[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 71 (Thursday, May 1, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3693-S3694]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TRIBUTE TO REEVE LINDBERGH

  Mr. President, Marcelle and I have many wonderful friends in Vermont. 
Some were born in Vermont, and others have come to enjoy our very 
special State. In the latter capacity is our friend Reeve Lindbergh, 
who lives with her husband, Nat Tripp, in Vermont.
  Like her parents, Reeve is a terrific author, and a conversation with 
Reeve is a conversation worth having. You always learn something from 
it, but, more importantly, you always leave with a greater sense of 
what is essential in life. I am extremely proud of her.
  Kevin O'Connor recently wrote a profile of Reeve, which I would like 
to share with my fellow senators. This profile does a good deal to 
capture her essence, and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Rutland Herald, Mar. 30, 2008]

Onward and Upward: Daughter of Legends, Reeve Lindbergh Looks ``Forward 
                              From Here''

                          (By Kevin O'Connor)

       Vermonter Reeve Lindbergh wrote her first memoir about 
     growing up with her father, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and 
     her second memoir about the final months of her mother, 
     author Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Recently turning 60, she began 
     a third memoir--this one about aging. She aimed to leap 
     fearlessly into the future right from its title: ``Forward 
     From Here: Leaving Middle Age--and Other Unexpected 
     Adventures.''
       That's when she found herself pulled every which way by the 
     past.
       First she thought about all the unlisted phone numbers 
     still ringing in her memory--one of many safeguards 
     instituted by her parents after the 1932 kidnapping of her 
     late brother, Charles Jr.
       ``When you are taught to memorize your home phone number 
     and never to reveal it except to close relatives and maybe 
     the family doctor, you don't forget that number.''
       Then she thought about the day in 2001 when, after the 
     death of her mother, she drove from her Northeast Kingdom 
     home to a storage building in Stamford, Conn. There she 
     opened box after box to find her parents' 1929 wedding gifts 
     in their original wrappings. Pausing for lunch at a nearby 
     diner, she glanced at a television to discover, 30 miles 
     south, the smoldering remains of New York City's World Trade 
     Center.
       It was Sept. 11.
       Finally she thought about what her publisher bills as her 
     book's ``shocking surprise.'' Lindbergh long described 
     herself as the youngest of five children. Then in 2003 she 
     learned her late father--the first person to fly solo and 
     nonstop from New York to Paris--later crisscrossed the 
     Atlantic out of a too-literal interest in foreign affairs.
       ``In one essay that is sure to attract much attention, the 
     author writes about her reaction to learning that her father 
     had three families in Europe, a fact that remained a secret 
     for 50 years,'' publicity promises. ``This is the first time 
     any member of the Lindbergh family has discussed in detail 
     their reaction to the controversial and surprising 
     revelation.''
       Lindbergh, angry at her father upon learning the news, now 
     can laugh at such hype. New book in hand, she not only has 
     made peace with all her discordant memories but also arranged 
     them into a mosaic of ``sly, gentle humor'' and ``quiet 
     resolve'' (says Publishers Weekly) that's reassuringly human.
       The modest yet gregarious 5-foot-3 daughter of the 6-foot-3 
     flyer is drawing the attention of Vanity Fair and the New 
     York Times. But the 40-year Vermonter would be just as happy 
     sticking out mud season at home with her husband, her monthly 
     End-of-the-Road Writers Group (named less for its 
     participants than its location) and her menagerie of dogs, 
     chickens and sheep.
       ``I'm not so interested in being confessional, but in what 
     certain experiences are like,'' she says in an interview. 
     ``When you're pretty honest and not too fancy, it seems to 
     help people.''


