LITERARY SIGNIFICANCE

I cannot remember the first time I visited the historic part of Sudbury that lies along Marlborough's Boston Post Road. Mere miles from my first house, my grandparents and parents often took us to the Grist Mill, Martha-Mary Chapel, and the Redstone School (home of Mary's Little Lamb). We'd shop for candy and toys at the Wayside Country Store and visit the Wayside Inn, one of the oldest and longest running inns in America.

In all of the times I've visited the Wayside Inn, I was always fascinated by the two front rooms where the bar and fireplace were located. These rooms were like shrines, never to be entered. Sometime early on as a toddler, someone must've told me that those rooms were strictly off limits, a directive engrained into my psyche because, even as an adult, I've avoided the sacred rooms.

Recently, I visited again, and, despite the seemingly private event happening, I walked right into the inn, dragging my semi-shocked chaperones with me. One of them ducked into a forbidden room, and we were caught by the bartender. I instantly went into childhood mode and started apologizing. After all, I had been instructed never to enter those rooms . . . hadn't I? Even as an adult, I felt unworthy to enter that portion of the shrine of the Wayside Inn, where famous literary and political Americans had visited and stayed through history since its opening as the How Tavern in the early 1700s. 

The bartender didn't admonish us nor say anything like, "Only guests and paying dinner patrons may enter this sacred room!" Instead, he simply said, "Let me know when you're ready for a drink. I'm happy to serve you."

Wait . . . what? But . . . I'm nobody.

I'm not Washington nor Adams nor Longfellow nor Lafayette. I'm just a semi-proficient writer with a lifelong awe of this place. 

People passed us, people obviously meant to be there, on their way to a private event in a different part of the inn. We snuck into the small front room, rebuilt with many original timbers after a devastating fire in the mid-1900s, and stood in amazement. I'm not sure my companions understood the significance of this for me. My god, I was touching the bar at the Wayside Inn! I was sitting at a table by a fireplace at the Wayside Inn! I was drinking amid the hallowed ground where perhaps several famous Americans also sat and drank.

It was amazingly cool, truly one of the coolest things that I have ever done. And I intend to do it again. Maybe I'll even take my laptop with me and do some writing. Or, perhaps I'll go old-school with paper and pens. It may seem silly and insignificant and even trivial, but to someone whose early roots involved visiting (but never touching) this hallowed ground, the literary significance is palpable.