Dear Newtown,

You’ve told me such wondrous stories during the past twenty years that I realize I’ve become one of the Record Keepers, an interpreter of your life.

First as a reporter for The Newtown Bee, I roamed your 62 square miles to learn your secret triumphs, your heartbreak, your humanity. From your breath to my ears to newsprint. So many memorable interviews… In Al Penovi I found a kindred spirit: gregarious, innovative, and at ease in his Route 34 plumbing shop surrounded by a thousand disparate things, albeit his life was filled with used toilets, hoses, and pin-up calendars; mine overflows with books, artwork, and feathers found on hikes. Hazel Spiotti, who saw the automobile supplant the horse on your country roads, set the bar for what I aspire to be at 90 — fearlessly embracing the future, shotgun at the ready, wig askew.

Then facilitating a memoir group at the library, I heard your wisdom resonate through the stories we wrote and read to each other twice a month for six years: adventures, regrets, and…(I’m not telling). My favorite chronicle: how a curious and kind-hearted boy from Cut Bank, Montana, travelled the world before landing in Newtown to embark on his second career, one as Probate Judge Merlin Fisk.

Next as an author, I shared your tales of horse thieves and hobos, safe crackers and arsonists in The Case Files of Detective Laszlo Briscoe: True Crime in Newtown 1889-1933. In Eleanor Mayer’s History of Cherry Grove Farm, I related how three generations respected, cultivated, and conserved your land.

Then, for a full decade, as an interviewer for and editor of the oral history project Newtown Remembered, I learned about fox hunting, your Great Flood of ’55, the battle for access to birth control, building a synagogue, fire department, ambulance corps. I learned how Sarah Mannix trimmed her living room in the same wood molding she cut into letter-tile racks for her employer, the developer of Scrabble. How Vern Knapp trapped muskrats along the banks of your streams. And how Doris Dickinson heard her husband died in an accident while inspecting a new construction site. This was 1955, and First Selectman A. Fenn Dickinson was your first tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Now, as a librarian, I’m archiving your pain. Choosing, reading, sorting and packing sorrowful expressions of sympathy sent to you from around the world: letters and banners, hockey pucks, cowboy boots, quilts, and ornaments. Oh, the glitter! Flashy flakes that stick to everything with a relentless determination, like the grief that has descended upon you.

Your great story is unfolding and I am swept up in it. Twenty years gone by, scores of stories told, a million words written. But that’s not the end of it.

I’ll still be listening, Newtown, when I’m old and my wig’s askew.

Andrea Zimmermann
July 28, 2013