                           Hippie flatlander

       Lindbergh has long had a thirst for life. Tiny and anemic 
     at birth, she required a pint transfusion of her father's 
     blood. She still remembers her thoughts upon receiving the 
     newly invented polio vaccine as a 1950s schoolchild: ``I'd 
     hope that death would be wiped out by the time I grew up.''
       Alas, mortality remains uncured. So what does aging mean to 
     a 60-year-old woman, wife and mother? Lindbergh put her left 
     hand to yellow-lined paper to pen a series of essays. 
     Reflecting on the present, she found herself rewinding to the 
     past.
       Growing up in a Connecticut suburb where ``tea hour'' led 
     to ``sherry hour,'' Lindbergh nevertheless found her family 
     didn't drink up fame. Her father--a Midwest farm boy who 
     focused on the moment rather than on memories--never talked 
     about his historic 1927 flight. Her mother therefore had to 
     offer reassurance when they watched Jimmy Stewart re-create 
     his grueling 33\1/2\-hour crossing on the movie screen at 
     Radio City Music Hall.
       ``Does he make it?'' his little daughter asked.
       Her father didn't fly to escape the earth, she knows today. 
     As a conservationist, he just wanted a bird's-eye view. With 
     a similar love of the land, she moved to the Green Mountains 
     upon graduating from Radcliffe College in 1968, taking a 
     teaching job in the southern Vermont town of Readsboro before 
     retreating north in 1971 to the countryside outside St. 
     Johnsbury.
       ``The optimists among us thought they were harbingers of a 
     quieter, cleaner, saner way of life on the planet, returning 
     to past customs in order to create a better future,'' she 
     writes. ``Some native Vermonters, especially older ones who 
     had spent their early years on farms without electricity or 
     indoor plumbing and had been chopping, stacking and burning 
     firewood all their lives, smiled good-naturedly and shook 
     their heads.''
       Others just labeled her and her like ``hippie 
     flatlanders.'' Reeve wed a man named Richard, then befriended 
     fellow transplants Nat and Patty. Soon came children, 
     midlife, divorce and a new couple: Reeve and Nat (Tripp, 
     himself an accomplished author). Today the last of the 
     offspring have flown the coop, leaving Lindbergh with a 
     teeming henhouse, sheep barn and sofa for two dogs.
       ``Why not?'' she says of the canine couch. ``Nobody else 
     was using it.''
       Entering the life stage her mother called ``the youth of 
     old age,'' she also faces countless questions.


                           Sixties Generation

       The first: Can a couple of ``hippie homesteaders'' who 
     harvest 600 bales of hay a year get a hot tub?
       Her brain said no. But her achy right shoulder and her 
     husband's bad knee screamed yes.
       What about her view of wrinkles?
       ``When I say I don't mind looking at my face in the mirror 
     anymore, part of the reason may be that I can't see it,'' she 
     writes. ``Maybe I care less now than I did then about how I 
     look to other people, or maybe I know from long experience 
     that most people ignore our imperfections because they are 
     concentrating upon theirs.''
       And drugs?
       ``As I and the other members of this much-publicized 
     `Sixties Generation' go through our own sixties--and 
     seventies and eighties and (we secretly hope) beyond--the 
     least we can do for ourselves is live up to our own mythology 
     and take lots of drugs.''
       (``Legal drugs,'' she clarifies.)
       Lindbergh, seeking to comment on both the salvation and 
     side effects brought by modern-day pharmaceuticals, devotes a 
     full chapter to listing everything in her medicine cabinet, 
     from the anticonvulsants required after falling off a horse 
     to the antidepressants prescribed during the year her mother 
     was dying.
       ``I realize there are people who are embarrassed about the 
     medications they take,'' she says in an interview, ``but it 
     was in no way difficult for me to write about that.''
       Neither does she shy away from the topic of death--not that 
     she has made peace with it. Take the three fuzzy chicks on 
     her property that wandered from their mother and perished.
       ``Even after 30-odd years of country living, with all the 
     dead chicks, dead lambs, dead dogs and dead horses, the 
     hamsters, the rabbits, the lizards and the turtles (not to 
     mention, dear God, the people!), I still get upset about 
     it.''
       Lindbergh writes about the burial of her father, who died 
     of cancer in 1974 at age 72, and the cremation of her mother, 
     who died in 2001 at age 94. The resulting ashes led to a 
     question: ``Where do you put them?''
       Family members scattered them in favorite places around the 
     world--but only after their matriarch, a gardener, first 
     considered a flower bed.
       ``She said it would be so good for the lilies of the 
     valley,'' Reeve Lindbergh reports matter-of-factly.


                            A private matter

       Lindbergh has spent much of this new century wrestling with 
     the old one.
       In 2004, she traveled to the Florida island of Captiva 
     where her mother wrote the 1955 book ``Gift from the Sea.'' 
     In that collection of essays, Anne Morrow Lindbergh found 
     meaning in shells--from the channeled whelk that represents 
     ``the ideal of a simplified life'' to the moon shell that 
     reminded her of solitude.

