A New Visit to an Old Memory

Life is sequential; I am not. Nor is this blog.

When I was back in Maine earlier this month I got to spend the night with my family out at my Auntie Kay and Uncle Emil's camp near Casco on aptly named Pleasant Lake. Auntie Kay was my grandmother Dum's closest sister and the two were inseparable. The camp was a major focal point for that side of the family for half a century or more -- my Mom grew up going out there with Dum and her sister, my Aunt Betty. Once we came along, we could go out every once-in-a-while, whenever we made it back to Maine. Both Kay and Emil are gone now, but "Knotty Pines" is still carefully maintained by the next generation; we were very grateful for the chance to go back out and reminisce.

(Thank you, Auntie Sue, Aunt Nancy and Aunt Lyda!)




Not much had changed at all. Of course, it is now a lot smaller than I remembered, but that's always the case as you get older. The pine trees still surround the camp, and the picnic benches are still perfect for a beer and some quiet lakeview philosophizing. The interior still has a dozen pennants lining the stairway to the attic loft - souvenir relics from age-old roadtrips by Kay and Emil and their kids. There's still the giant pinecones hanging over the fireplace, stolen away to Maine years ago from the giant California redwood forests on one of those trips. There's an ageless Bavarian clock in one corner -- it's been there as long as I can remember. And there's the rustic smell of pine and musty, stuffy blankets that never quite clears out after a winter's lockdown.



I love the lake; it is my gold standard when I compare other lakes. It is spring fed and as you swim in it you will find warm spots and icy spots as you go over hot or cold springs feeding it. The water is so clear that you can see the bottom clearly from just about anywhere on the lake. As kids we'd be in the water every second we could extract from our visit.

It's a place rich in memories and I'm glad I got to go back and see it again. I suspect it will be a long time before I'll get to see it again.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Gauchos

Stacy related a story to me tonight about how she quizzed L on her future educational plans. "Where are you going to go to college, L?" she asked her.

"I'm going to go to Buzz-the-Bee college like Daddy," L responded. "N is going to go the Santa Barbara Zoo because that's where Mommy used to live."

Evidently she had already given it some thought.

Frottée Fiasco and Other Misfortunes

I did something today I haven't done in quite a while: I tried painting at home. I am in the very beginning stages of a new project and have only begun to prep the canvas with a thin scrub of burnt sienna, the frottée, as it is called, to define and organize the dark areas from the light. With a frottée I didn't have to worry about mixing colors or pulling out a dozen tubes of paint, and I needed at most a brush or two. I figured the minimal supply list would make things a little more conducive to work at home.

Things went well at first. Stacy sat outside with me while the kids played in the yard a few feet offshore. After a while Stacy got tired and went to lay down. At that point, with the lifeguard away, the kiddie sharks descended en masse. Fingers here, sticks and leaves and other garden paraphernalia there. N wanted to touch everything and unscrew all the knobs on my easel. L was much more supportive and very persistent in her offers to help. "I like painting an awful lot. I could help you! I really could!" Eventually she found my tube of burnt sienna and had the top off, waving it around dangerously. It quickly became clear that even stripped down frottée painting was not going to be feasible.

"OK, I'm done," I said. "This is just too..." I didn't want to voice my frustrations in too accusatory a way, so I let the sentence trail off.

"Tricky?" piped up L. "Is it too tricky? I can help with the tricky parts! I'm very good at tricky things!"

In other news this weekend, N executed what must have been his 108^th face-plant since he took up the hobby of walking. Poor kid has a giant goose-egg dead-center in his sizable forehead.

Not to be outdone, L had her own set of bumps and bruises. Much to my chagrin, she has developed a great affinity of late for The Little Mermaid movie and soundtrack. (I made the mistake of letting them listen to it on our roadtrip a couple of weeks ago.) I rarely see her playing by herself now when she isn't humming "up where they walk, up where they run..." Earlier this morning Stacy happened to watch L unobserved playing in our pantry. She had hauled out our step stool and she was standing at the top of it, her back to Stacy, with her arms held out to her sides dramatically.

