A Pre-Election ay Walk to Beach Street

The Sunday before an election, national or otherwise, is a busy one in our game, what with making our vote tabulation forms, so the wife and I and our adopted woofer shortened our weekly walk. The boss decided to stay in the center of Rockport town. From School Street we headed toward the main stem with the four-footer under control by the leash. We envied a proud mother with two attractive young daughters jumping off the church's granite wall, all of two feet, but to them a bonafide dare, just as did our youngsters in the dim past. It has always amused us to see how crookedly arranged are these granite slabs that make the low wall, as if they had become a wee bit tipsy with time.

Main Street traffic was surprisingly heavy this brilliant sunny Sunday. Above us was bright sun, haunted by lowery clouds split by a screaming jet. Even the heavens lack the peace of yesterday. Political signs blazed forth from shop windows, Republican and Democrat, but none for Prohibition or Socialist-Labor candidates, who stay incognito but for their last names.

We came to the grandiose granite steps of Detective Ralph Piper's Main Street possession, a fabulous stairway and wall that has impressed Rockport, native and otherwise. It is a gorgeous piece of work that would do credit to a royal mansion. Clustered in front of the waiting station, "Brud" Curtis' emporium, were bikes and more bikes, his and her'n, with the teenagers yakking a mile a minute about school, girls and boys and all other subjects dear to their hearts. But not a word about the nation's politics. They leave that talk-talk to the mossbacks, like us. We saw where Brud is pushing his store into the ocean ready to handle an enlarging trade for the summer. It started as a hole in the wall.

On Beach Street, we were again delighted to see that house with the old cellar window of eight minute panes and the cerulean blue cellar door, set perfectly as a frontispiece of the Cape's most modern motel and its characteristic gull perched on the eaves. The comfy green wooden benches facing Front Beach had nary a customer this ideal Fall day. Instead along came a dyed-in-the-wool Rockporter headgeared for a football scrimmage, come what may. The youngster looked the part to a "T-formation."

Then our volcanic boxer Mollie came into her element, for we had entered Mill Brook Meadow, sold by jeweler Joe Thibeault at cost to the Garden Club and by it given to the town of Rockport. Barrels of room for her to scoot after birds she luckily could never catch, a running brook for her to wade in and snout for what she could find. And the rustling sigh and moaning of weeping willows to hold us enthralled. The willows weren't the only weepers in Sandy Bay. The town is still rock-ribbed GOP, you know.

From there through olden Smith Street, a way of comfortable sturdy old homes, all neatly kept up. 'Tis a part of town which we always love to visit for we feel we are again walking through a section that was nearer to what the village was in the past. Here was the old baker shop where Post Office custodian Eben Knowlton's ancestors operated a bakery. Today the building is one for storage. For us, it had rich memories.

A beautiful yellow-leaved maple, a background of the spire of the Finnish church greeting us with a touch of old Europe, a battalion of more weeping willows as we headed away from this dead-end street toward our own home lane. Brief as it was, the three of us breathed the better for this walk. Try it sometime for the better heart and leave the drugs on the bathroom shelf for a change.
J.P.C., Jr.