I grew up in Hamden, a city in the middle of mid-southern Connecticut, in a middle-class neighborhood known as Spring Glen. Spring Glen is known for its modestly charming homes and tree-lined sidewalks. My mother grew up here, too. It’s the neighborhood Sam and I moved to when we came back from California. It is a neighborhood that inspires loyalty.

            I felt a surge of Spring Glen pride when neighborhood poet Donald Hall was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2007. Hall’s boyhood home was a few doors down from my mother’s. Like her, he went to Spring Glen Grammar School, about which he would later write a famous poem. He attended the same high school, Hamden High, and submitted his work to the literary magazine, The Cupola (my mother was the editor). Later, when he moved to New Hampshire, my mother kept a watchful eye on Hall’s ailing mother, Lucy, visiting her daily, running errands to the library, the post office, and the A&P. She took care of Lucy because she loved and respected her, because that’s what neighbors do, or used to do, in Spring Glen.

            Decades have passed. Lucy is gone; so is my mother. But Donald Hall is still alive. When I read in the local newspaper that he was coming to the Hamden library for a town-wide tribute, I was excited. I wanted to talk to him about my mother.

The library was packed. Hall got up (slowly, unsteadily) and read a few of his Hamden poems, which I would describe as Garrison Keillor-ish with a cryptic, intellectual edge. They are dark and unsettling but steeped in nostalgia, with names of real places and people to provide a comforting heft.

My mother loved that Hall wrote about shared history and familiar terrain. She often expressed an almost proprietary kinship.

So, it was this connection I was thinking about when I went up to him after the poetry reading and introduced myself as DeeDee Somerville’s daughter. He asked me to speak up, and I repeated my mother’s name. “Perhaps that name is slightly familiar,” he said. I started to tell him that my mother requested we read one of his poems at her funeral, but stopped because he stopped listening.

At first, I felt angry, but it’s hard to stay angry at a frail 83-year-old, so I was left with disappointment. But that passed, too. Sight, hearing, memory- it all fades. We are - even Poet Laureates- only human, and subject to constitutional frailties.

But words are different. The poet may have failed me, but his words, had not, and never would, fail my mother.

As it turned out, I had not come to see Donald Hall, but my mom. And while I may have been temporarily distracted by the old man slumped in a chair, signing his latest book of poetry on the back of a town-issued honorary plaque, when I got back home I re-read some of his early poems, and once again managed to find her.