Maine Stories Volume V: The Route Home

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Hurry up and wait. It’s March in Maine, the nadir of my seasonal depression. The landscape is brown and bare, and I am burning for greens and summer. I feel like I’m stuck at the border in Portsmouth, waiting for the drawbridge and hurling oaths at I-95 traffic screaming across the Piscataqua River Bridge to the left. Come ON, let’s GO! Let’s put the top down and cruise! Rt. 1 is calling!

I can see the route in my mind’s eye. I breeze past the outlets in Kittery and crawl along York Beach, between dune grass and hardcore east coast surfers. I stop at the Nubble Light and inhale the warm Atlantic salt air like my life depends on it.

Traffic is stop-and-go through Ogunquit, Wells and Kennebunk, as the invading summer swells from Connecticut and New Jersey gawk and pillage antiques. But I love it: this is the quintessential Maine summer resort stretch. Salt water taffy and ice cream stands, vintage Gulf station signs, bronze weather vanes and lobster buoys for sale. I roll the window down and picture Sandra Dee on every corner.

All the way up, the Atlantic looms on the right, culminating in the magnificent sleaze that is Old Orchard Beach. Equal parts Jersey Shore, Southern California and French Riviera, OOB and Palace Playland are vestiges of past glamour and decay. The ocean is freezing, but the taste of Pier Fries gets me through the most brutal winter.

Industrial boom and bust and boutique renewal tell the tale of Biddeford/Saco and Scarborough. Next stop: Portland. The Forest City is an adventure for another day, though. I’ll be back.

North of Portland I find myself in Brunswick, my home town and home to Bowdoin College and Danny’s Hot Dogs on the mall. From here north, my parents and grandparents are with me. We have all driven these miles countless times, together and apart. They are in my soul and memory bank with every shift of the wheel, and every trip from Portland through Rockland is new and old alike.

Past Brunswick, Rt. 1 curves inland, through Bath and Wiscasset, the self-proclaimed Prettiest Village in Maine. And it just may be. Wiscasset is the home of Red’s Eats, which serves what may be the best Lobster Roll in the world. The lines form early in the morning and the wait can be an hour. Pretty compelling evidence of greatness.

At Rockland/Rockport and Camden, the Atlantic reappears. Rockland was once a rough, hardscrabble town, but it’s coming back. And Camden is white spire and windjammer perfection. One of my favorite towns in the world.

We can continue along the ocean to Bar Harbor and the indescribable beauty of Acadia National Park, and from there all the way to the farthest north of Maine and the Canadian border, but this is the stretch of Rt. 1 I know and love. It starts at the border in Portsmouth, and it ends at home, no matter which exit takes you there. And in between, Maine Rt. 1 will give you enough memories for a lifetime, even in a spring dream.

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Maine Stories Volume II: Slaves to the Meter

We were NOT prepared for life as car owners.

On moving to Portland in 2002, after nine months without a car in Boston, we were gifted a slightly worn white 1996 Hyundai Elantra from my parents. At 100,000 miles plus, our new car was an elderly Maine gentleman, so we named him Chester, because that sounded like the name of an elderly Maine gentleman. Parking for our new ride was not included in our rent, but we were so excited to be home, we figured we’d make due as meter slaves.

State Street is a one-way heading east. Both sides have meters, but for every three meters on the north side, the south side only has one. Often, trying to snag a meter was like trying to get on the last chopper out of Saigon. Many nights we would literally drive in a square for upwards of half an hour, spying for abandoned meters, cars that looked like they might be backing out or people walking in the general direction of a meter.

Wednesday nights meant street-sweeping on the south side, and this meant a mad scramble for north side meters between 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM. This is how we ended up getting towed on our first week in residence. I guess we should have been a bit surprised at landing such a prime meter almost in front of the apartment on the south side. We were even more surprised in the morning when Chester was gone, and we had to take a bus and walk a few miles through some godforsaken industrial park to pay $50 to get him sprung. We thought he looked scared, and he hiccupped a bit when we started him up.

But the height of our virgin-car-ownership brilliance came on Christmas 2002. The day was clear, but overnight brought 12 ½” of fresh snow. Because the City of Portland did not call a Snow Ban, nobody was forced to park in a city garage. We parked on the street as usual. In the morning, poor Chester was buried up to his windows in snow.

