Memories meet endless connections on the Internet

Cyberspace is a page turner; Memories meet endless connections on the Internet

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

This started out being about Stephen King and his new book, "Duma Key," which I bought at Costco the other day, despite the fact that there's enough horror in the real world so why go looking for more? But I love Stephen King and I was thinking about this, authors you love, books you read that you never forget. "The Stand." "Pet Sematary."

And somehow, who knows why, totally out of the blue, I remembered "Parrish," a 1958 novel about life and love, mostly love, on a Connecticut tobacco farm, which I read when I was 11, under cover of darkness because my mother would have killed me. And which I had to sneak out of Randolph's Turner Free Library between "Lassie Come Home" and "The Bobbsey Twins in the Country" because back then there was no taking out adult books if you were a kid.

For no apparent reason I was fixating on a novel I read back when Eisenhower was president. Why? Did King's book - the jacket colors, the bold print, the lightning bolts - trigger something? Was it Suzanne Pleshette's death a few weeks ago that got the wheels turning? A long shot for sure, but she starred with Troy Donahue in "Rome Adventure" (famous for the hit song "Al Di La'," which was No. 48 on Billboard's Top 100 back in 1962), plus they were married for a while. And he played Parrish in the movie.

Was this the slim connection?

Or was it simply that my synapses are frying and dying one at a time?

I came home and put aside Stephen King to Google "Parrish" just to find out the author's name: Mildred Savage, born June 26, 1919. Graduated from Wellesley College. "Parrish" was her first novel. Thank you, Wikipedia.

And because I was already logged on, I Googled "Parrish the movie" and clicked to a site where people wrote about their memories of the film. No one mentioned the long, detailed chapters about tobacco growing. They wrote about how old they were when they saw the movie (I was 14) and where they were ( Randolph Movie Theater) and who was with them (my best friend, Rosemary) and how they felt (I loved it, Rose didn't) and how beautiful they thought Connie Stevens (I liked her) and Diane McBain (Rose's choice) were.

Movie quotes came up next. "Back home in Boston we don't grow tobacco, we smoke it." (Did Troy Donahue say this?) And "When I get hot, I sleep raw."

Then I Googled "Parrish the novel" and went to Alibris and ordered a used copy for $1.99 plus shipping because by then I was hooked. I had to know if, all these years later, this book would pass the test of time.

Done. The end. Back to Stephen King.

Except there is no end with the Internet. All those links. All those connections to other connections. Endless possibilities.

Mildred Savage led me to John Savage, the actor, who led me to John Saxon, another actor who starred with Sandra Dee in "The Restless Years" (back when "Parrish" was a bestseller), then back to John Savage, who is - who knew? - WBUR-FM's Robin Young's brother.

It was night by then, and I had finally settled in with Stephen King when my daughter called. "Did you know that Margo Howard, Ann Landers's daughter, used to be married to Ken Howard, the actor?" she asked.

I got off the couch and went to the computer and Googled Ken Howard because I didn't know who he was. And all of a sudden I was reading about how Ann Landers won a writing contest and that's how she became an advice columnist. And that she wrote letters to her daughter for many years and that they were collected in "A Life in Letters - Ann Landers' Letters to Her Only Child."

So I ordered this book, too.

Then, may as well, I went to freerice.com, a website that tests vocabulary and donates 20 grams of rice to the United Nations World Food Program for every word a user gets right. It's a challenge. A distraction. An addiction. A time waster. And so much fun.

"Duma Key" is waiting. So I play for just a little while.