Eleanor and Franklin

(Photo from About.Com: 20c History)

I've become obsessed with biographies of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, although I don't know exactly why. At the Printer's Row bookfair, the same one where I met Mary Morris, I picked up an old copy of Eleanor Roosevelt's This I Remember, the second volume of her four-volume autobiography, which covers her years with Franklin. It had a slightly ripped but original cover and the look of an old Book Club selection, something I often find irresistible. It was raining when Gary, Garrett, and I were at the stalls at the book fair, and we didn't have umbrellas or any sort of protection, so we scooted as close to the kiosks as possible to stay dry when I spotted the book. Instead of just putting it on the shelf (something I've been known to do with an old book I'll get to eventually) I started reading it and couldn't put it down. I've read a few biographies of ER, but this was mesmerizing and I read it late into the night on Saturday. I bought Jean Edwar d Smith's FDR (very good), Ted Morgan's FDR (same cover photo, same title, and a lot of the same material, although published more than 20 years ago, but somehow unsatisfying and absolutely tonedeaf when it comes to ER).

I'm still reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time and Blanche Wiesen's biography of ER. The male biographers of FDR so far are somewhat dismissive of ER, but Goodwin and Wiesen, especially, are much more sympathetic. And of course Wiesen, who is focusing on ER, writes extensively about the League of Women Voters, which I find fascinating. So I think a side trip to Hyde Park on the way home from Maine is in order. We'll see if that will fit in.

Please Don't Squeeze the Garmin

Second day. We're trailing a boat, for the first time in more than thirty years. And for a lot longer trip - the longest we did it before was from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Wayne, New Jersey. But this is from Naperville, Illnois, to Rome, Maine, almost 1200 miles! We're overprepared, having planned and plotted out this trip for months. But we find that we need all these newfangled tools: we triangulate between the GPS (which is perfect and accurate, so far, and terrific when you are approaching a complicated set of roads, like the approach to any city or beltway), the atlas (which gives you the big, multi-state picture, as well as detailed state maps), and the Triple A state guides, which list hundreds of hotels with all of their attendant information. How did my parents ever find hotels when we went on (fairly rare) road trips with six people in the car? I know - we saw them from the road, drove up, and found out if they had a room. If they didn't, we asked for a recommendation and drove on. Weird-sounding, I know. The atlases and Triple A info haven't changed much, but I can't imagine a trip without a phone now, and by the end of this one, we'll be hooked on the Garmin. Gary, who considers himself a human GPS, was not convinced that it was what he really wanted for his birthday (I kept telling him yes, it was!). Plunk him down in any city in the country, and he can find his way to the airport, to the interstate, to a restaurant of our choice. But no one can know the exact route to everywhere. When we drove to Maine and Quebec in 1968, with four kids in the car, aged 11 to 18, and two adults, we joked that we drove 13 hours to Bar Harbor, half of it backing up. Very little backing up with a GPS. It has authority. Believe it. It's right.

Some Roads Lead to Rome

Gary and I are off to Rome, Maine, for a few weeks. I have seen my blog as something I closed at the end of the trip to China and Japan, which now seems like a magical interlude followed by two difficult years. A few months after I returned, Gary had a heart attack near Rochelle, Illinois, on the road to Madison, Wisconsin, necessitating a single bypass and a heart valve transplant in Rockford. An ambulance brought him first to Rochelle Community Hospital, which did a few tests and sent him on in another ambulance to Swedish-American Hospital in Rockford. Thank God our younger son Garrett was with him, who had the sense to turn around the car on Route 39, driving over the median, return to a speed trap where he had spotted state troopers, and flag down one of the troopers, who asked Gary a few questions and then called for an ambulance. During the next ten days Garrett, Sarah, Matt, and I hovered in the hospital room in Rockford while Gary went through the surgery and began his recovery. He has since lost 70 or more pounds, can swim a mile at a time, and has spent the past two months building a boat trailer that he ordered online and came UPS in three boxes. We bought an inexpensive, well-aged Sunfish through Craig's List, and he has been refurbishing it since May. We have a new daggerboard, tiller, and tiller extension, all ordered on eBay. A few trips to Wilmette took us to the only store that caters to sailors in northern Illinois, where we bought new lines and a few fittings and a bridle. In June we went into Chicago for the Printers Row Book Fair - how have I missed it for so many years? It was fabulous, and the best thing was that I got to meet Mary Morris, the travel writer whose work I talked about so much in my China/Japan posts. (She and I taught in adjacent classrooms at Rutgers when my oldest child was a baby and I was in grad school. She won the Prix de Rome that year, and several years later wrote Nothing to Declare (about a sojourn in Mexico) and later Wall to Wall (about a journey from Beijing to Berlin on the Trans-Siberian Railway), both groundbreaking travel memoirs. Her most recent book is River Queen, where she takes a trip down the Mississippi on a riverboat. Spoiler Alert: the child she finds she is pregnant with in Wall to Wall, which my students read in China, is now off to college. My children are even older; my oldest is 31 and just bought his first house; my second is 27 and in grad school, and just back from a trip to Greece and Italy; my third is 23, and an art student in Chicago, making shoji screens in his summer internship/job. And this trip that Gary and I are taking is a bit of deja vu: the last time we drove anywhere with a boat on a trailer was in 1976, before we had any children, and we shared a Hobie Cat with another couple when we lived in Oceanside, CA, and Gary was a lieutenant in the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton. We sailed that in San Diego. Before that we had an Aquacat in North Carolina, when we were even younger - I was 21 and Gary 22. We got married between semesters of my senior year - Gary graduated the year before. It's so long ago we could hardly recall the details of how to secure a boat to a trailer. In North Carolina we drove a Volkswagen Bug, and when we drove from North Carolina to New Jersey we were a sight, with suitcases piled on a roofrack and a large, if light, boat trailing behind. We probably had a map or an atlas. This time we have (1) Triptiks and Guidebook from AAA; (2) a brand-new Rand McNally atlas with a leather cover and pockets for pens and cell phone and (2) a Garmin GPS. I think we can find Rome, Maine.