Dining room of the Griswold Inn, since 1776, Essex, Connecticut. (Photo by John Griswold)
Back to what I was saying about making choices with the freedoms you have.
It was not hard to ask my sons if they would like to forgo Christmas gifts this year and travel together instead—to make memories instead of buying things because the season dictates. We had great, traditional Christmases for many years, especially in our first house, an Italianate on the historic register, built in 1871, with a high-ceilinged library and big window bay where I could put a nine-foot tree. They and their mom and her mom and I had wonderful holidays in that house and were warm and comfortable and fed many people.
But the boys are well grown now, and this could be the last year they were free to join me on a whim. We live in three different cities, but I got them scooped up and into a rented Volvo SUV and headed for Maryland. First, a long dinner with familiars—two friends I have known forty years, and one of their wives—then a night on Castaway, a yacht that one of those friends and I motored up the eastern seaboard in August. The next morning after eggs, bacon, and several cups of strong coffee on the boat, the boys and I headed for Connecticut to visit the graves of the old ones—my seventh great-grandfather and -grandmother buried in Clinton, Connecticut.
Edward was born in 1607 and was the first Griswold in the new world. Growing up, I felt orphaned at the end of history; my father was gone, and my mother’s father was said to be an actual orphan, which had cut off any knowledge of where I was coming from. I had no idea of my family’s history, and I knew no other Griswolds. With the internet, my sons and I have been able to see that we are the latest in an unbroken line of Griswold fathers and sons going back to the year 1200.
Edward, I am afraid, sat on two juries for witch trials, but it is apparent the society he lived in was not to his liking. He moved away from new centers of population twice, and one of his descendants walked/rode/paddled down the Ohio Valley to the Illinois Territory at the start of the nineteenth century, leaving behind a century and a half of burgeoning family wealth for new adventures. (My mother’s family turns out to be interesting too; the Mormon Church tells me William Shakespeare is a first cousin, 13 generations back, with Robert Arden as grandfather in common. Thus born to bloggery am I.)
Letting my boys visit this landscape of our ancestors and toast them graveside—all I had was bottled water to drink—was a nice thing, though it was long after dark and colder out than a grave-digger’s ass. We spent a comfortable night in Essex at the Griswold Inn, which cousins opened in 1776. Despite my name I could not get a dinner reservation, so we waited for a table in the taproom and dined well on sausages en croute, steaks, a game pie, and several rounds of Black-and-Tans. The next day we ate breakfast at the tiny, magnificent Whistle Stop Café in Deep River, in business since 1934, with eggs benedict on an English muffin, open-faced, with bacon, red onion, baby spinach, and garlic herb cheese. We visited another family graveyard near Old Lyme, where Captain John Griswold is buried, a Yale graduate who died with the 11th Connecticut Infantry at Antietam Bridge in 1862. To get there we walked a little, three abreast, along the Black Hall River, a tributary to the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound, and into an ancient pine forest. I caught my younger son looking at me then grinning at my elder about the whole situation, which was a gift.
And that, other than the many companionable hours we spent together in the car, was it, and it turned out to be the best. Any ancient squabbling about who would sit up front had been ended by age and the latest technology in comfortable Swedish seats, and even the stop-and-go traffic around the entirety of New York City provided long, slow, gorgeous views down the Hudson River at the entirety of the island of Manhattan lit by the setting sun. It is good to remember America’s waterways—and highways—for their historical importance in making us who we are.
We repeated the process in reverse and were back in St. Louis for Christmas Eve and the extended family’s Yankee Swap. Flintily as a Yankee trader I stole the one good bottle of Scotch whiskey in the game from a nephew and was home by 10 pm to enjoy it. Now more than ever I find that choosing experience does honor to my time, which gets consumed whether I engage with it or not.
