Back in the
1970s / 1980s, there was a little bookstore on the corner of Transit Street and
Brook Street in Providence, called “Seward’s Folly.” It was run by an older
couple, Schuyler Seward and his wife Peterkin.
It was a
small musty wonderland of a bookstore, and the Sewards were always very kind to
me. I went there whenever I could. I wanted a book by Will
Cuppy the 1930s / 1940s humorist, and they managed to find it for me, and after
that they knew me as “Cuppy,” because who in the 1980s remembered Will Cuppy?
Schuyler had
a beard and mustache as I do now, and was very wry and very smart, and one
online source claims that he was a speechwriter for the Truman Administration.
Peterkin was small and walked with difficulty, but had a wonderful smile. They
had two dogs when I knew them: a huge poodle and a huge bulldog – both elderly
and tired – who had to be taken upstairs (where the Sewards lived) and showered
with cool water from time to time in the summertime, so that they wouldn’t
overheat.
The Sewards
were lovable people, and very memorable.
I wonder how
many people remember them now?
And who will
remember me when I’m gone?
This is the
very last bit of Thornton Wilder’s “The
Bridge of San Luis Rey”:
“But
soon we shall die . . . and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and
forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love
return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There
is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only
survival, the only meaning.”
Do you get
that? We don’t last forever, but we will leave something behind.
The Sewards
left me a wonderful legacy – a memory of two intelligent kind friendly people. I
hope, when my time comes, that I will leave behind some tiny fraction of the
kindly legacy the Sewards bequeathed me.
(Postscript:
while researching this blog, I discovered that Peterkin died only a few months ago – on July 30, 2013 – not far away, in
Rumford, Rhode Island. Schuyler evidently predeceased her, though I couldn’t
find his obituary. They are survived by their daughter Abbi.)
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