On a midweek midday in 1978, I was whiling away lunch-hour in the small bookstore in Concord, browsing but not buying due to a dry cashflow. I picked up a volume on a side desk of remainers. Today — the actual today, in the autumn of 2024 — I see penciled on the flap that it set me back $5.95, not Harper’s prohibitive $12.50 list.

“You like E.B. White?” asked the nice woman who handled daytimes.

“I liked Charlotte’s Web.”

“Do you know The New Yorker?”

“Oh, yeah,” I sort of lied. I didn’t want her to think poorly of me.

“Hmm,” she said. “You said you work at a magazine?”

“Yeah, well — a small one. New England-y stuff. Trying.”

“You need that book,” she said, not at all pushily.

I had a tenner and two ones in my jeans so bought "Essays of E.B. White," my first-ever hardback not required by syllabus. A five and a one were left for a burger and pint at the Gaslighter that night. Tomorrow was payday. I would survive.

I won’t say the book changed my life because that’s always trite and never true unless the book is "Don’t Eat the Pufferfish." I did wonder why I might need — need — these essays, so I cracked the book soonest. I twigged to the poetic title “A Slight Sound at Evening” and paged ahead. The lovely phrase wasn’t White’s, as he readily confessed: “In his journal for July 10-12, 1841, Thoreau wrote, ‘A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressively serene and grand.’” Perfect: an essay on Thoreau. I’d grown up in Chelmsford, barely a musket shot from Walden, and was a diehard devotee of our locals — Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, that crowd, particularly Thoreau. In the late 1960s, I’d occasionally take a ritualistic swim in Walden or drive through Carlisle with likeminded buddies to toss a football in the glades of Henry’s sacred dominion rather than on our prosaic field just off Old Westford Road.

In 1954 E.B. White, unaware that I was napping in a crib to the northwest, made a pilgrimage to celebrate Walden’s centenary. He found “serenity and grandeur unimpaired.” White’s essay, which is itself now 70 years old, weaves several themes, one of them the durability of simple truths: “In our uneasy season, when all men unconsciously seek a retreat from a world that has got almost completely out of hand, his house in the Concord woods is a haven.” Everyone needs a haven, then or now. Soon enough after reading White’s words, I drove from New Hampshire’s Concord to Massachusetts’, and there enjoyed a re-read of the essay, plus the “Solitude” chapter of Walden, while leaning against a suitable tree.

I stayed with New Hampshire Profiles magazine through the holidays in 1979 then relocated to New York City where I’d spend four decades at perdurable Time Inc., which today is dust, its famous periodicals dead or scattered on publishing’s fluky breezes. I lived in Greenwich Village where I was delighted to find, during regular hauntings of the mammoth Strand bookstore, second-hand editions of E.B. White books, even unto obscurities: “Talk of the Town” items compiled in Quo Vadimus? (1939), political writings in The Wild Flag (1946). I noticed — just a moment ago — that one of the several Whites I bought at the Strand was signed by the author and another features on its front endpaper a bookplate pasted in, which declares in ornate script, "From the Library of Alan Jay Lerner." Messages in a bottle, set adrift from the shore of a bygone Manhattan Island.

Luci and I married, had a child, had two more and moved to the northern suburbs. Unrelatedly, E.B. White married and moved from New York to a saltwater farm on the Maine coast that would provide setting for dozens of essays and also "Charlotte’s Web," the famous tale of a brave spider and radiant pig that has delighted millions of children and their parents.

Eventually our own kids would move on from Charlotte into their Rowling Years, just as I and my brother had enjoyed our Tolkien Period, trading those Ballantine paperbacks back in the ’60s. That brother still lives in Chelmsford and we visit often. Our sister and her husband live in Wellesley, where they’ve raised two daughters and lots of dogs.

About two decades ago, they bought a family getaway on the Alton shore of Winnipesaukee — “It’ll be great for the kids.” When Luci and I first took our children to visit their cousins at “Aunt Gail’s lake house,” I was happy to find kayaks sunning on Gail’s narrow beach. I took one onto the blue-black surface of the bay. During my paddle I noticed green ski trails on a mountainside across the way. I knew this was Gunstock. My brother and I, ages 9 and 7, had taken our first ski lesson there in the late winter of 1961. Long time ago ...

