And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.” While neither of our fathers repeated those exact words to me, I could tell they were thinking them. We got married on April 11, 1964 in New York’s Church of the Heavenly Rest, in a service conducted by the Reverend Floyd Thomas – to join hands “…till death do us part.”

 

In Adam Bede, George Eliot wrote: “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories of the last parting.” Amen.

 

Together we move on, happy and still in love.

 

 

---

[1] Martin Luther, once a Catholic monk, married Katherine von Bora, a former num, in April 1523, two years after he had been excommunicated by Pope Leo X.

[2] In the summer of 1967, I became a stockbroker – my career for the next 48 years.

"Mortality"

 Another beautiful wintery day, with light snow falling in this part of Connecticut. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Mortality”

February 17, 2024

 

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming

closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragility.”

                                                                                                                                Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

                                                                                                                                Nuns and Soldiers, 1980

 

Perhaps it is because of a recent birthday and a growing consciousness of age, but I have been thinking of mortality. I scour obituaries each day, feeling a little like George Burns who allegedly once said: “I wake up each morning and read the obituary column. If my name is not there I eat breakfast.” Perhaps it is because death has been a more frequent visitor in the households of those I know and love. Living in a retirement community, where the average age is in the mid to late 80s, that is not a surprise. But I want to be clear – these thoughts on mortality are not morbid. Memories bring joy.

 

As Charlotte said to Wilbur about the life of a spider: “We are born, we live a little while, we die.” And, while people don’t trap and eat flies, life has a natural sequence. The other day I walked through the Residents’ Garden – a fenced-in half-acre holding a dozen or so small garden plots, now in winter slumber. The garden sits in the middle of a field, and as I meandered along I was reminded of “Sadie,” a Cockapoo owned by a neighbor and who died about two years ago. She was a delightful and friendly little dog who used to love to be rid of her leash and run around that field. As I stood on that cold but sunny field, I had the eerie sensation she was still there, running her heart out.

 

Walking back I passed a small nook, warmed by the sun where a friend, a victim of Polio but who lived into his 90s, would sit in his wheelchair on sun-filled chilly days, getting his dose of Vitamin ‘D.’ I thought of our conversations and remembered my maternal grandmother’s admonition that people don’t die as long as they are remembered, a sentiment George Eliot expressed in Adam Bede: “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

 

On my desk are family photographs: Caroline and me on our 50^th wedding anniversary in 2014; our ten grandchildren on the beach in Seabright, New Jersey; a photo taken from behind of me and our lab “Dakota” looking out on the Mystic River; one of my paternal grandfather with his ever-present pipe; another of my great grandmother Washington holding me, with my older sister sitting nearby; and a lovely one of Caroline in Bermuda on our 25^th wedding anniversary. There are photos and drawings on the walls and in albums of siblings, parents, grandparents, other family members and friends. Each recall a person, an incident, or a time. In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That is true, so long as the past remains in our memory.

 

Whether walking alone through fields and woods, or lying in bed waiting for sleep, my thoughts often turn to those now gone whom I was fortunate to know. We are mortal; that cannot be denied, and there is no question of the truth in Ms. Murdoch’s quote about our fragility, but memories keep us from the void, and there is comfort in the thought that remembrances of us will stay with our children and grandchildren.

"Stuck in a Reading Rut"

Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“Stuck in a Reading Rut?”

March 3, 2018

“The more that you read, the more places you will know.

The more that you learn, the more places you will go.”

                                                                        Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel, 1904-1991)

                                                                        “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!”

As in most things, we tend to stick to what’s familiar in books we read. If one likes mysteries, and one just finished a juicy murder by Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey or Patricia Cornwall one will turn to Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times to find out what she’s recommending, or Otto Penzler, of the Mysterious Book Shop in Manhattan.

But does it not make sense to try something different? Recently, Erin Geiger Smith of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article with the title I borrowed for this piece. Her column made me think of a change I had made. I have long alternated between fiction and non-fiction. I read non-fiction to learn – history, people, events – books like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, David Brooks’ On Paradise Drive, Jennet Conant’s Tuxedo Park and Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money.  Fiction, in contrast, I used to read only for pleasure – like watching a light movie after a docudrama. I read anything by Wodehouse and everything by my daughter-in-law Beatriz Williams. I read Robert Barnard, John Marquand, and Old Lyme’s David Handler. Generally, I read about thirty books a year – not much when one considers that more than 100,000 books get published every year, but enough to keep me occupied.

But a few years ago, I decided I should read (or re-read) some of the classics – Dickens, Austen, the Bronté sisters, George Eliot even Tolkien. Reading these authors is not only entertaining, but instructional. While language, venues and manners change, human nature does not. This exerciset led me to Anthony Trollope. My parents had had a set of Trollope, but I never read him. He seemed intimidating. However, in 2011 I picked up Barchester Towers. I enjoyed it but found the characters difficult to track. For five years Mr. Trollope lay fallow. Finally, in 2016, I read The Warden, the first of the six Barsetshire novels. I was hooked. That same year I read Doctor Thorne. The characters became old friends. Last year I read Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington. I am now reading The last Chronicle of Barset, the final of the six books in the series, and am looking forward to starting the Parliamentary (or Palliser) series.

There are thousands of writers, and it is fun to try someone different, especially authors we read when in school or college – classics that have stood the test of time. I still like to read those I know. With the wind blowing and the rain coming down, old favorites like Charles McCarry and Lee Childs are as comfortable as a hot cup of cocoa. But we cannot spend our lives in a cocoon. No matter our age, we should challenge ourselves, and there is little that is more rewarding than re-reading a book we read sixty or seventy years ago. Now, with time to savor the story (and no one looking over our shoulder), we have the advantage of reading with a perspective unavailable to those in their teens.

Oh, and this essay should be shown to children and grandchildren who feel STEM programs alone lead to success. Remember, classics open the mind in a way an algebra text does not.