Up where they play all day in the sun!
Wish I could be, I want to be...

At this point she backed down the stairs, stopped and made a sudden run back up the steps, throwing her arms back out again tres expressively. The orchestra swelled and the waves crashed across her seaside rocky outcrop as she belted out her grand finale:

A part of your world!

Except that the rock must have had a little seaweed on it because as soon as she had borne her soul to the pounding waves, the stool slipped out from under her and she was plunged to the cold, dark abyss of the pantry room floor.

I wasn't there to see it, but I can imagine Stacy's struggle to console her with a straight face.

In Memoriam

Pauline Edith Lang Given

Sept 1919 - Sept 2008

All my life my siblings and I called our grandmother "Dum." The way my Mom tells it, I wasn't too successful at imitating her in calling her "Mum." Dum never minded; she signed all her birthday cards and Christmas presents that way. Having grown up with it, it seemed perfectly natural to us. Didn't everyone call their grandmother "Dum?"

Dum passed away about three weeks ago. She was 88, a few weeks shy of 89. She lived in Maine all her life. My parents and I moved away when I was just six months old, so most of my memories of her are vacation memories, when either she would come to wherever we were living at the time, or when we would make our celebrated cross-country roadtrips to "Vacationland" (as the state license plates one time wisely proclaimed).

Everyone, I'm sure, has moments of temper and instances of nastiness, but I'm sure I never saw them in Dum. Her adjectives are undeniably "soft" and "gentle." The things I remember most about her were her soft, squishy lips when she gave you kisses, and her soft voice with its mellow Maine accent. In the wrong hands Maine accents can be harsh and grating, but hers was soft and soothing. There was something about her voice that reminds me of a lazy tabby cat. A little tired, a little hoarse, a little shy and reluctant - half purr, half meow. She chuckled slowly as if giving in to outright laughter might attract attention and change the dynamics of what she was enjoying. As kids she would blow bubbles with her gum and let us pop them with our fingers. This could go on for an hour. I can only imagine what the gum was like after dozens of grimy kid-finger pokes. She was steady, dependable, undemonstrative, even retiring. She really loved her grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) - that's something a kid picks up instinctively.

I know it was her time, but I'm so very sad she's gone.

A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Lady

Original source picture.

(Apologies to James Joyce.)

My painting class had a pretty long summer break and when I'm not at class, I don't paint. (Not with all my little "impressionists" running around.) We started back up about two weeks ago and I managed to get a portrait done that I'd been working on for quite a while. The subject is Orania "Cally" Hamilton, a poet and friend of my mothers. I've never met her personally. My Mom mailed me a small black and white photo that I used as the portrait source picture.

Confirmed: That Was Stacy in the Delivery Room!

From time to time my daughter's looks are maligned by comparisons to her father. Try as I might to ignore such slander, I nevertheless occasionally hear people consoling Stacy because it is clear to them that I have two children and she has none. While I think, for better or worse, I've left a considerable genetic mark on the kiddos, I did come across an old photograph of Stacy recently that does lend some credence to the claim that she did have something to do with the begetting of our daughter.

Adåm och Ëve

I've been trying lately to pull each of the kids aside for a little personal time. Tonight after dinner I took L on a "Daddy Walk." I used the time to talk to her about her day and the things Mommy had been teaching her. Evidently today Mommy taught her all about a man named Adam and a woman named Eve and how they disobeyed God when they lived in the Garden of Sweden...

I'm looking forward to our next discussion, probably on how Christ has gone to prepare us our Heavenly Stockholm.

Mold Your Children Before They Mold You

The damage is done. We fought valiantly to save the carpet in the master bedroom after L's little incident with the toilet paper roll, but it wasn't to be. Despite a wet/dry vac, five fans going full bore (Thanks Wayne & Donna!), a couple pounds of baking soda, and Stacy's unending vigil with the hairdryer, the mold and mildew won out. I think at this point the carpets on the Titanic would be more salvageable. I recall forgetting a gymbag with dirty clothes in the trunk of my car out in the hot sun for about a week once; the parallels are striking.

