The squat, red-brick, factory-like building, adjacent to the high school campus, was where Dad had taken up ‘wood-working,’ or ‘shop,’ as they use to call it. I still have the small table and shoe-shine box that he made as a freshman student there.
“That’s the Technical Building,” Dad gestured, as we passed the immortal Central High School campus. “That’s where I took shop. Built my first table there. A lot of the young guys used to study and work there. Many of them went off to the war, like me. Most of them never came back home.”
Ironically, during my own ‘shop’ experience in the eighth grade at the Wilson School, I had made a small sign with the words ‘Colman’ painted in red. I later gave that sign to my father. Nearly five decades later, I happened to notice the same wooden sign, its red paint still bright, nailed to the door of his back-alley brick apartment. It was the last item I took from that hidden, lonely ground-floor apartment, just off the back alley across the street from my Mom, after Dad’s death. No one, I suspect, even knew what it was, or where it had come from. I suppose that someone would have noticed it sooner or later, and eventually just discarded it, along with the memory of a small boy and his disenfranchised father, both of whom were suspended in time, separated forever.
As I exited that apartment, a little over a year ago, I tossed the wooden sign in the cardboard box with Dad’s effects, and headed to Mom’s place across the street. It reminded me of the green and white New Hampshire license plate bearing the COLMAN name (I salvaged that metallic memory from Dad’s garage some years ago). All I ever managed to salvage from our relationship, it seemed, were priceless, but equally useless mementoes: cheap canvas military belts, a Limited Edition 200th Anniversary United States Commemorative belt buckle, a bonafide ‘Bear Creek Tool Stone,’ with a small handmade wooden case, and a realistic replica of a ‘rare’ silver dollar, which I first believed to be an original; it was not. I did manage to salvage a few of Dad’s paintings. My father had a passion for Native American themes and artifacts, as did his second wife, Dorothy, who, throughout her entire, sheltered life, enjoyed anything ‘Indian’ (almost as an obsession). I, too, have shared that passion from the time I was just a small boy. Most of Dad’s paintings displayed early American pioneers and log cabins, or peaceful pastoral scenes. But his favorites featured the sea. One large oil-painting, which he entitled “The Rising Storm,” actually won a pink ribbon.
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Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Father of the Man
Before returning home that day, and at my request, Dad took me to the outskirts of Manchester, on the old Goffstown Road (in the direction of Glen Lake). Just at the fork in the road which led northwest toward the town of Goffstown and Weare, the old Dunbarton Road headed due north to the right, parallel to the Merrimack River.
The original township of Dunbarton and Weare, settled during the day of General John and Molly Stark, went all the way to the river. On the morning of the same day, we spent several hours revisiting and exploring the old homestead (the ancient ‘Eliot or Morse’ house – built in 1822 - at the junction of Morse and Montalona) in Dunbarton. An early picture of the Dunbarton house features three crude chimneys and two towering, but leafless pines standing like tired sentinels with bare, thinned arms ready to defend the lonely, feeble fortress at all cost against no one in particular.
There is a strange similarity between my father’s and my high school, with some minor exceptions, which requires little speculation or imagination to appreciate. To some extent, it amounts to a repetition of history. Can it be construed as mere coincidence that both Dad and I attended the same high school? Not really. No mystery there. It is intriguing, nonetheless, to consider that my father, who grew up in Manchester, would shuttle off to the Pacific theater as a teenager, only to return, move to a remote area of Dunbarton, and gravitate back to Manchester, his only son in tow, and that his son would later wander the same streets (within a matter of block), only to retrace his father’s steps to the same old yellow-brick edifice a few years later.
Are you a Christian author looking for a quality Christian publisher that offers over 25 years of experience and expertise? Have you written a book but have no idea where to start the publishing process? Then look no further!
CSN books offers quality Christian publishing services including: editing , cover design, printing, and distribution . Check out csnbooks.com for more information and download their FREE Ebook, “Before You Publish” to learn what you need to know before choosing a publisher and sending out your manuscript.
The original township of Dunbarton and Weare, settled during the day of General John and Molly Stark, went all the way to the river. On the morning of the same day, we spent several hours revisiting and exploring the old homestead (the ancient ‘Eliot or Morse’ house – built in 1822 - at the junction of Morse and Montalona) in Dunbarton. An early picture of the Dunbarton house features three crude chimneys and two towering, but leafless pines standing like tired sentinels with bare, thinned arms ready to defend the lonely, feeble fortress at all cost against no one in particular.
