Tarry

Linger here with me

At my latest Show and Tell, my neighbor shared the most romantic piece of paper I’ve ever seen.

Jared told his story, at the very end of the night after the designated speakers, as a sort of postscript, sitting in a chair alongside the stone fireplace at the noble space of the Hudson Valley Writers Center. He had a Ziplock with him I was kind of hoping would reveal some kind of cookie. But what he offered was so much better.

He said, as I was well aware of, that he and his wife had spent many years tearing their new old house across the street from me down to its bones. The walls were packed with old disintegrated insulation and everything else, including, as they discovered in piles of rubble they were actually shoveling into dumpsters, many handwritten letters from the turn of the 20th century. Nothing dramatic here, just everyday often banal conversation, mailed from house to house across time and distance, to a girl growing up here, who somehow thought it was a good idea to toss the letters after arrival into a hole in the wall. Jared found dozens.

He read some and laid them upon the table for people to admire after, along with the Revolutionary cannonball, the original Beatles fan pins and sweatshirt, and a grandfather’s obsessive production of knitted coat hangers. This line on the envelope from suitor to sweetheart tugged at me.

postman postman, do not tarry
this is the girl I am going to marry

I couldn’t love this more for many reasons. The romance of course. The sweet simple rhyme. The conviction. The commitment. The handwriting. This vehicle of communication. The very word “tarry” which underlies our founding villages, Tarrytown and once North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow) which were known for perhaps being a place where you might want to tarry, or linger longer, or perhaps with men a little too prone to linger a little too long at the tavern. There is a restaurant (and bar) now aptly named Tarry Tavern. And there is that new literary magazine for the Tarrytowns I contributed to. But in my version, a new myth I concocted for the villages, they are known as the Hollows (and merged after Sleepy Hollow and what was known as South Sleepy Hollow decided to marry). In my story, the word “tarry” features thematically. For here is a place to which both the living and dead gravitate, a sanctuary city for humans and their ghosts. No one ever leaves so it’s getting quite crowded. (In other words, it always feels like October.) Locals can find these magazines at Transom book shop. Others can find them on Etsy.

The climax, if you will, of my story:

One day I dared swim too far into the channel, slogging stroke by stroke, determined to make it across, and before I knew it, a storm was upon me, and a boat too close that I hadn’t heard or seen approaching until the terrible horn sounded, churning the brown water more than it was already. I was getting fatigued and spooked. I was gasping, sinking and rising faster, terrified that the awful nausea would return, “not waving but drowning.” The dark was darkening, deepening, but then who knows how much later there’s a great rush, an uplift, muscled arms hoisting me into a dinghy, ears popping like an epiphany, and from there handing me to the adjacent tugboat crew like a foreign fish caught in their nets. I remember eyes–how can I forget. Light, kind eyes that had a sparkle of humor in them despite what must have seemed wretched, my seaweed state. And something more, like recognition, sadness. He pumps my chest of its sludgy bile and I see only the pinwheel of colors like my own personal sunset. I remember thinking as if on the edge of the best dream: I could tarry here with you forever.

Tarry, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as a verb as:

1 a: to delay or be tardy in acting or doing; b: to linger in expectation : wait

2: to abide or stay in or at a place

History, however, posits that Tarrytown might be known for the Dutch word for the wheat they grew here, calling the area “Wheat Town,” or “Terve Town,” but most people prefer author Washington Irving’s interpretation, as it’s far more fun.

Ichabod Crane “tarried” in Sleepy Hollow to teach the regional kids, but it’s worth sharing the whole paragraph from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” since Ichabod himself is a figure worthy of a show-and-tell.

In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

Here Irving uses the context of “staying” in the temporary way of “sojourning.” But right up front, he introduces the concept of our sister village Tarrytown (Tarry Town in his rendering), as a place where the men might stay too long at the local water holes.

In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

Of course this quietest place in the whole world place is Sleepy Hollow, “a sequestered glen,” where a “drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere,” and rustic lads called “Sleepy Hollow Boys” roam in abundance, which sounds great to me on the eve of the Halloween parade when we are anything but rustic and drowsy.

No one seemed to want to leave this sweet safe space of the Show and Tell at the end of the night, where we learned so much about each other in these five short minutes each. The objects chosen speak so much to who we are and what we care about. And the event itself: how hungry we are for positive community and connections. For making new friends, catching up with old ones, laughing, crying. I had cleaned up all my pop-up shop with the books and dark arts, and gotten help folding up all the chairs and clearing snacks, and still a group lingered and talked. I was going to flicker the lights to convey my exhaustion. I want to go home. But I created a thing where people want to stay. That’s something to be proud of. Like the 25 cent ticket for the Lawn Party benefit at St. Teresa’s Church, night after night. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 1901. The people want to keep coming, and tarry here indefinitely.

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