It’s now six months since our move from Long Island, a gut-wrenching transition for all the right reasons. Rereading my description of the anguish and adjustment, I’m more convinced than ever that we did the right thing. I’ll publish the companion piece to this in a few days…

December 2009:

“I Have Often Walked Down That Street Before…” lyrics from Lerner and Lowe’s classic Broadway show, “My Fair Lady.”

I hear the song play in my mind as I sit alone at the bar of the Cape Henlopen, the ferry taking us from Orient Point, Long Island, to New London, Connecticut, and our new home in Essex.

Woodland Drive, Brightwaters, Long Island, New York is that street for me. For 72 of my 77 years, I lived there. I grew up at 41 Woodland, the house my parents bought in 1937. For the past 45 years, my home has been 42 Woodland, right across the street. As a boy, I remember standing in our living room, gazing at the cozy stone house across the way, which resembled a cottage high in the French Alps: smoke rising from the hooded chimney centered in the middle of the peaked slate roof. The palladium window in front was fast disappearing in a blanket of white. The snow was swirling, blown almost horizontal by the east wind. The house took on a Currier and Ives-like appearance. I remember thinking one day I want to live there.

Mom and Dad are both gone, as is my brother Ken, two years younger, but not the memories of our family and the joy of growing up in that wonderful neighborhood at a time when no one locked their doors and open fields abounded.

The section of Woodland Drive where we lived starts on the east, a sharp left off Lake View Avenue West. Five ponds with a cascade and pearly white bridges connect and divide the lakes. Dad and Mother taught us to skate on those ponds. Ken and I became very competitive hockey players later skating for Andover and then, Ken for Brown and me for Yale.

Woodland Drive continues about 400 yards west before it turns lazily north and continues about an eighth of a mile ending up as it intersects Union Boulevard running parallel to the LIRR tracks. The western end of our section of Woodland leads onto the fifth hole of a beautiful golf course, Southward Ho Country Club. Before the days of mindless vandalism and the end of civilized norms required that a fence be put up around the greens, the kids on the block spent many happy hours playing hide and seek, and acting out WWII battles, playing guns in the woods in the middle of the rolling course. We rode our sleds down moguls and large traps when it snowed.

41 Woodland was for Ken and me the base from which our lives took shape. Two wonderful, loving parents guided us wisely at every turn. Education, sports and the love of salt water and the sea and the great outdoors, service to our country and an abiding faith in God were the legacies they passed on to us.

Ken and I shared so many things. We both went to Andover, then me to Yale and Ken to Brown. My father was a Brit and saw action in WWI. He served in the British Merchant Marine. At the age of 17, his ship was torpedoed. He was one of five lucky sailors who survived when the German U-boat surfaced and machine-gunned those clinging to the wreckage.

After graduation from college, Ken and I served together on the same destroyer, the USS Abbot, DD629 in 1956. This required parental approval. My parents were so proud of us. We operated in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. At that time we were the only brothers serving as officers together on the same ship in the entire navy.

At every stage, we returned home to 41 Woodland. Ken married first. I was married in 1958 to Betsy Waskowitz. We lived in Tarrytown. Betsy died of lymphatic cancer in 1963, a little over a year after we had moved to New Canaan, Connecticut.

I was fortunate to meet and fall in love with Dorothy Crawford. We were married a short time later and purchased 42 Woodland, directly across the street from my childhood home, where my parents still lived. The house that I loved, that I drew pictures of as a youngster, became our home for the next 45 years.

Mom passed away in 1978 in her bed at 41 Woodland. The house became too much for Dad to handle. He came to live with us. Our garage, the same beautiful stone construction and slate roof, was modified to look like a small British country cottage. Dad died at home in February 1986 at age 86, a Lester Lanin record playing, his black Lab Monty on the bed beside him, Claudia his cat fast asleep on the rocking chair and ice cubes still floating in a glass of Dewars on his bedside table.

We had arrived home after watching our son Graham play hockey, accompanied by our daughter Jenny, on break from Andover, to find Dad gone. His head was tilted in the direction of a beautiful painting of the sea on the wall by his bed.

The joy of having our children Graham and Jenny grow up and share the same experiences I had savored over my young life on Woodland Drive was an experience that few are lucky enough to have. Graham became a very good hockey player, after learning to skate on the local ponds, and Jenny has become a gifted writer, after devouring book after book in her little bedroom above our kitchen.

While Dorothy and I lived at 42 Woodland, our kids moved out for college, then back home as they commuted to their first jobs in the city, then out again as their careers took off. Graham married his wife Paulette, a lovely young lady from East Islip. They lived in Bay Shore raising their four children, then moved to Essex, CT a few years ago, after falling in love with the countryside. When their eldest son needed surgery last year, Jenny also moved to Essex from New York City to be closer to them.

Life on Woodland Drive had changed. My parents had died. The empty lots were gone. The kids now had to be chaperoned at the bus stop. On a personal note, the departure of our kids and grandkids from the community left a hole that nothing could fill. My wife and I could no longer drop by my son’s home for a visit or attend my grandchildren’s soccer games or school plays. The days began to feel empty.

For me, Woodland Drive was more than a street. It was a way of life. And after 72 years, it had changed more than I could bear.

It was time to say good-bye to the street “where I lived” and spent so many wonderful years and pass the mantle to a new generation of “Woodland Drivers.” Last December, we sold the house to a wonderful young couple with three sons – a perfect fit for the neighborhood, which is filling up again with young families. The cycle was about to start again.

The ferry horn sounds. I am jolted back to the present, as the boat pulls in to New London. I tip the bartender, head on deck to meet Dorothy and prepare for the short drive to our new home, on the same street as my son and his family. The grandchildren are waiting. There are new memories — on a new street — to make.

George S. K. Rider