There is a strange similarity between my father’s and my high school, with some minor exceptions, which requires little speculation or imagination to appreciate. To some extent, it amounts to a repetition of history. Can it be construed as mere coincidence that both Dad and I attended the same high school? Not really. No mystery there. It is intriguing, nonetheless, to consider that my father, who grew up in Manchester, would shuttle off to the Pacific theater as a teenager, only to return, move to a remote area of Dunbarton, and gravitate back to Manchester, his only son in tow, and that his son would later wander the same streets (within a matter of block), only to retrace his father’s steps to the same old yellow-brick edifice a few years later.
Are you a Christian author looking for a quality Christian publisher that offers over 25 years of experience and expertise? Have you written a book but have no idea where to start the publishing process? Then look no further!
CSN books offers quality Christian publishing services including: editing , cover design, printing, and distribution . Check out csnbooks.com for more information and download their FREE Ebook, “Before You Publish” to learn what you need to know before choosing a publisher and sending out your manuscript.
Peter Coleman
Dad spent a brief portion of his early childhood at the old ‘Colman Estate’ at the foot of a hill on a seven-tenths-of-a-mile stretch in old Auburn, New Hampshire. I have only seen the old one-story clapboard ‘mansion’ twice. There had been and old gristmill somewhere out in the swamp behind the house, but no one seemed to remember the exact location. The day that Dad showed me the house, he simply, but proudly explained, in passing, that it had been there, in the same house, that he had lived as a boy. Maybe it was just a repressed memory; maybe it was the only simple, surviving memory had had to cherish. How could he have known that his parents’ rudimentary, but blissful relationship would end in divorce and another fractured chapter in the Colman odyssey? Did the eventual disappointment of infidelity irreparably damage his innocence, contaminating his capacity for enduring love? Or did the rude, unforeseeable turn of events affecting his young life just render him wiser and more conscious of his own frailty, his own vulnerability, and his own flawed morality? The answer cannot be known.
We continued on soberly to the Auburn Cemetery where most of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Colman-Moy clan have been laid to rest beneath a proud row of limestone and granite headstones on a prominent brow of the nearest hill. Dad seemed to possess a sense of pride as we perused the silent, stolid monuments, the only tangible vestiges of our humble Auburn history. ‘Inglorious Miltons’ perhaps?
I really don’t know whether those were happy days for my father. Folks worked pretty hard from dawn to dusk in those days, without many distractions. There were no trains nor trolleys servicing the Colman Hill, and it was a good half day’s buggy or wagon ride to the city. There was too much to do on the farm to waste time spending one’s hard-earned money on frivolous activities. Oh, once in a while there was a county dance at the Grange Hall. Nearly everybody who could walk would go to the dance, except a small group of local ‘Friends’ (Quakers), or other such straight-laced religious folk whose strict Protestant traditions against attending ‘worldly’ functions prevented them from enjoying such potentially corrupting intercourse (an old, but equally functional English word for conversation…).
Are you a Christian author looking for a quality Christian publisher that offers over 25 years of experience and expertise? Have you written a book but have no idea where to start the publishing process? Then look no further!
CSN books offers quality Christian publishing services including: editing , cover design, printing, and distribution . Check out csnbooks.com for more information and download their FREE Ebook, “Before You Publish” to learn what you need to know before choosing a publisher and sending out your manuscript.
We continued on soberly to the Auburn Cemetery where most of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Colman-Moy clan have been laid to rest beneath a proud row of limestone and granite headstones on a prominent brow of the nearest hill. Dad seemed to possess a sense of pride as we perused the silent, stolid monuments, the only tangible vestiges of our humble Auburn history. ‘Inglorious Miltons’ perhaps?
I really don’t know whether those were happy days for my father. Folks worked pretty hard from dawn to dusk in those days, without many distractions. There were no trains nor trolleys servicing the Colman Hill, and it was a good half day’s buggy or wagon ride to the city. There was too much to do on the farm to waste time spending one’s hard-earned money on frivolous activities. Oh, once in a while there was a county dance at the Grange Hall. Nearly everybody who could walk would go to the dance, except a small group of local ‘Friends’ (Quakers), or other such straight-laced religious folk whose strict Protestant traditions against attending ‘worldly’ functions prevented them from enjoying such potentially corrupting intercourse (an old, but equally functional English word for conversation…).
Are you a Christian author looking for a quality Christian publisher that offers over 25 years of experience and expertise? Have you written a book but have no idea where to start the publishing process? Then look no further!
CSN books offers quality Christian publishing services including: editing , cover design, printing, and distribution . Check out csnbooks.com for more information and download their FREE Ebook, “Before You Publish” to learn what you need to know before choosing a publisher and sending out your manuscript.
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