Newtown On Vacation

–– A Different Place And A Slower Pace

By Dottie Evans

Newtown in late July looks a little like Dodge City at high noon just before the big shootout.

Call it the doldrums or the dog days, we know it as a relaxed, nirvana-like, timeless zone that we enjoy between the Fourth of July and the day before school starts. Weekends are the same as the weekdays as activity slows to a crawl.

The town empties out and for those of us staying at home, nothing seems more important than doing very little. We want only to be involved in something we truly love and we don’t want to waste time or   energy stressing over end results and bottom lines.

Some of us work in our gardens. Some spend hours on the porch swing reading. Some cook light suppers or spend days tending a crock of cucumber pickles prepared according to Grandma’s recipe. Some hike or go fishing. Some have gone away. Simply packed up and left town.

“Where is everybody?” Sandy Hook organic farmer Jim Shortt asked a visitor recently before heading across his empty parking lot to his fields where he would soon be pulling out clumps of lettuce that had gone to seed.

The sweet corn was piling up on his farm stand. His 100 laying hens had gone on their own version of slowdown, and the large koi in the fishpond were hiding out in the cool bottom waters. Only the zucchini seemed on a mission to get bigger and better.

“We were really busy in June and then it started tapering off,” he noted.

Anyone driving through the center of town these days can see what Jim Shortt is talking about. The streets are nearly though not quite deserted. Almost empty. Strangely quiet.

It is as though the mystery virus that did a number on that small western town in Michael Crichton’s book The Andromeda Strain had swept through and laid a swath, though we trust nothing so sinister is happening in Newtown.

Unlike Piedmont, Ariz., Newtown today looks and feels rather like the small town we think it used to be. Perhaps it was this quiet in 1940 when there were only 4,023 residents and maybe a few more cows than people. Maybe in 1950, even after the soldiers had come home and the population skyrocketed to 7,448, Newtown all the time was like Newtown in late July.

Today, our residents number more than 27,000 according to the town Community Development Office, so we can safely say that this is no longer a small town. But for a brief time, we can pretend otherwise.

Running More Errands In Half The Time

In late July, those of us driving to work at 8 am don’t get stuck standing in traffic behind school buses on Route 34. We don’t have to wait behind a line of eight cars trying to turn left off Currituck Road onto Main Street.

CVS is pretty quiet, since nobody can bear to think about Back-To-School supplies just yet.

A steady trickle of residents is observed at the post office and it turns out most are there to fill out yellow Hold-Mail While On Vacation cards. Postal employee Joe Coreluzzi did not want to divulge actual numbers, but he admitted the Commerce Road facility is fairly bursting with undelivered mail waiting to be picked up by returning residents now on vacation elsewhere.

“The carriers are squirreling it away all over the building.  It becomes a challenge to find enough room for it all,” he noted.

No more killer deli counter lines at the Big Y. Some days they even ignore the number system altogether.

No more gridlock at the far end of the Queen Street Shopping Center where 15 cars are trying to exit one by one from the bank, the Big Y parking lot, My Place Restaurant, or all the other smaller stores and businesses that use the big lot where the only exit is a short one-lane road to a stoplight. Right-of-way rules usually work, but who knows what the next guy is actually going to do.

You first? No, me first. Well, all right, you go ahead. Wave. Nod. Thank you.  Negotiating that intersection from behind the wheel of your car any time except mid summer is like being in a square dance where nobody can hear the caller.

“Allemande left with your left hand; Do-si-do and a right and left grand.”

 Waiting For Donuts, Books, Or Gas

There are, of course, a few places in town where lines can still be found –– at the gas station on Friday afternoons while people fill up before a weekend getaway, or at the circulation desk of the Cyrenius H. Booth Library where everyone is stocking up on beach reading.

Authors like Nora Roberts, Tony Hillerman, Orson Scott Card, and John Grisham are hot. The library’s vacation book display at the front entrance suggests we consider rereading an old favorite. Check out the “greatest thriller of all time,” The Manchurian Candidate, which was written by Richard Condon in 1959. Start the youngest child on Nancy Drew mysteries.

In summer time, the old books are often the best books.

Only one small traffic jam was noticed last week and it took place right where it should have according to our nostalgic view of Newtown 60 years ago –– in front of Edmond Town Hall. At 1 pm, Tuesday, several cars driving north on Main Street were stacked up, stopping to turn left and hopefully park. They wanted a “Flagpole Special” at the General Store, or they were trying to buy tickets for the matinee showing of “Starsky and Hutch,” or they were going to the Tax Collector’s Office to beat the July 31 deadline.

Only between 5 and 6 pm on weekdays does Newtown look like the 21st Century town it really is as a long line of commuters waits to turn left or right off Church Hill Road onto Main Street.

But we like to think that as they inch toward the flagpole, they are happier in late July than they are any day in November or February. Their windows are down, their radios and CDs are blaring, and they are talking on their cell phones about evening plans.

Even in small towns, somebody has to go to work.