[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 6] [Senate] [Pages 7608-7609] [From the U.S. 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 [[Page 7609]] 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. 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.'' ____________________