The Grove Cemetery & Yale Environs

Just a few blocks from our 1929 apartment and on the edge of the Yale campus is the Grove Cemetery.   The cemetery was organized in 1797 and was the first private, non-profit cemetery in the world.  It incorporated the new idea of a planned lay-out, permanently owned family plots, structured plantings, and paved, named streets.  There are 14 former Yale presidents buried here including Bart Giamatti, better known to us as the Commissioner of Major League Baseball who permanently banned Pete Rose from professional baseball.  The entrance on Grove Street is through an Egyptian Revival stone gateway designed by Henry Austin

and built in 1845.  The quote on the lintel ("The Dead Shall be Raised") is from 1 Corinthians 15:52, and wags claim numerous Yale Presidents have said, "They certainly will be if Yale needs the property."

Just inside the gate is the 'office' which was once a Victorian Chapel.

This was a beautiful cemetery with a park like atmosphere.  It was a balmy summer day with rain washed bright blue sky - a really lovely day to be out for a stroll.  There are several famous people buried here, the most recognizable being Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin.  The cemetery is the final home of many, many Yale notables. Drake commented that it's easy to see why these Yale people all feel a loyalty to this place with its long traditions.

Walking throughout the cemetery we were able to get glimpses of some of the Yale architecture.  There were also flowering dogwood trees.  One of the reasons this cemetery is on the National Historic Register is because of the variety of gravestones and monuments that dot the cemetery.  Here's one of my favorites, the female sphinx.

We found veterans of all the American wars as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  We found someone who died during the California Gold Rush.  We found a student of Yale who died in 1725.  We found a family who changed the spelling of their name.  We found a woman born in 1687 in Waterton, New England - this would be prior to the organization of Connecticut. We found lots of interesting gravestones and monuments.  

Then we strolled back to our apartment through a portion of the Yale campus with me snapping pix of some of that fascinating architecture.

Enjoy the pictures:  https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2013ConnecticutTourOneNewHavenYale?authkey=Gv1sRgCImG-7OvorH-kQE

P.S.  Can you tell we're traveling again?  Two blogs in two days!

Welcome to Yale-ville

The trip across country was relaxing when contrasted to the lead-up days and the big wedding event.  We got to eat at two of our favorite restaurants.  The first is in Holbrook, Arizona.   It's a third generation Mexican restaurant right on old Route 66 that has the best Tex-Mex I've ever eaten.  The second place, amazingly, is in Dickson, Tennessee.  Lugo's is a fabulous 4 star restaurant opened by a culinary trained chef and his wife in this dink town because they wanted a small town atmosphere in which to raise their children.  This place is about 25 miles outside of Nashville, and each time the food shines.  I've never eaten better food anywhere including New York, San Francisco or New Orleans.

We rolled into New Haven, Connecticut and have spent the first two days getting settled.  Sarah and Jay did a great job getting their apartment ready for us to sublet.  The apartment was built in 1929, and had all the mod-cons of the era.  There's the original elevator complete with the wire grate you have to pull across when you enter the telephone booth sized box.  (Thank heaven this apartment is on the second floor, so we haven't bothered with the 80+ year old contraption.)  The apartments include a built in bathroom, hardwood floors, 10 foot high ceilings, electricity, AND a built in ice-box (and I mean an enameled box lined with wood that you cooled with ice).  The kitchen has its original cabinetry - not wood, but metal painted with enameled paint - like those old fashioned turkey roaster pans.  The doorknobs are glass.  There's a brass circle about 3" in diameter cut into the front door with a little piece of swinging metal, so you can see who's calling at your door before opening it.  The windowsills are about 8" deep.  Everything has been painted about a million times, but the interior of the apartment and the exterior of the building and the common spaces are surprisingly clean, neat and bright.  The apartment is chopped up into tiny rooms, but the 10 foot high ceilings keep it from being claustrophobic.  Believe me when I tell you I've lived in much worse places than this.  Our apartment when we first married was 1/2 of a detached garage built in the 1930's.  You could laughingly call it a 'studio'.  We called it Crazy Betty's garage. 

One of the perks of living close to Yale, and I mean spitting distance, is we are on the free Yale Shuttle route.  Mysteriously, there are no paper maps of this system.  Everyone has helpfully explained that all we have to do is go on-line, and there's everything we need.  Yeah, everything EXCEPT where the Shuttle stops.  One of the things we quickly learned is there's no place to park a car.  We haven't been able to find anywhere legal to park in the SUMMERTIME when no one is here.  I can't imagine what the parking problem is like when all the students are here.  Sarah got us a parking permit for our car in the Yale garage that serves their apartment building, and her friend, Meriam, got us a second permit for our trailer.  Our hope was that the car and the trailer would be housed in the garage right across the street, and we would use the trailer like a big closet.  