Did we have a shovel inside? Nope. We spent three hours of the day after Christmas 2002 digging our car out of four feet of packed snow with a cookie sheet and two expired debit cards.

I choose to look back at this experience and see my native Yankee ingenuity kicking into gear, but it was really my big-city ignorance putting us in a hole of unpreparedness. And now, needless to say, we have a shovel, along with expired debit cards, in the house and in the trunk at all times.

I miss the apartment somewhat, and I greatly miss the neighborhood, the wisteria vine and the proximity to everything that comes with living in town. But I don’t miss the parking situation at all. No man is an island, and this man is no meter slave.

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Maine Stories Volume I: State Street

May 2002: I’m sitting on a plastic lawn chair in the bay window of our new apartment on State St., just off Longfellow Square, in Portland, ME. My fiancé is by me in her lawn chair, and we’re relishing the feeling of escape and liberation. We’re only days removed from leaving Boston, after sharing a borrowed twin bed and a pillow for nine months while a commune of pot-befouled roommates floated in and out like driftwood outside our door. Now we’re in our own place and starting over for ourselves.

The new place is a dream. First floor of a three-story brick building in a row of similar buildings, on a street with brick sidewalks, low wrought-iron fences and flower beds. French doors, 10’ ceilings, crown molding, chandeliers, two gigantic non-working fireplaces and, best of all for a couple of avid bookophiles, the entire wall of the living room is a built-in book case. The decorative flourishes are enough for us to sign the paperwork before we notice the complete lack of storage, camp shower stall, inhumanly cramped kitchen, the stove that blows up when our rental agent turns it on in front of us and the freezer with layers of frost that will require boiling water to begin the thaw and Paleolithic chipping with butter knives. We will notice those things, but not now.

The apartment was obviously once part of an enormous single-family dwelling, and as we sit in our lawn chairs, eating peanut butter sandwiches and cracked pepper kettle chips, with boxes of books strewn across the hardwood, we speculate about the past. Perhaps a sea captain lived here. Perhaps the living room was once the ball room. It’s not an impossible lineage we’ve assigned to our new home: we can certainly feel the presence of a privileged past here.

The windows are open to a warm early summer workday, and the wisteria vine just outside our window is blooming. The smell of the flower mixes with the smell of the sea, mere blocks away, and we are incalculable miles removed from where we were only days ago. We sit in our lawn chairs, shaking our heads at the seismic shifts of our current lives, imagining the past of our building and pondering what’s to come next. Our new life together begins in this magnificent new home in our stately new neighborhood by the Atlantic.

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Hidden Treasure

Image Source: flicker flu

She sways in tempo on the train, subconsciously, unaware of the public display of her private overture. A slight glide to the left as she stands holding a pole, head down, lost in thought. Her head rises, eyes closed, exalting in the crescendo she alone hears. A faint staccato tap against her purse. A pause between movements. A subtle jerk of her elbow, like a violinist, as her inner sonata builds. Her head rolls, her lips faintly counting time, as the music in her mind comes to a grand finale.

She is energized and replenished as crisp peals of applause greet the orchestra in her head. She has given herself the gift of her music, and her commute and her day job and the minutia of life float away. Just for a few moments…just long enough for her to get from home to destination. And then she’s gone and her day continues and she takes the music elsewhere…

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Intersection: Third Movement

Image Source: tanignak.com

It’s funny how two lives can intersect.

I thought I would know Daisy for life. Maybe she thought so too. We were best friends from kindergarten until second grade, and we were inseparable. Birthday parties, roller skating, trading our lunchbox treasures on the playground at recess…we did it all together and believed we always would.

Our parents were friends and both had station wagons – we had a Buick, and they had a Dodge – and sometimes we would take day trips to the lake together. Daisy and I always rode in the way-back, bouncing around without seatbelts, playing Mad-Libs and drinking juice with sticky hands. Sometimes we would just hug and watch the landscape roll by.

Daisy was my best friend, and I never thought I would know life without her. And then one day her family moved away. Just gone on a dime, half-way across the country. I cried every day for a week, and it took a long time before I could play at recess or ride in the way-back again. We exchanged a few letters and talked on the phone a couple of times, but that was it. She was gone and left to my memories.

