Benjamin Toomer had been dead for over a decade when his youngest daughter, Lida Brooks (Toomer) Calhoun, and family made a trip to Mobile. His grave in Magnolia Cemetery, photographed during the visit, was a white headstone, readable in the photo. The current gravesite, added later, has a pair of large ledger stones, level with the ground. The first is inscribed to Benjamin Toomer and his wife Lucinda Huddleston. The second, his son, Edward Terry Toomer, and his wife, Anna Rambaut. The other gravesite documented in the set of photos from this visit is quite different. I don’t expect the name of the person buried in this grave can be…

My father, David Wakeman Calhoun, died on December 24th, 2017; Christmas Eve. He was 93 having been born on December 4th, 1924. We were fortunate as a family to have many months of lucid conversations over his final months to come to terms with our loss. He died peacefully in his sleep. The contributions he made with his life were significant. After an education in New Haven, CT, at the Foote School, Hillhouse High School and Yale, he worked as a biometrician at G. D. Searle, a pharmaceutical company in Skokie, IL. As part of the Biological Research Division he was a key investigator at Searle for the introduction of…

My children and I heard Dar Williams sing “The Ocean” with my Brother and his family at a free concert in Freeport, Maine several summers ago. She forgot some of the words and her collective memory, the audience, jarred them loose again. Who would have thought such grace could be shared in an L L Bean parking lot. I went back to the ocean today With my books and my papers I went to the rocks by the ocean But the weather changed quickly, oh the ocean said "What are you trying to find, I don't care, I'm not kind I've bludgeoned your sailors, I've spat out their keepsakes Oh…

We lived for a year in Colorado. The access road to our housing complex presented a spectacular, expansive view of the Rockies. The mountains were my morning companions as I drove beside them into Denver. I thought at first that they stood as a silent reminder that some things cannot be corrupted. But, it now feels like stoical acquiescence. I will return to the mountains, they are like friends; but, the ocean is in my blood and I can’t be away too long. In contrast, my grandfather, Robert Lowry Calhoun, wrote of how the mountains restored his faith when he found he had, “Doubt that there is any God, and…

My family has owned a house on an island in Penobscot Bay where we have gone in the summer since the 1930s. Summer people are never fully accepted into the community by the locals; except, with some dispensation for the fact that “my Grandmother knew your Grandmother”. At the height of the depression there weren’t many options for a “proper” vacation with four children on a professor’s salary. The first year, while Grandpa taught on the mainland, Grandma took a boat to the island and she and children and luggage were all dropped on the muddy sand of the harbor at low tide. How long was it, wondering what kind…

In May I stopped in Harrisburg. The Dauphin County Historical Society has the pre-colonial account book of the Rev. John Roan for Paxtang and Derry. I discovered in this book that my ancestor, George Calhoon, twice paid his church subscription with “a bushel of salt”. An art professor of mine was pleased to have my company but mentioned a proverb from his native Poland, “One is not a friend until you have shared a barrel of salt.” The sense was that one’s friends have shared both times for breaking bread and salving wounds. I was not aware until recently that this expression has an origin earlier than Aristotle. But it is…