It was a good thought.  The trailer was 2" too tall for the garage.  At this point, we figured we were screwed.  As we traipsed up to the building where all the Yale parking is assigned, paid for, and denied, we weren't hopeful.  Our expectation was to encounter the parking counterpart of Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine.  (This famous character was a woman who worked for the one and only telephone company, and who loved denying service to customers because "We're the phone company, and we can".) Instead, we encountered Linda, a Yale employee who worked very hard to find us a space that would work for our trailer.  Ironically, we wound up in the postage stamp size hidden parking lot of the School of Forestry and the Environment which is one of the schools who will be issuing a Master's Degree to Sarah in a couple of years. 

We took the free Yale shuttle all day long our first day in New Haven.  It seemed like we would just walk up to the intersection where we thought we could catch it, and the one we wanted would be pulling away from the curb.  There was a lot of standing around admiring the architecture.  And let me tell you - there's architecture coming out the wazoo in this place.  I noticed there's a tour of the Yale architecture this coming Saturday, and I think I'm going to hook on.  There are buildings on top of buildings here all crammed together.  As we rode the Shuttle from place to place running our errands, I quipped to Drake that this was the poor man's Greyline tour. 

Another smooth spot of this visit is the giant cat.  Jackson (who I call Alice half

the time), is HUGE.  He must weigh 20 pounds, and his tail is 18" long.  He is magnificent looking, and he's really been lonely since Jay and Sarah have been gone so much.  Now, he's deliriously happy there are people living with him who talk to him and pet him and tell him what a great cat he is.  Actually, he's a little flatulent, slightly stupid, and shedding so much that you'd swear you can see the hair wafting off him as he walks.  Well, today we upped the grooming, and I combed about a pound of hair out of his coat while Drake vacuumed the entire apartment.  We have been looking forward to having a temporary pet.  We've almost always had a pet - first there was Fanny who lived with us for 12 years, and then Alice who lived with us for 19 years.  My only complaint about the cat is he thinks he's going to sleep in the bed with us.  Nope.  He keeps trying, and he hasn't realized that it's never going to happen.  When Sarah comes back, he can resume his place which seems to be on the pillow.  Until then, he's banned from the bedroom at night.  

We're settling in nicely here.  I've been sleeping more than eight hours a night, and I'm starting to feel rested after the wedding madness.  I'm looking forward to the day trips.  I picked up a bunch of Connecticut tourist literature, and in the fourth smallest state, it's pretty easy to go anywhere and back in a day.  One of the things I've had to learn is that every paper state road map is the same size.  However, what may be 300 miles on the paper map of Texas can easily be only 30 miles in these tiny states.  No matter how small, these states all have stuff they are proud of.  Like who knew there were 24 wineries in Connecticut?  I see a wine tour in our future.  There's a bunch of history here - New Haven is 375 years old.  There's an old cemetery in the middle of Yale, and there are free tours on the weekends.   I also found the Yale Caberet which is apparently a summer drama club of Yale students who are putting on a season of plays this summer.  I've barely had time to look around, and I can already see lots to do.  For now, I'm just glad to be feeling well, have a cat to pet, and a new place to explore.     

  

And the Wedding

I've discovered that your child getting married is a lot like your child being born. Time both speeds up and slows down.  The actual wedding day seemed to go by in a flash, but moments during the day were like a slow motion film.  Here's what happened.

The day started at 4:40 am for Drake and I.  I don't think we could have slept another minute if we had wanted to.  Drake especially was very keyed up.  No doubt he would say the same about me.  The reason we were up so early is that we expected the hairdresser to arrive about 5:30 am.  We gave each of the bridesmaids a session with the wedding hairdresser, Tammie Garza.  This woman is very professional and with an assistant turned out hair dos for six bridesmaids and Sarah in under three hours.  

Now, you understand why I made the kimonos.  Everyone wore their kimonos during the 6:00 to 9:00 am getting ready time.  Drake and I are floating around making sure everyone got yogurt, coffee, and the kolaches we brought from West, Texas while we tried to get ready ourselves.  In a calculated move to settle me (and himself down), Drake read out loud to me the Texas Ranger baseball story of the previous night's game.  I'm sure everyone thought that very bizarre, but it felt like normalcy to me.  Suddenly, about 8:00 am, rain begins pouring down.  Sarah is close to tears.  Drake, checking the weather radar, rashly promises her that it will not be raining for her wedding.  I'm sending up silent prayers since I know Sarah picked this venue for the unique processional it offered.  Slowly, slowly, over the next hour the rain dribbles to a stop, but it remains ominously overcast. 

Meanwhile, the "getting ready party" is a rousing success.  Everyone is laughing, eating kolaches, and putting on make-up.  The hairdressers are steadily working through the bridesmaids.  Amy and Emily look lovely.  I thought Shanleigh's hair was really gorgeous, but I was most impressed with Shailie's hair since her hair is long, thick and naturally curly.  I really should have gotten money back for Anne.   

