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PRINCETON: Spotlight: Happy 100th, Mrs. Lockwood!

    Virginia Chapman Lockwood — teacher, poet, and longtime Princeton resident, known to many as “Ginny”— celebrated her 100th birthday at her home on Sept. 15, an occasion which included the receipt of a letter of birthday greetings from President and Mrs. Barack Obama.
    Virginia was born on Sept. 15, 1910, in Portland, Maine, the daughter of Philip F. Chapman, a prominent local lawyer and banker, and Gladys Doten, a leading figure in Maine’s women’s suffrage movement .While she missed seeing Halley’s Comet by six months in 1910, she did see it in 1986.
    Virginia attended the Waynflete School in Portland, Class of ‘27, playing both basketball and leading roles in dramatic productions, and today remains the school’s oldest living graduate. Following graduation from Wellesley College in 1931, she returned to Portland to teach at Waynflete, during which time she met and subsequently married William W. Lockwood, a young economics instructor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
    The couple eventually moved to New York City, where Mrs. Lockwood began what was to be come a lifelong dedication to teaching children in the primary grades, starting with her first job at the famed Dalton School . She and her husband moved to Princeton in l941, and while he served abroad in the Army during World War II, she raised two boys — William Jr., of Princeton, and Stephen, of McLean, Va. — and became active locally in the League of Women Voters, the YWCA, and the Princeton Group Arts, and even found time to act with the Princeton Community Players.
    After the war, when her husband joined the faculty of Princeton University, Mrs. Lockwood added a daughter — Julia Lockwood Miller of South Freeport, Maine — to the family, and took up teaching third and fourth grades again, starting in 1946, first at Miss Fine’s School and subsequently at the Princeton Day School, following the merger between Miss Fine’s and Princeton Country Day School. She retired in 1969 after 23 consecutive years, having taught more than a generation of Princeton children, many of whom still reside locally and remember her classroom fondly.
    During this time, Mrs. Lockwood continued to be active in the affairs of the Wellesley Club of Central New Jersey and the League of Women Voters (often as moderator of the LWV’s annual Candidates’ Meeting), while traveling frequently abroad with her husband , especially to the Far East, and annually to their summer home in Maine on the shores of Casco Bay.
    Following her husband’s death in 1978, Mrs. Lockwood became an active docent at the Princeton University Art Museum for many years, and took up writing poetry with a passion, becoming a fixture of the U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, which frequently held its monthly meeting at her Jefferson Road residence, where she has lived since 1953.
    Mrs. Lockwood’s verse has appeared in several publications, and she has frequently participated in poetry readings at the Arts Council of Princeton, Barnes & Noble, and other locations. Her family privately published a selection of her work on the occasions of her 80th and 90th birthdays, excerpted below.
THE MILLENNIUM
(as seen from 89 years) 
Like day and night I, too, shall end;
    Meanwhile, each day is mine to spend.
    Each day, impatience flares anew —
    Touch me before I go
    Down to the bones below —
    There’s much to do. 
The slow centuries drag along;
    They exit to a shout, or to a song.
    Each morning swallows up the afternoon.
    I feel the need to stay,
    But cannot slow my pace —
    Nor can the moon. 
I count the days like beads upon a string
    And smiling, tell them over — lingering
    On some — there were a few
    Whose memory recalls a grief
    Or joy that will not die —
    Ripe for review. 
Between the alpha and omega of my years 
    Almost a century has passed — no fears
    Attend this changing of the guard.
    There’ll be no cheering, no apocalypse —
    I’m not afraid — nor should you be.
    Give me your hand to hold —
    It won’t be hard.
— Virginia Chapman Lockwood 
ON LOOKING AT GEESE OVERHEAD
    I don’t care what happens when I’m dead
    If only I could see again
    A skein of geese go wavering overhead. 
    If my flesh becomes thin air,
    Finding a place for viewing will be hard.
    When formless, there’s no such thing as focusing 
    And heaven is as close as my backyard. 
    So I must look my fill of geese today,
    Revel now in their eager calling,
    Shout out my answer to their cry —
    And watch until the last wing’s beating
    Becomes sky.
— Virginia Chapman Lockwood
TWINS 
   I am old all over.
    I wear a coat of Somewhat Slow,
    And wind a scarf of Slightly Bent
    Around my neck when winds blow.
    A thin veil of Indistinct
    Curtains sight and sound.
    My feet are shod with Caution —
    They creep across the ground. 
    But there’s a second person
    Twinned inside of me,
    Dancing and turning cartwheels
    That no one can see.
— Virginia Chapman Lockwood 
CODA
 I suppose I shall just go on
    Flattening empty cereal boxes,
    Feeding the black cat,
    And filing good newspaper photos,
    Until one fine day I’ll come to a full stop.
It’s hard to remember my teaching.
    I was full of missionary zeal,
    Especially for third-graders.
    Thirty falls since retirement
    have drifted away like clouds. 
Now I am growing sentimental.
    ‘MASH’ and its theme song
    Recall evenings  of comfortable marriage — 
    The children asleep, the adults
    Bright-eyed — needing each other.
Certain memories are clear:
    At two, I rode a stuffed bulldog;
    Much later, learned to back-dive;
    Was married holding lilies.
I am alone, but never lonesome —
    I’m snug as a bug in a rug,
    And ready for a long sleep,
    Which will come next.
— Virginia Chapman Lockwood