So today after church I spent my day of rest pulling up the carpet and the unspeakably foul padding underneath it. When I was in college I sometimes worked as a volunteer with a group in inner-city Atlanta that gutted old abandoned crack houses in prep for refurbishing them. This afternoon I thought I was on a particularly bad crack flashback. When tearing up putrefied carpet there's just no doing it at arm's length. I need to go soak in boiling water now.

At least now we've got good clean concrete slab under our feet. I'm trying to convince Stacy that it's probably good enough for a year or two...

The Great North Woods

One of Dad's roads on the farm.

My Dad grew up on a dairy farm owned and run by my grandfather Norman in the tiny Northern Maine town of Sherman Station, less than a mile from the Patten town line. Eventually, probably around the time my Dad was in high school, the cows were sold and it was converted over to a potato farm. After college (University of Maine) my Dad moved away and my grandfather didn't want to have to keep up with the potato fields; he changed most of it over to fir tree plantations. Now it is home to several hundred acres of Norwegian Spruce. My Dad bought the farm (literally, not figuratively) from my grandfather when I was five or six, but my grandfather continued to tend it, thinning and trimming, until my Dad retired and he and my Mom moved back up there about ten or eleven years ago. My grandfather has since passed away and now my Dad works the plantations by himself every day weather permitting.

His life and work intrigues and amazes me. Although I consider myself a smart and competent person, I know I would never be able to do what he does. The physical effort alone of felling and cutting and hauling the timber would do me in - trust me, I've worked with him for an hour or two a couple of times and nearly died. But the thing that I know would doom me more than the physical would be my utter lack of what to everyone else up there would be "common man's knowledge." I never cease to be amazed at all the strange and weird nuances of living in such an isolated, harsh, semi-tundra-like climate. My Dad cuts and builds his own roads. He cuts and hauls all his own firewood (anyone with any sense burns wood, not oil, all winter), all my grandmother's firewood, the firewood for the local church and probably for half the widows in the state. He owns and operates huge articulated, Caterpillar-like construction equipment - his bulldozer and "skidder," he calls it. He knows how to run it and maintain it and the hundred things you need to keep in mind so that it runs the next day (or the next season) when you go out to start it. He still manages to break it three or four times a season, but somehow knows how to fix it or get it fixed. He knows the species of every tree on his property, not just his spruce, but the native fir and the few stowaway deciduous. He knows which are ready for cutting and which need a few more years; which are going to start growing badly and should be cut now, and which, if you thin out around them to give them more light, will become mega-valuable trees in another ten years. Granted, he grew up in that environment, and his working career as a paper company chemical engineer kept him closer to it than some jobs might have, but still: how does he know all that? What a ton of micro-specific stuff he has in his head!

4-foot stumpage cut this summer. I learned this year
that this spot used to be called the "Indian Field."

Whenever I go to Maine I always love going out in the woods with him. I'll brave the deerflies and mosquitoes, and depending on the time of year, the knee-deep mud or the freezing temperatures. It's my time to dress up in the flannels or coveralls that all smell like heavy machinery oil. I can wield a chainsaw for 45 minutes (before my arms fall off) and pretend that I could do this for a living if I had to. Of course I couldn't, I know. I'm sure my Dad would have loved it if one of his sons had wanted to take over the farm, but I'm sure he knows that in me, at least, he has a soft city-boy, and has come to accept it. But I still like to pretend, and I think Dad likes it when I go out and admire his handiwork too.

Maine Blueberry Picking

One of L's favorite books is Blueberries for Sal by Maine children's author Robert McCloskey. She loves the story of the little girl Sal who sets off with her mother to go blueberry picking in the Maine countryside, and runs into a mama bear and her cub who had similar plans. She was quite thrilled a couple of weeks back when I was in Maine and told her that I got to go blueberry picking with my Mommy (a.k.a Mimi) just like Sal.

