Stop me if I've told you before how we came to live in Norwich. Okay, I didn't actually mean you should say stop; it was a figure of speech, a story-telling construct to further the narrative. Glad we got that straightened out before this got really awkward.
I wasn't born here or even in New England and I didn't marry someone from here. I married someone from there; there, in this case, being Germany which is where I worked until we won the Cold War and by the fall of 1991 NATO had started to reduce the overhead and I was placed in a job at Submarine Base, New London and relocated across the ocean.
I arrived about six weeks before my family did that autumn so I was the scout in search of a place we would call home. The realtor showed me all kinds of places across the area for (as I remember it) days on end but when I stepped across the threshold of our last stop on that Saturday afternoon, in a house near Chelsea Parade, I knew I was home.
As we crossed over the old Laurel Hill Bridge and drove past empty and derelict buildings where a downtown once had been it was a somber and sobering moment but I had spent days in the library looking at reviews of schools and other local quality of life concerns (this was all pre-internet, remember, so lots of walking six miles uphill in the snow both ways all day) and while Norwich had lots of history (three or so centuries as a matter of fact) it seemed to this new guy on the block to have even more of a future and I decided then and there we would live here.
When my wife, our nine-year-old son, and four-year-old daughter arrived just before Thanksgiving I had finally figured out, despite what I had been telling co-workers, we didn't live in Norwalk, but, rather, in Norwich. (When I told people I lived in Norwalk they'd ask how long of a drive I had and when I answered 'about twenty minutes,' I'd get lectures about 'we don't have an autobahn here and there are speed limits.')
Our son attended Buckingham School and, for seventh and eighth grade, Kelly Middle School, while our daughter had to wait until the following year to be old enough to attend kindergarten, which was in the portable classroom to the left of the school when entering from the upper parking lot.
On our half of the street, I always thought of Uncas as the vinculum, we had scads of children for our two as acquaintances, playmates, and, in some instances, life-long friends. Up the street, across the street, as well as next-door on the other side and also next door to their next-door neighbors, too, all these kids all about the same age or close to it with everybody's front and backyards serving as shared playspaces. All of them, or very nearly, attended the same schools all the way through Norwich Free Academy, played on the same youth sports teams, made some pocket money delivering the Bulletin (I helped our son on Sundays while Mom handled the money collection from subscribers) and made their versions of life in a small town.
My wife and I joined the other mothers and fathers attending PTO meetings, signing up for car washes, supporting bake sales, and organizing basket bash raffles as we worked to fill the financial holes in our schools' budgets (even then) because, as the song goes, 'children are our future.'
The future crept in quietly on cats feet, I guess; the years progressed and all the kids on our half of Lincoln are grown and gone, many now with kids of their own in places and spaces far from here though near in our hearts, The tide of time and lives that create the safe harbor which is our city (or should be) continues to ebb and flow even as the next generation in our neighborhood are learning to ride bikes, shoot driveway hoops, fall in love and grow a little more every day into the promise of their own tomorrow even though for many, far too many for this Dad's heart, that tomorrow will happen elsewhere.
Each of us in our own way makes Norwich a place to come home to; some for a lifetime while for others only for a little while.
-bill kenny