[[Page S3694]]

       A half-century later, Reeve Lindbergh discovered many of 
     the same shells--as well as discarded plastic cups, drinking 
     straws and cigarette butts. She tucked away the treasures and 
     threw away the trash. But she can't pitch other remnants of 
     her past so easily.
       The kidnapping and death of her parents' first child, 20-
     month-old Charles Jr., topped world news in 1932. Decades 
     later, people still write to say they're her long-lost 
     brother. That's why she was skeptical when, five years ago, 
     the European press claimed her father had affairs with three 
     German women who gave birth to five boys and two girls.
       The headlines proved explosive: ``Lindbergh fathered 
     children by three mistresses.'' Adding fuel, the stories 
     reminded readers that some people had labeled the American 
     hero as a Nazi sympathizer when he opposed the United States' 
     entry into World War II.
       Reeve Lindbergh replied with a public statement still 
     pinned to her bulletin board: ``The Lindbergh family is 
     treating this situation as a private matter, and has taken 
     steps to open personal channels of communication, with 
     sensitivity to all concerned.'' (Today she translates that to 
     mean: ``We don't know any more than you do, but we're trying 
     to figure this out while causing as little pain as 
     possible.'')
       DNA tests proved the reports to be true. In her book, 
     Lindbergh recalls her initial feelings of anger and 
     bitterness.
       ``How do I fold this story into my memories of my father?'' 
     she writes. ``I certainly could have done without his endless 
     lectures on the Population Explosion, with all those graphs 
     and charts on `exponential growth curves' (that's a direct 
     quote). How could he have done this with a straight face, let 
     alone a clear conscience? A man who fathered 13--I think, I 
     still have to stop and count us!''
       Calmer now, she has visited her European siblings and 
     hosted them in Vermont. Meeting one half brother halfway 
     around the world, she shook her head just like he did, all 
     the while silently sharing the same thought: ``This is 
     absolutely normal and completely insane, too.''
       Lindbergh devotes her book's last chapter to her 
     conflicting emotions about her father's secret. (Kirkus 
     Reviews hails it as ``a moving account.'') She didn't plan to 
     write about it so publicly. Then she found reason.
       ``I've noticed how many things there are that people are 
     afraid to talk about,'' she says in an interview. ``If you 
     leave something in the realm of scandal and sensation, it 
     becomes very unreal. I just wanted to write about it and then 
     let it be. I've found, in spite of all the craziness, that my 
     new relatives are just great.''


                              Lucky . . .'

       Life, she has discovered, eventually puts everything in 
     perspective.
       Lindbergh wrote one chapter about clutter in her mind. Ten 
     days later, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It led to 
     surgery--and something equally unexpected.
       ``I soon discovered that the effect the two words `brain 
     tumor' have on people is remarkable: `I'm sorry, I can't help 
     you/be there/send a contribution just now. I have a brain 
     tumor.' Stunned silence, then instant retreat. With these 
     results it's hard to resist taking advantage of the 
     circumstances.''
       Even so, Lindbergh gladly agreed to serve as grand marshal 
     of the annual Lyndonville (village population 1,236) Stars 
     and Stripes Festival parade.
       She isn't the first in her family to face a medical crisis. 
     Her older sister, Thetford writer Anne Spencer Lindbergh, 
     died of cancer 15 years ago at age 53.
       ``I worry less and less, not more and more, about getting 
     old myself,'' Reeve Lindbergh says. ``I don't mind if I do. I 
     wish she could, too.''
       Lindbergh faces a busy spring. She'll serve as narrator 
     next weekend for the Bella Voce Women's Chorus of Vermont 
     premiere of Braintree composer Gwyneth Walker's new work 
     ``Lessons from the Sea,'' inspired by Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 
     ``Gift from the Sea.''
       She'll then appear at more than a dozen New England 
     bookstores as the national media rolls out profiles and 
     reviews. She finds such travel can be exhilarating and 
     exhausting--As a result, she'll no longer attend so many far-
     flung celebrations of her father and instead stay closer to 
     home to read the unpublished writings of her mother.
       ``With a family like mine, you have to be careful not to 
     let history take over too much of your life,'' she says. ``I 
     think I could let other people represent my parents at 
     ceremonies. My mother's work has always struck a spark, 
     especially with women. I would love to see some of that 
     unpublished material out in the world.''
       Leaving middle age, Lindbergh hears the clock ticking. She 
     remembers two framed needlepoint phrases in her grandmother 
     Morrow's home. One said, ``It is later than you think!'' The 
     other said: ``There is still time.''
       ``I don't know what further changes I will enjoy or endure 
     as I age, but I do know the answer to the question I asked 
     myself at 30, and 40, and 50: `How did I get to be this old?' 
     I was lucky.''

                          ____________________