The grandmother on my Dad's side still lives in the old farmhouse my Dad grew up in. In the side field there are 6 or 8 pretty big blueberry bushes, each about 6 feet high. They had produced a bumper crop this year. My Dad told me that just that morning my Uncle George and Aunt Julie and had gone out and made the final harvest of the season - they brought Grammy in around 20 quarts! We swung by "the farm" that evening to see my grandmother and my Dad and I, thinking alike as usual, wanted to go out and see if there were any stragglers. We expected it to be slim pickings (quite literally), but even after the morning's final hurrah, we still found the bushes loaded branch on branch.



These blueberries are cultivated and are large and sweet. The wild Maine blueberries you find all over the woods are usually much smaller and a little tarter, but generally more flavorful and prized. Their size makes them pains to pick. (Poor Sal.) These, however, looked like grape clusters and you could pretty much run your fist down a branch and end up with 20 beautiful berries. And I certainly had no complaints about the flavor - Wow!

There were plenty enough to pick for another pie, but unfortunately we hadn't brought any pails, so we had nothing to carry the berries we picked. We were forced to eat them all right there at the bush. Tragedy, huh?

Hell Hath No Fury...

It started out as a bad day and proceeded steadily to the extreme. I was out of my office at meetings in another building all morning and when I finally got in there was a harried message left on my voicemail. "The kids are being so absolutely horrible that I'm not taking them to the aquarium like I planned today. Wish you were in so you could talk to them." [Read "yell at them"]

A couple hours later I get another call., this time in tears. Unobserved, L had put an entire roll of toilet paper in the master bathroom toilet and flushed, overflowing the toilet bowl. A simultaneous second failure: the flapper in the tank got stuck and didn't drop when the tank emptied, so the water kept on merrily spurting into the tank and on down into the already overflowing bowl. L, not knowing quite what she had done, but understanding it was not going to make anyone very happy with her, she hid in our bedroom without telling anyone. About a half hour later Stacy walked into guest bathroom to find water pouring across the floor, coming from under the wall shared with the master bathroom. The master bath, of course, was submerged, along with most of the master bedroom carpet and a decent amount of the hall several feet away.

Twenty minutes later I get another call saying she had tried to suction up the water with my wet/dry shop vac, but not knowing how to use it, didn't put the water filter in and likely ruined the motor. She reminded me that she had class tonight and that she needed to leave by 6:30.

The next few phone calls were all work people giving me must-do assignments that had to be done by COB ("close of business" for you laymen). The next chance I had to raise my head it was 6:00. I was home by 6:45. The house was damp, but there was a chill in the air I couldn't attribute to the water damage. Stacy left for her class saying that L had dumped the mac & cheese she was planning on having for dinner into a pot of water, ruining it, and that I would have to figure out what to do for dinner myself. The kids hadn't napped, so they needed to be in bed by 7:30.

I took the kids to Costco and we all had hotdogs. We got home at 8:30.

Unfortunately Stacy's car was already there when we got home. Her class had been cancelled, but our email program was on the fritz, so she never got the memo. I was pretty sure the temperature had dropped another few degrees while we were gone.

It's a good thing N thought to pick up these at Costco.

Driving Lessons

I got to take L to her nursery school this morning. On the drive over I got behind another car at a traffic signal. When the light turned green the car sat at the light for a few seconds.

"Come on!" I groaned. Momentarily the car spurted and drove on.

"Daddy, why did you say 'Come on?'" L asked me.

"Because the car in front of me wouldn't move," I answered. "They must have been confused."

I dropped her off, gave her a kiss at the playground, signed her in and walked back out to the car. On a whim, I stopped and went back to the playground fence to see if I could spot her. She was oblivious to Daddy, on a tricycle on the little round cement track with a dozen other kids. One little 3-year-old in front of her seemed to have his trike wheel cocked funny and couldn't get it to move.

