I learned about it only as an adult, on my private project, my research into the past. On my second or third trip back, I stopped in the cathedral for an hour of private prayer, and during that prayer I thought of looking up Mrs. Jensen, the woman who’d owned the 112 Store. She was in late middle age by then, and had sold the store, but she still lived in the town and I found her without any trouble and we sat in her living room and had a cup of tea. During that conversation she happened to mention a man named Ronald Merwin, who, she said, had been the person responsible for my going to school. I’d never heard the name before that day and had never thought about why, after years of keeping me at home, my parents suddenly decided I could go to school.Merwin was an established painter with an apartment in New York City (I found him there, in his seventies and still painting). In search of a quiet country retreat, he’d purchased a cabin on twenty acres off Waldrup Road, and he lived there most of several summers, working on his abstract canvases, putting new siding and a new roof on the cabin, and taking long solitary walks up and down the eight miles of dirt road.