On to make-up.  The make-up designer arrived to 'do' Sarah.  She got 'airbrushed' with make up that would last all day and would be tear proof.  (She and I inadvertently tested that property as I was getting her ready.)  At the conclusion of the makeup session, here's the most beautiful bride I've ever seen.  Ok, Ok, I'm a LITTLE prejudiced.   

And here's they are:  Sarah's bridesmaids - Shanleigh (Jay's sister), Amy (Best Woman), Shailie, Sarah, Emily, Anne and Lauren.  

Next, Drake, Sarah and I leave for the Mansion on Judge's Hill, the venue of the wedding.  The next hour was my favorite part of the day.   It was a bittersweet drive.  We all took our accustomed seats in the car, the places each of us have sat thousands of times - Drake driving, me riding shotgun, and Sarah in the back seat behind Drake.   However, this time the family drive felt like both an ending and a beginning.   This was the last time we would drive as a family of three.  The next time Sarah would drive with us she would be Sarah Lynn Smith Wilson, and our family would be four, not three.

We took a hotel room at the Mansion for Sarah and the girls to put on their dresses, jewelry and shoes.  Pastor Marilyn and her husband, John, stayed in the room the night before the wedding.  They graciously vacated it the morning of the wedding, so we could use it for our final preparations.  Drake left us at the room, and I helped Sarah put on her beautiful dress and get ready for one of the most important days of our lives.  This was an intensely emotional time of joy for both Sarah and I.  There were a few tears blotted by her great grandmother's handkerchief as we tried to express what we were feeling.  This was a moment of connection between myself and Sarah Lynn; one of the best times in my life as Sarah's mother.  Here is my angel baby ready for her wedding in her gorgeous dress wearing her "something old", the pearls, which was one of our wedding gifts to her.  These are the ones Drake gave me for our 10th wedding anniversary, and they are now Sarah's.

Our next hour was both fun and nerve wracking.  Sarah left to do her 'first look' with Jay.  Drake and I toured the reception area, and then went to greet the groomsmen, Jay's parents and our early arriving friends. 

Drake and I, Kit and Jeff (Jay's parents) are all so happy, and so ready for the event we have planned and worked on for six months.  It's hard to believe at this point the day is actually happening. It's almost time, and there's a big problem...

The one thing we couldn't buy, couldn't schedule, couldn't control:  the weather. It's been overcast all morning, and raining intermittently. The staff of the hotel are drying the guests' chairs as well as sweeping down the flagstone surface of the garden area.  One of the staff is actually using a small towel and drying small puddles of water that are dotting the length of the processional portion of the flagstones.  At 10:45 am it starts to spit rain.  Guests are putting the lovely programs over their heads as rain drop catchers.  The wedding planner looks at Drake, and says, "What shall we do?"  Without hesitation, Drake says, "We're doing it."  And, true to his prediction, as the wedding processional begins, it stops raining.  Sarah Lynn sweeps down a wrought iron staircase, takes her Dad's arm, and processes up the aisle to the "Spring" music by Vivaldi.  She is a vision, and he is beaming.  

The wedding ceremony was beautiful  Pastor Marilyn's service blessed the union. Jay and Sarah exchanged vows they had written which were the traditional sentiments expressed using modern words.  For instance, they vowed to love one another through 'plenty' and 'want'.  The rings entrusted to Jay's Best Man and best friend, Nick, were given and exchanged.   Just as they are saying their vows, the sun comes out and illuminates them.  The wedding service is going like clockwork.  

However, as we all know, every wedding has a hitch.  In one wedding we attended, a groomsman fainted.  Sometimes bouquets are dropped.  Toddler ring bearers and flower girls act up during the service.  Our wedding hitch involved Kit and I.  Jay and Sarah asked the two of us to light a unity candle symbolizing the new family we were creating as a result of their marriage.  As we did the rehearsal run through, no one thought it was important we actually learn how to light those fire guns.  These look like wands with triggers and fire shoots out of the end as you press the trigger.  That's what is supposed to happen.  Neither Kit nor I could get the stupid things to light.  We tried, and then we tried again.  I was dumbfounded.  How could this be happening?  All I could think of was, "Nobody smokes anymore, so nobody has a damn lighter."  I thought I had covered ever contingency, but I missed this one.  Fortunately, just as the guests were getting restless, Sam, one of the groomsmen, stepped up and produced a Bic lighter.  Kit and I were as relieved as was everyone else.  Whew!   With a final blessing, Pastor Marilyn introduced the newly married couple to the guests.

Time for the party.  Here's my final picture:  Drake and his newly married daughter dancing at her wedding.