Composing a Further Life

a pendant that met his meticulous standards. On each one, he pointed out small flaws that had allowed him to refine his technique, so that together they provided a narrative of his patient learning. The completed pendants, he said, show slight variations, so he numbers them like lithographs. The mussel shells are now on sale locally in Maine, but by the time I visited Tucson, Hank was repeating the process with sand dollars, more challenging because their markings are so faint. He spoke of producing enough pendants so that small quantities could be released each year after his death as an ongoing inheritance.
    After our conversations in Maine, I was reminded of a novel I had read many years before,
Trustee from the Toolroom
, by Nevil Shute. 2 In the novel a man who has been developing miniature models of engines and clocks and publishing the plans in a hobby magazine finds himself on a quest to the South Pacific. He has very little money, but he ends up being given free transport from place to place by pilots and captains who have followed his model designs with pleasure and who use the time together to refine their own skills. The ability to miniaturize opens an entire world, from macrocosm to microcosm and back. A precise focus on machinery opens a series of human relationships. I sent a copy of the book to Hank, who read it with great pleasure and asked, when I came to Tucson, “How did you get to know me so well?”
    When people’s lives go through major transitions, different strategies come into play. Some people choose discontinuity and look at retirement as a fresh start, sloughing off the skills and habits (and sometimes the relationships as well) of earlier years, going to a strange place or returning to school and learning a new profession. Some pick out a single element of their earlier lives to pursue without the distractions and stresses that characterize so many jobs. Others find ways of connecting the new and the old that allow them to transfer their skills and passions into forms that appear to be discontinuous but are actually based on subtle metaphorical translations—How is a mountain range like the sea? How is a park model trailer like a ship? How is the fashioning of delicate jewelry like the maintenance of great diesel engines? We call the people who articulate their recognition of such relationships poets. The sensibility that can make these transitions in daily activity is also, I suspect, making them in deeper ways, so that the conscientiousness of Hank’s craftsmanship expresses itself as a kind of fidelity in relationships that has led to friendships with writers like E. B. White, a client of the boatyard, and scientists like Dick and Barbara, based on commonalities that are not obvious.
    I approached the Lawsons partly because I wanted to understand the effect of moving on people as they grow older. Throughout human history, place has been a basic element of identity, as basic as family of origin, yet in contemporary America both have been partially set aside. Almost all of the people who turn up in the chapters of this book have initiated their years of Adulthood II with changes in their housing, and I find myself struggling with phrases that combine a sense of grounding with different kinds of mobility. Definitions of home have as much to do with human connections as they do with real estate.
    The Lawsons, having been attached to Maine all their lives, took one approach, scaling down and moving away from the winter cold and into a setting designed for retirees, in a mobile home that is not designed for mobility, but they wisely retained a base to return to in Maine in summer. Considering their choices, I have found myself enumerating the variations I encountered in my interviews and my own life.
    My husband and I have owned our apartment in Cambridge (where we first met as students in 1957) since 1969. We moved there when I was pregnant with our daughter, and it was extensively renovated, but it was rented during years when we lived abroad. After our daughter married, we expanded into part of the second-floor apartment to create a guest room. When we returned from Iran, Cambridge was home, but then the center of gravity of our lives shifted to New Hampshire, where we built on the footprint of a dilapidated barn on the property we have owned since 1962 and originally used seasonally. In both cases, construction was triggered by the need to have space for extended visits by our