Welcome to Middletown.
I decided to start this blog last week, during a conversation with G, my girlfriend. We were getting a late breakfast at Manhattan Bagel in Middletown, Delaware. It was just before close. Other than the two of us, and the lady behind the counter, there was a construction worker picking up a takeout order, and an employee mopping the floor of the dining area, which had been closed off with a chair.
Middletown is where G lives, and in a few months, I’ll be moving there too. Middletown: such a generic name. You could be anywhere. I just googled it, and there are nineteen Middletowns in America. The middle Middletown, more middle than any other town, would by my guess be the one in Ohio—which feels appropriate.
We have history, G and I and this particular Middletown. Long before getting together, she and I were friends and classmates at St. Andrew's, a boarding school located on the banks of Noxontown Pond, just outside of town. You may have seen St. Andrew’s, even if you don't know it—the movie Dead Poets Society was filmed on campus in 1988.
We both found St. Andrew's, or SAS, because we had family members who'd gone there. For her, it was her dad and aunt (and then two younger sisters after her). For me, the connection starts with my grandfather, Alexander Hemphill, who arrived in what was then a much smaller, quieter Middletown in 1936, I think. Three cousins and two aunts are also alumni, and my mom, who graduated in 1975, in the first class of women.
Already I worry about how this sounds—reciting my blue-blood bona fides. St. Andrew's has an endowment larger than that of many colleges. It tries to do good with its wealth, giving millions in financial aid to students every year. Still, it can be uncomfortable, confronting how lucky you've been. My having gone there sometimes feels like a slightly shady accident. And yet, beneath the guilt, the caveats, is this feeling that I cannot evade: when I am there, it feels like home.
I can dimly remember playing in the grass outside the headmaster’s office, where there is a big tree with a swinging bench hanging from a branch, at my mom’s 25th reunion. This would have been in June of 2000, when I was six years old. I’m not sure of the dates, but I also remember Thanksgivings spent on campus, hosted by my Aunt Louisa, who was Director of Admissions at SAS. One year, an uncle brought a huge multi-colored kite, the kind you would use for paragliding, and we all ran around the football field together, hanging onto the end of it.
I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. St. Andrew’s—along with my grandmother’s home in Oxford, Maryland, a place I’ll talk about later—was where I discovered something else. Something other than sidewalks and strip-malls. I found woods here, farm fields and dirt roads. The peace and stillness, the familiarity and welcome of the outdoors.
It brought me to where I live now, in Salt Lake City, Utah. This city at the edge of a great basin of mountains and desert has been my home for the past three years, since March 2020. It could not be more different than the flat, green, mild mid-Atlantic, where I come from. It is the first place I chose to live fully on my own, unguided by the forces which propel us through early life—namely, school. And now, very soon, I’ll be leaving Salt Lake, to go back to St. Andrew’s and to Middletown, this time as a teacher. Both of my parents were teachers—professors of history at small colleges outside Philadelphia. I never thought I’d become one. Nor has "back East" ever held my interest as a place to live as an adult. Yet here I am, making ready to return.
What I am getting at is the sensation T. S. Eliot put down at the end of his Four Quartets. He writes:
I go back to the beginning, now that everything has changed. The words from Monopoly, the ones on the card that sends you to jail, run through my head: "Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars."
As I have mentioned, returning to St. Andrew’s means returning to my family—my mother’s side, at any rate: the Hemphill clan. My dad’s side, the Hills, are from Seattle. They are another story; I am another story. For now here is some history of the Hemphills.
After graduating from St. Andrew’s in 1940, my grandfather Alexander Hemphill went off to the University of Pennsylvania, and then served at the end of World War II in the Marine Corps and the Navy (I wonder what the story was there, why two different branches of the military). He married my grandmom, Jean Calves, in 1946, and they started having kids. Jean raised the family while Alec pursued a career in law and politics. He was the city controller of Philadelphia from 1958-68 (I recently learned he has a Wikipedia page) and then ran for mayor, losing to a guy named James Tate. I found this confusing, when I was little, because although I was named for my grandfather, my nickname was Tato, or Tate (short for Potato, due to my resemblance to one, as a newborn), leading me to wonder if I was also secretly related to this other guy, this “Tate” in competition with my grandad, the one who won.
Grandad died in 1986, eight years before I was born. My grandmom died in January of this year, at the age of ninety-seven. She spent thirty-six years, more than a third of her long life, without her husband. Never remarried. I'm astonished to think of that—the length of time apart, the different lives which take place within the span of one long life. Now they are together again, wherever we go when we are not here. In June, there will be an interment in the family plot at Oaklands Cemetery.
About a month ago, my extended family got together to celebrate Grandmom's life and see what to do about the estate. We spent the weekend at Connemara. Which brings me to Oxford, Maryland, and the Eastern Shore: the other place, in addition to St. Andrew’s, where I discovered the outdoors. Connemara is the name of the house my grandad bought and spent the last years of his life renovating and expanding. Alec and Jean named the property after a region on the West Coast of Ireland. The farthest back I can trace the meaning of the word is to a group of people in early Ireland, before the year 1000, called ConmhaÃcne Mara, which means something like “progeny of Conmac of the sea.” The name is appropriate in that the Maryland Connemara, like the one in County Galway, looks out on water. The house is bounded on three sides by the glittering inlets of Island Creek, a tributary of the Tred Avon River, which is itself a tributary of the Choptank River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay.