Thirty years later I found Daisy again, naturally through Facebook. And she was back in town! We immediately friended each other and launched into a passionate catch-up. We had a lot in common: both divorced, no kids, adventures across the states. We were able to speak the language of fulfilled adults while delving back into the feeling of being inseparable kids again.

We met for drinks, and hugged for hours, or so it felt. It was like getting a transfusion of youth through her body. I found myself trembling at her beauty in addition to the nerves about seeing her again after so long. I often dreamed of this moment, and here it was.

We sat down, ordered a round and settled in. And it was…kind of awkward. Stilted conversation, long pauses, not as much common ground as we thought. We ordered another round, and managed to battle through the discomfort, a little bit. But it felt like we were out of synch. Unfamiliar partners dancing at slightly different tempos.

After our third round, I think we both felt the chasm between us. The years between had killed what we were, and there was nothing to go back to.

We hugged again on the way out, but shorter and more detached, and went on our way. We kept in touch through Facebook, but that night was the extent of our grand reunion. I don’t know that I had any thoughts of anything developing. But I’ll always feel off about how undeveloped it all felt.

Two people come together, and it’s like two rivers flowing together. They split apart, then intersect again hundreds of miles south. And then they split apart again.

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Down The Middle

Lesson Number One: the metronome doesn’t care about you.

See that metronome there on the piano, class? It doesn’t give a crap about you! You could be having the worst day of your life, but the metronome doesn’t care. You could be swimming with herpes, but the metronome does not care. Flood, famine, pestilence? The metronome does! Not! Care! Set that thing to 120 beats per minute, and it IS 120 beats per minute. No wavering, no complaining: Just a ruthless, methodical 120 bpm straight down the middle.

Think about this, class! The metronome is one of the great levelers the world has ever known. It is democracy and justice. Balance and symmetry. That metronome doesn’t care if you’re black, white, green, whatever. All it cares about in this world is keeping tempo. It shows you what is and gives you the chance to succeed. And if you can’t keep up, well, that’s on you to keep trying. THAT’S democracy.

What’s great about the metronome is that it will LET you succeed. It will give you all the tools you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get ahead. If you’re struggling with a passage at 160 bpm, you can slow it down and work on that phrasing until you get it nailed, and then speed it up until you get that nailed, and then speed THAT up. Try asking if you can slow down the production line at the factory so you can catch up!

And here’s something really cool: the metronome takes you in between the lines. See, class, rhythm isn’t notes: it’s the spaces in between the notes. The metronome is set, and it offers you the same exact space in between notes, over and over and over again. You can fill and synchronize those spaces all you want, and you’ll have unlimited chances to get it right. Because that metronome isn’t stopping and it isn’t going anywhere.

You will never have a more honest, even-handed friend in your life, class. That metronome right there is pure loyalty. It’s there for you, precisely because it doesn’t care about you.

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At Ease

Image Source: Brian McGuire

I lie in bed in the dark trying to keep up with my hurtling thoughts. My wife sleeps beside me – sweetly, untroubled – backlit by the alarm clock. Occasional footsteps, growing fewer and fewer as the night goes on, rustle outside the window. The room is dark and still, except for the thoughts running away from me.

Can’t sleep…

The tempo of my thoughts is allegro.

FINally my music education pays off! Allegro: fast, quickly and bright. 120-168 beats per minute. Lively.

And WHY CAN’T I SLEEP?!?

The thoughts come fast and quick:

The water bill is due…then the hospital bill is due…MORTgage is due…and what was that RATTLING SOUND in the car?!?

I. Can. Not. SLEEP.

Midnight comes and I run the numbers in my head.

1:00 AM comes and I plan the payoffs. I write a check in my head for the mortgage and cringe. The heating oil truck pulls up in my mind for another delivery and I panic. I see the price at the pump in my thoughts and freak out.

NEED SLEEP!

How the hell did people afford to live before? The economy was so much different in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s…what happened to the middle class?!? WHAT ABOUT US?!?

I think and feel the worst and convince myself that it will never get better.

And then I think of my life and all at once it hits me and I realize that it IS better.

