Housesitting in New Jersey: Highlights of My USA Visit

Many readers will know that I enjoy visiting cemeteries and have seen quite a few along my journey. I’ve been to two cemeteries in my current destination and each has had special meaning for me.

The photo (above) is not my mother’s grave; it’s my grandmother’s — my father’s mother — who I never met.

I’m in Eglington Cemetery, Clarksboro, N.J., where I have vague recollections of my father taking me to visit her gravesite when I was young. I wanted to see it.

Ada Hunter Bishop was killed in 1946 at age 44 in an explosion at a government facility in South Jersey where employees were defusing bombs that were no longer needed at the end of WWII.

But one of the bombs exploded on the disassembly line, killing my grandmother and three others. My father, who was in the Army stationed at Staten Island, New York, at the time, was devastated.

My grandfather was a violent alcoholic who my dad fought to protect his beloved mother, who worked hard to provide for him, two sisters, and a cousin who needed a home, all during the worst years of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

My dad rarely talked about his mother’s death. He buried her here, but never the pain of losing her.

The mother of a lifelong friend of mine, Ken Ridinger, a retired chief of police in the town we grew up in, was in the same room doing the same work as my grandmother. Fortunately, Mrs. Ethel Ridinger, a family friend, escaped the blast with minor injuries. She died last year at age 94 and was also buried in Eglington Cemetery.

Ken found local newspaper articles reporting the tragedy that contained numerous errors. For example, my father was not mentioned among the victims’ survivors; the article apparently confused him with an uncle.

The reporting also contained what Ken and I concluded was some serious government denial about the cause of the explosion. They said without investigation that it was caused by a steam boiler in the building.

We talked to a former resident of Paulsboro, now living in Florida, by phone, who was also working in the room where the explosion occurred. Now in her ’90s, with a vividly expressive memory of the tragedy, she said the bombs were supposed to be free of explosive powder before the fuses were removed. But sometimes powder remained in the shells, and smaller, non-lethal bomb explosions had occurred at the plant on occasion before this one.

Mrs. Ethel Ridinger, who died in November 2021 at age 94, recalled that my grandmother and all the other women who were killed were seated at one table beneath a structural beam that collapsed on them.

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Returning to Walt Whitman’s Grave

Nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman’s mausoleum is located in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey, where I was born nearby in Cooper Hospital in 1951.

Harleigh Cemetery is about a 20-minute walk from the home of Maria Tahamont, whose late husband Craig’s memorial service was the reason I returned to the United States last month.

I last visited the Tahamont home in 2020, when I first visited the celebrated bard’s burial site.

Whitman’s epic poem, Leaves of Grass, inspired my journey with its celebration of democracy, love, friendship, and nature.

After five years on the road in 2021, I celebrated my 70th birthday in Tbilisi, Georgia, by getting my first tattoo; it was of Whitman’s words that I had memorialized in ink on my forearm: “Forever alive, Forever forward.”

The photo on the left is me at the gate to the mausoleum; below is the the interior seen through the gate, where a chair and a red-covered copy of Leaves of Grass lie along with pencils and writing paper. On the wall are the names of Whitman family members also entombed in the mausoleum

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Planning for the Journey Ahead

I wasn’t planning to be in New Jersey this long; now I’ll be here a little longer.

I’m really enjoying myself here with such good, long-time friends. My host where I’m currently staying offered to have me housesit for a week or so while she takes a trip to visit relatives and friends in the midwest. I accepted and booked a one-way flight to Buenos Aires on October 13.

The Journey Continues

I’m tentatively planning a few weeks in BA before heading south by bus for Ushuaia (Argentina) and Puerto Arenas (Chile) on the tip of the South American continent.

I’lI be looking for the best way to get to the Antarctica, which in my case would be the cheapest way. But I’ll try hard to make it happen, since it would be the seventh and final continent in my quiver of international achievements.

On my way back, I’ll likely take a slow route through Patagonia, with nowhere particular in mind beyond that. Alhough I am looking forward to being immersed in the Spanish language and culture in South and Central America again.

Meanwhile, I’ll be continuing my memoir-writing project, which is going well, though not as fast as some might like, but fast enough for me.

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