As a little kid I spent several summers at Connemara, learning to sail a dinghy called an Optimist in the Junior Sailing program at Tred Avon Yacht Club. Then, when I was a teenager, the same program provided a fun summer job: coaching kids in sailing, motoring around in a Boston Whaler. On no-wind days, the kids would jump out of their boats, braving the jellyfish for some relief from the heat. I'd throw a line over the stern, and tow them slowly through the water, their blond and brown heads bobbing up out of their lifejackets. Then, later again, I returned for parts of two summers in college, this time to work on an oyster farm. I'd rise before dawn, catch a ride with the farm owner an hour south through Dorchester County and the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge to Hoopers Island, a desolate, sinking, gorgeous spit of land reminiscent of the far outposts of southern Louisiana, beyond the levees.
So in Middletown I discovered woods, and on the Eastern Shore I discovered water. In the eight years since that second summer of oyster work, I've rarely returned to the Delmarva Peninsula.
At Grandmom's memorial this spring, I saw many of my cousins for the first time in several years, since before the Coronovirus pandemic. There are eighteen of us, plus spouses and children, so that the full gathering was in the neighborhood of fifty people. I met my cousin's kids, and felt myself for the first time to be in the position that my parents were in, almost forty years ago, when they started to come down to this little house. They weren't even married yet. Once they were, and had brought into the world my brother and I, then they, I imagine, saw and felt what I was now, in 2023, seeing and feeling: a house filled with loved ones, and little children. Those little kids used to be me; now my cousins and I were my parents and aunts and uncles, and my dad and aunts and uncles were the grandparents. You feel the ground, the generations, shifting beneath your feet. And you see them, the young, experiencing the world for the first time. I mean in general, the sensation of being alive, having a body, and in particular (this house, this creek, those people). Experiencing it for the very first time. The first time, the world gets written on our eyes. When we are older we reach back, groping for some kind of why. Trying to touch again that first present, which was so resonant.
My cousin Chris and his wife Maryann have decided to buy Connemara. They are going to turn it into a vacation rental. As this was the only way the house would stay in the family, it is a result we are all really happy to see. The possibility of future Hemphill Thanksgivings remains alive.
To get to Oxford from Philadelphia, you have to drive through Middletown. I remember what my mom would always say, as we passed through: "this used to just be cornfields." It is a change that anyone who has spent a few years in Middletown can't help but notice. It is expanding. It seems like it always has been, and every year, it billows outward: where there used to be only horizon, now there is a Panda Express, a Chick-fil-A, an Amazon distribution center.
I'm put in mind of lines from the opening of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: “Look around you. Very old land. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.” That's about some farmland in the middle of the country: maybe Illinois, where Wallace grew up. There was probably a Middletown nearby. But in America, everywhere is the middle of the country. So it works, these words, for Delaware, too. "The first state," tucked away at the forgotten edge of things, the very locus of backwater. "Dela-where?" people in Salt Lake joke, when I tell them where I am moving. The literature of bays in America, I want to say, is incomplete. Those lines from the end of The Great Gatsby about the Dutch sailor notwithstanding. Perhaps it is because bays provide a natural bounty, a sufficiency and gentle tidal harmony, which does not jibe with the importance of hunger, of desperate, starving ambition in our culture.
How can you hate mildness? You can't, and I don't, mostly. I think I'll fit in nicely, back on those quiet roads. That's what I'm scared of. The ease. The contentment. I'm about to turn twenty-nine. If you look suspiciously enough, you can see the beginning of the end anywhere. You can see it clearly, right where you stand. You can find it, turning around, somewhere you've already been, which you passed without noticing. This moment feels a little like that: in my last weeks out west, the last weeks before the last year of the last decade of my youth. What is middle age like? When does it begin? Will I, as the cliche goes, wake up tomorrow and be forty? Fifty? Sixty? Walking around the office one day, at the age of sixty-four, Grandad suffered a massive heart attack and dropped dead on the floor.
This is supposed to be a kind of welcome to this blog. An opening. Those are always difficult, because you have to pick a point and say, Here. We're starting here. Nothing before this. Do not pass Go. Brigham Young, having migrated across the plains with his band of Mormons, reached the Salt Lake Valley and said, "this is the place." This is first. And from here a new beginning. But of course this is out of tune with how life actually is. There is always before. There were already people living in Utah, Ute and Shoshone. And so I could not say where this blog started, in a bagel restaurant in a little town, without saying what the town means to me, and my family, and who my family is, and where I come from, so far as I know. Now, with a sufficient mess made, certain connections gestured at, I say again: Welcome.
I hope this site will be a container for my writing. I hope its structure and visibility will support me as I try to write more often and more freely. I love to write, but I have spent much of my life with something stuck in my throat. Worried about the right way to say. Overwhelmed by the dilemma of choice, as James Wood puts it. In many projects, I've painted myself into a corner, and, to mix metaphors, the whole winged contraption I am building comes crashing to the floor, pinning me underneath. There is a pathetic quality to writing. Or perhaps it only seems so, to the one doing it. In any case, Welcome again, and again, and please enjoy. I don't know what this will become.