During a wintertime visit to the lake house in, maybe, 2007 or ’08, all our kids skied their first “real mountain” — good ol’ Gunstock. They gradually worked their way up the Penny Pitou Silver Medal beginners lift to the summit chair. Penny had been a local girl racing for the Laconia High boys’ team before placing second twice at the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. She’d returned home a conquering hero and been importuned by Gunstock to run the ski school. And it was 23-year-old Penny herself, the prettiest person that 7-year-old me had ever seen, who’d taught my brother and me to snowplow. Penny is still alive at 86, still lives right across the lake, bless her heart.

Gail’s husband, Scott, added an elegant flatfish to his Winnipesaukee fleet. The sailboat had been built from a plan drawn by master designer Joel White. This perfect boat — my, she was yar — was named Charlotte, and Joel White’s father was, yes, Elwyn Brooks White, the famous writer of such things as, yes, "Charlotte’s Web." Round and round the world spins, even as it hurtles on.

Truth be admitted, the kids, when young, preferred tubing behind the motorboat to sailing. But, being team players, they occasionally did the Young Kennedys thing and crewed aboard the Charlotte, smiling the while. What wonderful days and nights those were, lullabies by loon. Quoting from another White essay called “Once More to the Lake”: “[T]hose summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving.”

The lake house has come to sprout, here and there, my extra copies of White. A favorite is "E.B. White on Dogs," which was compiled by the author’s granddaughter, because, when our families gather, the lake house takes on four, even five dogs, too. The canines get along as well as the sapiens. I’ve reflected more than once as the cousins (and their parents, and their dogs) have grown older ... I’ve reflected that a house becomes one of The houses in our lives, a place becomes a Place, because of the quality of the activity, not any criteria of location or garage-size. Events are what warm the air and make memories infinitely precious and worth saving. I and my siblings had had The Chelmsford House, still considered such because Santa had known the address, because Mom and Dad had been good parents and because Mom had slow-cooked Thanksgiving turkey overnight to the perfect degree of botulism, infusing all, rooftop-to-cellar, with an aroma that hit us like a linebacker when we returned, frozen fingered and shivering, from the 10 a.m. Chelmsford-Billerica game down the road.

Our kids and Gail’s are young adults now, and have largely flown the nest. Perforce, it’s tougher to assemble all-hands-on-deck beyond Thanksgiving (our house) and Christmas (Gail’s). I go up to Winnipesaukee alone sometimes, or with the dog. This fall I was there for foliage-season hikes with my brother and sister. I mentioned to Gail that the Charlotte wasn’t at anchor. She said, “Scott found the right buyer. Another family will have what we had. Charlotte’s in...”

That second essay I mentioned above, “Once More to the Lake,” recounts White’s revisit to a tarn in Maine where his own father had rented a family camp in 1904. White has returned four decades later with his own young son, who is unnamed but I know was Joel, a lad destined to be an artist with watercraft like his father was with words. Joel would draw plans one day for a boat that would be named Charlotte.

In 1978, in Concord, I appreciated “Once More to the Lake” as an affecting story. I was younger, and didn’t dwell on its themes of aging, families progressing, families making memories — how it is this continuum of memories, traditions and time, things infinitely worth saving, that builds a place and a family.

Just now I re-read White’s parable and was slowed, as if by speed bumps, by this passage and others related to it, all of which described me among our kids, over and over and over again, almost every day we spent at the lake in the years now passed, now past: “Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which I was, the one walking in my pants, the one walking at my side.”

Robert Sullivan spent 40 years with Time Inc. at three magazines: Sports Illustrated, Time and then LIFE. Before that, he worked for the late-and-lamented-by-some-of-us monthly, New Hampshire Profiles, where he was editor in 1978 and '79. He is the author of "Flight of the Reindeer," "A Child’s Christmas in New England" and other books.