HADLEY — It took a scorching hot day on the bike path to unravel a mystery that’s been with you for decades. On a family trip to the Dominican Republic the same week the Red Sox signed the island’s own Pedro Martinez, out of nowhere something clicked, a thing so unexpected you surprised yourself, let alone others.
Norwottuck Rail Trail, July
As we said, it’s a scorcher, which did nothing to dampen the wishes of Belchertown’s Callum Larson, age eight months, who, in the words of his dad, UMass grad student Derek Rainboth, “He had to get out!”
“He loves the outdoors,” said his mom, Gwen Larson, a government consultant. “Doesn’t matter how hot.”
Relatively shaded, the trail does provide balmy relief from the sun’s rage, and here’s Callum in his stroller trading smiles with his grandparents, Susan and Richard Larson, who’ve been keeping tabs on their only grandchild from their home on Long Island.
“He’s had a growth spurt,” his grandfather smiled. “He was underweight when he was born but he’s now just chugging and growing.”
“Awesome,” said Derek Rainboth about parenthood in general. “Tiring, but incredibly rewarding. He started sleeping through the night a few weeks ago.”
“Now the cats are waking us up,” laughed Gwen. “They were getting used to being fed in the middle of the night with Callum.”
For the patriarch, this strip of blacktop is familiar ground. Richard grew up here, his father then part of the faculty at UMass. “We lived over on Bay Road so we climbed Norwottuck and hiked all over — a wonderful place for children to grow up. College towns have a different, gentle atmosphere — we’ve always lived in them. They have a kind of rhythm when the students are around.”
“Amherst, in many ways, does not change,” he continued. “It’s also grown enormously impressive — the pressure on housing and all the new things that have developed. It still retains its very Connecticut Valley vibe.”
Susan grew up in Ohio. “We’ve visited a few times now,” she said. “I don’t have a map of the area in my head like they do. ‘No, that’s NORTH Hadley.’ OK, whatever you say. But this area is so charming. We live on the North Shore (of Long Island); Richard likes to believe it’s part of New England.”
Though they met as lab-mates at Kent State and went to grad school together at the University of Wisconsin in Madison — talk about a college town — they found separate paths academically, he in linguistics, she in anatomy. Both have enjoyed long careers at Stony Brook University, with Susan still teaching gross anatomy to medical students.
“What you might call a marketable skill,” she said. “Med students always need to know anatomy; finding people who continue to teach gross anatomy is a bit of a challenge.”
“She teaches them to cut up bodies and what it feels like when scalpels go through flesh,” her husband wryly offered.
“OK, alright, that’s enough,” Susan smiled. “It’s not something that anyone would confuse with fun — it has a certain kind of ick factor to it … but (students) see it as this remarkable opportunity to learn and come to really appreciate people who donate their bodies. An incredibly altruistic act.”
The process is surprisingly easy, she says, if you can envision yourself as a cadaver. The school takes care of the cremation part and returns the ashes to the family.
Richard, recently retired, is still jazzed by his lifelong study of language, “the unique capacity of humans, that somehow evolved in us 2–300,000 years ago, is quite extraordinary,” he said.
The languages he and his students have “investigated” include Warlpiri, Japanese, Turkish, Mandarin and Iranian Persian. So he speaks in a million tongues?
“English natively,” he says. “Languages acquired at your mother’s knee are not acquired the same way later in life, part of the biology part … I studied a lot of different languages but I only consider myself to speak one of them.”
In one ear …
The only language the columnist ever “studied” was Espanol in high school. I say study. I literally slept through every class, major league slumber, of the face-buried-on-a-bed-of-crossed-arms variety. I flunked tests, quizzes and courses; all verbs stood un-conjugated.
But in 1997 in Santo Domingo, in a city where hardly any English was spoken, not by cabdrivers, clerks, nor the concierge at the hotel, I was able to converse with local Dominicans, with simple word recognition, words that I thought died on a wooden desk senior year.
I had a fast-paced conversation with fans at a beisbol game that mainly concerned Pedro Martinez and his future with Los Medias Rojas de Boston — with complete sentences coming out of me, like “Donde es su casa?” When I turned down a young prostitute’s offerings by telling her I was married, she asked, “Aqui?” I said “Si.” and she muttered “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
The linguist was delighted.
“Your brain is keen for the sound of languages whether you know it or not,” said Richard, pointing to his grandson. “He acquires language while he is resting or dozing — it just goes in. Yours came into your head while you were sleeping at your desk!”
“I wish we could all do that,” laughed Susan.
Callum, meanwhile, used his own form of expression to indicate that it was time to go, eager to see more of the world from his stroller. The state of that world from the point of view of young parents?
“Nerve-wracking,” said Derek, “but you have to look at the silver lining, which is him. It’s not like how things are for you, but how they’re going to be for him. He’s gonna be here longer than us — that’s the plan.”
But the moment at hand, here on familiar ground, with all three generations involved? “Lovely,” said Gwen Larson, as the rolling commenced.
Bob Flaherty, a longtime author, radio personality and former Gazette writer and columnist, pens a column called “Chance Encounters” in which he writes about our neighbors going about their daily lives.