I remember I’m a stable married homeowner with a stable job and a stable life. I realize that we’re handling the expenses of life and we’re not breaking.

I think of where I was a decade ago. Back then I was alone and sleeping on a mattress. Back then I couldn’t imagine not having roommates or not being employed through a temp agency. Back then I was bouncing $300 rent checks and I couldn’t even think of eating out at nice places.

Tonight we had a hell of a nice dinner and talked of our coming vacation at the beach. And we’re making the mortgage and all the bills. I would NOT have been having this conversation back then.

It IS better…

I remember my breathing exercises from therapy, and how much they help. I train myself to slooooooowwwwwwww my breathing – and with it my thoughts – from allegro to adagio.

Ah hah! Adagio: slow and stately (literally, “at ease”). 66-76 beats per minute. Sloooowwww, solemn. Definitive. My music education has paid off!

At ease. At ease I breeeeaaaaattttthhhhhheeeeeeee.

INNNNNhaaaaaaaaling pooositive. Hooooollllllding onnn to pooositive.

DAMN! The phone bill!

EXhaling negative. EXhaling negative. PUSHing out negative. PUSHing out negative.

And my student loan!

INNNNNhaaaaaaaaling pooositive. Hooooollllllding onnn to pooositive.

The bills will be there tomorrow. Let it goooooo tonight…

INNNNNhaaaaaaaaling pooositive. Hooooollllllding onnn to pooositive.

It IS better….

EXhaling negative. EXhaling negative. PUSHing out negative. PUSHing out negative.

NOTHing I can do about it now….so let it goooooooooo….

EXhaling negative. EXhaling negative. PUSHing out negative. PUSHing out negative.

NOTHing I can do about it now….so let it goooooooooo….

Let it gooooooooo and sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

My breathing slooooooows down my brain and body. Caaallllmmmmm and clarity befall the path of my thoughts. And I realize that I’m alllllright.

What can I do about that surprise bill at 2:00 AM? NOTHing. So let it gooooooo.
What can I do about that surprise bill at 9:00 AM? Pay it. And then it’s goooooone.

My thoughts slooowww to an adagio that I can carry about all day. Confident, controlled. At ease.

At. Eeeeaaaaaasssssseeeeeee…

It IS better.

It IS better…

The alarm clock glows 3:00 AM. My wife sleeps on, undisturbed. I exhale. Adagio. I inhale. Adagio.

And then? I sleep.

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Carmine

Image Source: stephendun

The pain wasn’t explosive at first. It was more warm and beckoning. Passionate, even. Much more carmine red than cardinal. It wasn’t until I realized the pain and pulled my finger away from the burner that the hurt burst forth in fierce, angry agony. Lesson learned: the initial contact isn’t nearly as painful as subsequent or repeated contact.

It was the night of the All Star Game, 1982, and I was at my grandparent’s farm making Jiffy Pop for the Midsummer Classic. I was nine, and I remember staring at the orange/red coils and thinking, “what would happen if I put a finger on the burner?”

Not three years earlier, I was at the farm, on the back of our trailer with our Christmas tree, which we had just cut down from our own woods. I was sitting on the back of the trailer, by the right rear tire, while my grandpa drove the tractor and my parents walked behind. I was wearing my moon boots, and I remember staring at the tire and thinking, “what would happen if I put my boot on the tire?”

Broken collarbone.

I remember feeling the thud of hitting the ground, the wind hurtling from my body and a warm ache just under my neck. And then I was screaming and my mom and dad were running for me. Carmine to crimson.

My first sips of beer came from cans thrown away on Jacksonville Beach. You could always find an empty on the beach, and occasionally I would pick one up and take a pull. I showed one to my mom once, and she was horrified.

From there, I went undercover and graduated to sips of Jack at my friend’s parents’ house. These raids reversed the lesson. The first taste was explosive: pure tongue-tingling medicinal fire. But then, once you swallowed, the warmth spread. It was like swallowing the sun and feeling the beams slowly reach all over my body. Crimson to carmine. I liked this carmine.

I liked it a lot.

Most of my life has been spent, I now realize, in search of the inverse carmine. The pain becomes too much and I run for the beckoning warmth. I do it again and again, realizing that the warmth deceives, that warmth is also pain, and will lead to more and escalated pain.

