Word: avon
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Death, a stranger in any child's cosmos, seems grossly alien in Hilary's. She lives in a pale-yellow house a block from the ocean in Avon-by-the-Sea, N.J. The tiny town is a summer beach destination--Ginny met George on the boardwalk when she was just 17 and both were working menial hotel jobs--with a year-round population of slightly more than 2,000. Yet even in the off-season Avon retains a certain lazy, carefree air. Sweeping front porches serve as social hubs. Traffic grinds to a halt so that ducks can meander across...
...laid-back leg of the threesome, Ginny quit her job as a high school English teacher after Hilary was born, and now works two days a week at the Avon public library. She is the one who races around to the parade of after-school lessons and practices. George had a grueling commute--two hours each way, leaving on the 5:35 a.m. train--but on evenings and weekends he was all Hilary's, supervising homework assignments, shooting hoops. You can see the closeness of the father-daughter bond in the photographs around Hilary's room. Hilary and George skiing...
Three days later was the first of George's three memorial services, sponsored by Aon and held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The next two were in New Jersey: one at St. Elizabeth's Church in Avon, where Ginny and Hilary worship every Sunday, and the last at the Protestant church that George had attended growing up. Since there was still no sign of a body, Ginny propped up a framed photo of George on the altar: he was basting a Thanksgiving turkey and grinning ear to ear. At the receptions afterward, Hilary was the one grinning. Again...
...weeks ago, sitting at the Judson Grill, a sleek New York City hangout for publishing types, Gollob, 71, reflected on the path that has taken him on scholarly jaunts to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, to Oxford University and even to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace. His interest in the Bard is only intensifying, the Houston-born Gollob says with a Texas twang. "You read Shakespeare like you read the Bible," he says. "Because he's rich in ambiguity, you find something new each time you read him, something you've missed...
...sheer luck that he stumbled on the Bard of Avon when he did, says Gollob. What advice does he have for seniors who want to stay as intellectually engaged as he has? "Take as many courses as you possibly can," he says. "Find adult-education courses. Audit college courses if possible. This may sound frivolous, but get into it not so much for the profundity but just to have a good time." After all, as Shakespeare put it, "the play's the thing...