Among them were grownups in summer hats, dogs, children sitting cross-legged in the grass, relatives from near Portland (three hours down the coast), and Angell’s stepdaughter, Emma Quaytman. On a sunny Saturday in early August, an ample crowd gathered on the front lawn of the library’s modest white Greek Revival home. One non-routine engagement: According to the chronometer, Angell won’t segue into his second century until September 19th, but various friends of Friend Memorial Public Library, in the center of Brooklin, decided to celebrate early. He recalls a threat from Carol as her death neared: “If you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone I’ll come back and haunt you.” He obliged in the summer of 2014, when he and Moorman married a week or so before he was inducted into the writer’s section of the Baseball Hall of Fame the following winter, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters-a dual distinction uniquely his. Although Angell spent five-plus decades as a fiction editor and is best known for his matchless œuvre of baseball writing, including seven books and scores of blog posts, his most widely read essay for the magazine was “This Old Man,” a ninety-three-year-old’s unflinchingly intimate account of what one discovers, savors, bears, rues, and forgives in the late chapters of a very long-lived life. Next to Carol’s is an identical seventh, a slender marble slab engraved with his own name and birth year, standing by. Scotch-and-water (plenty of ice and a side of cheese, crackers, and olives), in time for the news (usually NBC, always PBS) postprandial Yanks/Mets/Bosox broadcasts and periodic visits to the Brooklin Cemetery, where, in the shade of an expansive oak, six headstones mark the graves of Katharine and Andy White, Roger’s brother Joel White, his daughters Callie and Alice Angell, and his wife of forty-eight years, Carol Rogge Angell (1938-2012). When Angell returned to Brooklin this year, he anticipated observing certain seasonal and quotidian routines: admiring the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta of wooden sailboats morning round trips with his walker to the Center Harbor Yacht Club (“a porch surrounding a Ping-Pong table,” in his description) a 6:30 p.m. Roger Angell Illustration by João Fazenda
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