Still, the lure of warmth holds the greatest sway. I seek warmth like the winter sunsets at the farm, and my parents and grandparents and their loving spirits.

Warmth like endless summer days when all I had to worry about was if we’d end up at Pizza Hut or McDonald’s after Tee-ball. Warmth like jumping in the hay in the barn and dreaming about girls and real electric guitars.

Who doesn’t want to be warm and safe?

Who cares that safety is a lie?

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Oxford

Image Source: JPGFOTOS

Between black and white lies subtlety and nuance. Shades of gray and pale, balance and symmetry. Comfort in the margins. I try to straddle the line, to keep my balance in the middle. I have been too low before.

I have known the depths of black. I’ve lived the terror of merely showing up: at school, never knowing when and where the next attack would come from; at social situations, not trusting that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself. I’ve felt the agony that kept me barely functional, sometimes kept me unable to even get out of bed, always left me wondering WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME that I can’t just get past the depression.

I have lived with loss and felt like I was losing it all. I’ve done things I never would have thought I would do just to see if I still felt. I’ve lived hard and wondered if I would make it to advanced age. I’ve lived with the ferocity of the gods and left myself a shell of an existence.

I have seen myself get ahead of myself, spiraling away like eddies on the water. I’ve caught up with myself, and gotten away from myself again. I’ve repeated patterns that should never be repeated.

I have watched my life spin completely out of control and crash into a wall.

And I’ve recovered and found balance. I’ve conquered demons and found peace. I’ve struggled and regained control. I’ve worked to reclaim and rewrite myself. I’ve pulled myself out of the black, and into the gray.

I am in a gray area. Gray suits me well.

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Red

Photo Source: William Eggleston

I was a nervous kid, thus I was a goner every Sunday I punched in under Red Langfield. Nobody I ever worked for made me feel so utterly intimidated. Probably because he wasn’t an obvious sadist. Oh, he was a sadist, alright. But more of a subliminal sadist. Red Langfield never chewed you out, but he didn’t have to: he was in your head every nanosecond of every shift.

The dread would begin every Sunday as I drove to work at the Dilly Dairy. And when I pulled into the parking lot and saw his car, I nearly fainted with terror. Langfield was a full-speed-ahead Naval Academy guy, and his mission every Sunday was to get his platoon of shit-birds wired and ready to take back Omaha Beach. He would get out of his Benz, Wall Street Journal folded smartly under his arm, Rolex flashing in the sun, and assume his position at the door to let us in: ramrod straight, head like a pink bowling ball, prison-issue glasses, every inch of clothes and self perfectly polished, pressed and creased. He would offer a curt, almost-pleasant “good morning” and open the door, and the sweat circles under my arm would start their march for the day.

Langfield never raised his voice, but his tone could peel paint and make the flecks cower. His delivery was pleasant, but extremely cold. Withering cold. I worked register, and just hearing him standing behind me saying, “more FRIES please, thank YOU!” toward the kitchen reduced me to a trembling wreck. A trembling wreck in charge of a cash till. I have no idea how he pulled off such subtle intimidation, but he did, and I wasn’t the only ashen basket case at the end of the day.

The closest I ever got to a full-on reaming came once after the noon rush. I was standing at the register collecting myself, when Red came up to me and said, “DON’T you have some cleaning to do, young MAN?” in that warm-as-permafrost tone of his. Why, yes I did have some cleaning to do, SIR! And so I did, and I subliminally cleaned my room several times a day for a week after that.

Langfield was like a human incarnation of Chinese water torture. One flash of that steely “smile”, one turn of phrase, and the paranoia knocked you to the canvas for a three-count. In retrospect, it seems odd that we would all cower under the gaze of a man who was flush enough to drive a Benz and wear a Rolex, yet was reduced to commanding a shift of degenerate punk teens at a grease-pit called the Dilly Dairy. But that certainly didn’t occur to us at the time.

The restaurant went under years ago, but I still feel my butt-cheeks clench every time I drive by. I’ve heard that they’re going to tear it down and build a bank or something on the spot. Personally, I think they should open a trauma clinic. I’m tempted to learn how to run a bulldozer so I can be the first to have at the destruction. Take THAT, Langfield! BASH!!!

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