As I recall, the motto from NCHS, printed on a decorative unfurling flag on a logo on the red and black bookcovers we could buy to protect our books was "what we are to be we are now becoming"  And yes, I still have one of those bookcovers  -  the motto is correct, but is it correct for you?  How do you think growing up in the prosperous town of New Canaan, nicknamed "Next Stop to Heaven", in the post WWII era, influenced who you are now? 

For me, as I look back, I think growing up in New Canaan had a profound influence on my ultimate career as a clinical social worker.  I remember  feeling embarrassed by and somewhat ashamed and envious of all the wealth around me, and the poverty I saw every time I took the train into NYC.  Catcher in the Rye was a pivotal book, and I remember wanting to catch people from falling.  It took some time for my career to gel, although I did major in Psychology (lab rat variety in the BF Skinner mode) at Connecticut College - where I went hoping an all female learning environment would foster better and more equitable learning, but instead was disappointed to find that women carried quiet, well trained manners into the classroom and that co-education was far more stimulating.  It was the incoming class of 1970 that finally had some creative hippie juice. 

Caught up in the confusing currents of sexism, racism and beginnings of woman's liberation, I didn't know if I wanted the cushy but boring life style I saw women living in New Canaan, where ambition was squelched by valium, conformity was praised, the pressure to be thin was maintained by diet pills (today, it was recently reported, Fairfield county has the lowest level of obesity in the nation - I wonder about the levels of eating disorders) or the struggle to have a career in a world where women were paid about half of what men made for comparable work.  AND add to the mix Vietnam - a war draining our national moral and sending so many men to untimely deaths ... for what purpose?

But oh the beauty of New Canaan - it's beautiful landscapes and physically beautiful people.  And such good taste that comes with old wealth.  It still is breathtaking to stroll along Elm street and people watch, or run through Waveny park, or drive around and see all the lovely old New England homes (not the newer McMansions), to carol on God's Acre at Christmas.  

I would love to hear what others have to say about  growing up in New Canaan.  How did it  influence you?   I will have more to say about it myself if we get a conversation going.

You comments, Joyce, made me remember a little ditty I used to sing as I skipped along the stone wall that separated our property on Silvermine Road from our neighbors’.  “There must be more, there must be more, there must be more, there must be more.”  Mind you, I lived within the conformity, had to wear the A-line plaid skirt with the matching three-button collared sweater, or the straight skirt with the matching cable sweater, whatever was in style.  I remember my mother asking why I had to be like everyone else, but wasn’t that the ambience of New Canaan (or high school, or that era)?  Hadn’t my grandmother discourage my second grade friendship with Richard Dotson, one of the few black kids in town?

So I sought to find “the more” by moving to NYC after graduating from Connecticut College.  I shared an apartment with a New Canaan friend until I found a place of my own, found a job at Viking Press and ventured forth into the city where anything was, and still is, possible.  I flailed around, of course, but followed my interests into a career that I had always wanted, far preferring my dad’s life of business to my mom’s life of bringing up kids, playing bridge and doing good works for people.  I loved the city and took full advantage of what it had to offer.

I’m not sure when I realized how privileged we were growing up with great kids and excellent schools in such a beautiful town.  I did register people’s positive reaction to my having grown up in New Canaan whenever it was mentioned.  In 2002 my husband Ken and I stopped in on a car trip to Maine and had lunch at the restaurant that has replaced Elmcrest, where we used to sip cherry cokes or vanilla cokes after school.  What a beautiful town!  I grew up here??  It felt distant yet familiar, rich yet isolated, a story of its own.