Jim’s Connecticut

By Jim.

Ginny’s heartfelt post on Connecticut will be hard to match.  We decided that our visit to Connecticut was so special, each of us should express our own feelings about it.

Despite wearing my Alabama heritage on my sleeve (especially during football season, as you may have noticed), I lived in Connecticut almost half my life – 32 years.  That’s more than twice as long as I lived in Alabama, and way longer than I lived in California, Oregon and Washington.

Connecticut defined my adult life.  I moved there right after law school, when I went to work for the NFL in New York City.  My children were born there and virtually all of my memories of being a father are based there.  Whether it was riding a commuter train from Darien to Manhattan or driving from Litchfield to Bristol (or, ill-advisedly, driving from Weston to Far Hills, NJ), it was my home during most of my career.  I grew to love fall foliage, the aroma and warmth of a crackling fire, the hushed beauty of the morning after an overnight snowfall, the warm days and cool evenings of summer, sunsets in the Litchfield Hills and the camaraderie of hockey parents as our kids skated around rinks all over the state.  I met Ginny in Connecticut (our first date was at the Inn At Newtown), and it’s where we launched the magical mystery tour of a life that we’ve been sharing for almost 11 years.

When we planned this year-long trek of ours, we knew we wanted to be in Connecticut in October and we knew we wanted and needed to be there for a good long while, to reconnect with so many people who were and still are special.

Our sentimental journey also included some steely-eyed practicality.  The Northeast is not, shall we say, particularly RV-friendly.  After futilely searching for a place to park The Big T anywhere near where we planned to stay, we booked a room at The Westport Inn and dropped the rig off at a nearby Freightliner dealer for some scheduled maintenance.  Practicality then morphed into good luck, when the hot water system on the rig started acting up and we found an authorized repair dealer just up the road from the Freightliner dealer to fix it.

Before getting to Westport, we spent the weekend in Old Saybrook at the weekend house of Mike and Lisa Foster, just a short walk from Long Island Sound.

Then it was on to our old home turf.  As Ginny has already described, the whole week was a blur – so many people to see, so many places to go.  We smiled so much, our cheeks got sore.

We went to NYC one evening, where Grand Central hasn’t lost its recently-restored grandeur,

visited Jay Moyer Bob Raskopf and Gary Gertzog, dear friends from my NFL days (with whom I had so much fun, I forgot to take pictures!) and had a belated birthday dinner with JJ.
We drove up to Litchfield one day to visit old haunts…

and enjoy a special lunch with old friends Bill and Betsy Goff.

We were beyond lucky to be in town the same weekend of a big party, where we got to visit with some old friends we might not otherwise have gotten to see.

Nostalgic visits aren’t the mere wallowing in memories – they are a chance to savor people and places that define our lives and give them special meaning.  THAT was our visit to Connecticut, a place like no other for both of us.