poems
prose

but today I write “proses” to suggest multiplicity: the tenth or eighteenth version of a periodical piece as well as a letter of recommendation and a proposal to the New Hampshire Arts Council. Underneath “proses” I place another pair of syllables:

Life Work

Doubtless italic permits me to distinguish general from particular, and late in the day I will draw a straight line through:

and a wavery line, to indicate failure, through the projects I didn’t get to, as it were:

My Connecticut great-grandfather Charlie Hall worked with his hands. After the reservoir job and the war, as an older man with a grown family, he worked for Farmer Webb in a part of Hamden now called, after a 1920 developer’s dainty device of onomastic invention, Spring Glen. Charlie was a farmhand when my grandfather Henry (1875–1966) was born in a worker’s cottage belonging to Farmer Webb. One of Charlie’s tasks, in middle age, was to milk Webb’s cattle and deliver raw milk from the pail into the receptacles of Webb’s cowless neighbors. When Charlie quarreled with his boss, as the family story records, he started his own business by buying milk from another farmer to sell to Webb’s customers. From hired hand he became middleman, founding the Hall Dairy—that would grow, expand, combine with Charlie Brock’s to become Brock-Hall Dairy, wax over southern Connecticut, acquire moribund family dairies, metamorphose stables of workhorses into fleets of delivery trucks … and finally fail, fail, as supermarkets with loss-leader half-gallon milk cartons knocked out home delivery in the 1950s and 1960s.

My grandfather Henry Hall labored for Farmer Webb as a boy, odd jobs a boy could do, especially in harvest. When he was ninety years old, he lived on Norris Street in a suburban block of Spring Glen built over Farmer Webb’s strawberry fields, where as a boy he had picked strawberries for ten cents an hour. At ninety, he told such stories in a deep slow voice, shaking his head over the changes he had lived to see—bewildered by progress, still commanding, never judging the effects of change.

Henry quit school about 1885, after the fifth grade, and worked beside his father. When Charlie Hall quarreled with Webb and went off on his own, Henry worked with his father. They built up two routes for the home delivery of milk, invested in glass to deliver milk in bottles—O luxury of innovation!—which they washed by hand every day in the kitchen of a rented house. People moved out to Hamden from New Haven, especially to Whitneyville, two miles closer to the city than Spring Glen. Maybe the trolley came as far out as Whitneyville, allowing workers to commute. Before Charlie died, he and Henry disputed over expansion. Charlie believed in keeping small, his son in expanding.

Henry Hall expanded. When I first remember the Brock-Hall Dairy, in the early 1930s, we (I relished the pronoun) built a big milk processing plant on Whitney Avenue in Whitneyville. (Eli Whitney had built workers’ housing in the nineteenth century—Whitney’s Village—when he raised a gun factory beside the dam at the end of the lake.) Who built a plant in 1934? Home delivery of good milk prospered—the cream line on our Grade A was deeper than any other dairy’s—and route added to route, and behind the new brick building stretched long low wooden stables for the fifty great shaggy workhorses that pulled the red wagons of Brock-Hall.