"Come on!" I heard floating back to me.

Thoughts at 30,000 ft

(Written Saturday, September 6th.)

There's something about a nighttime plane ride that gets into your head. The world looks different through a porthole; I can't tell whether my thoughts are constrained or focused. Is the cabin slightly over-pressure, keeping my thoughts too close together and irritated, or is it slightly under-pressure, letting them roam more freely? They race back and forth from mellow and contented to choppy and disconnected - mind turbulence.

I'm on a flight to Maine to bury my grandmother.

Northern Maine is a good place for a funeral. It is rugged and careworn. It seems slightly abandoned. Another Scotland - the Outer Hebrides - it appears to live out of pure stubbornness or maybe spite. Or perhaps it's that it realizes it has very few options and the ones it has are pretty stark; it is an old lady in a nursing home. Summer is wrapping up quickly there. Summers in Northern Maine are a furtive and futile recovery, like an addict's pointless plunge into sobriety before the next return of delirious normalcy. Why bother?

I've left Stacy and the kids behind and I miss them tremendously. I think about everything that has gone into getting to the point I'm at now. Not in the immediate sense of the flurry of coordination calls and bite of last minute plane tickets, but in the sense closest to the eternal that we have a frame of reference for - as "long term" as 40 years will buy you. It wouldn't be wise to think about my grandmother now. I think of Stacy and the kids and miss them some more.

It seems that everything has been leading up to this point, almost inevitably. I can't imagine things being significantly different, and memory almost fails me for a time when Stacy and I didn't have two kids, or we weren't married. I can't imagine being alone. Everyone tells me this is the sweet spot and the best time of my life. I'm afraid I believe them. Every phase of life has been a trade up from the one before. Through high school, everyone's pressure relief from the universal horrors of middle school, and college, yet another metamorphosis, I've been carried on a predestined path. As I got to each crossroad in Frost's yellow wood I never had time to consider which was the less travelled; it seemed I was drawn down or the other without much personal volition. But it still has made all the difference. And I wonder: am I now at the peak? It seems to be the pinnacle. I don't see where it can go from here, or rather, the options appear few and stark. Stacy and the kids: Indian summer, a sweet time of beauty and contentment before things get tough again.

We're beginning our initial descent into the Portland area.

World Wide Web (Almost)

I think I know now what's contributing to L's running spate of nightmares. We've had a consistent and persistent visitor to in our backyard for the last several nights. I discovered our orb weaver unexpectedly, up close and personal, a couple nights ago and am pretty confident my life expectancy dropped a year or two in the process. Now that I know she's around, and I know to venture outside each night a little more gingerly, I can take a more distant and studied appreciation of our visitor and admire her handiwork. Her web truly is impressive. She sets to work on it right outside our backdoor shortly after sunset. I've looked for her in the morning; I saw her out in her full web one morning around 6:00am, but when I checked back a half hour later she had vanished along with the entire web.

L on the watch.

Dispite middle-of-the-night screams to the contrary, L doesn't seem the least bit freaked out to watch her work. We sat out on the back stoop for 30 to 40 minutes a couple of nights ago and watched her circle, circle, circle. I got a spray bottle of water and L had tons of fun misting the web so it glowed in our porch light. Not so sure the orb weaver was as entertained.

Sayers Sayings

I'm currently reading a collection of essays by Dorothy L. Sayers called The Whimsical Christian. They are Christian apologetics along the line of C. S. Lewis, and like Lewis, Sayers is exceedingly quotable. Here are some good ones from various essays.

On the nature of sacrifice in "What Do We Believe?":

Ask yourself: if there is something you supremely want to do, do you count as self-sacrifice the difficulties encountered or the other possible activities cast aside? You do not. The time when you deliberately say, "I must sacrifice this, that, or the other" is when you do not supremely desire the end in view. At such times you doing your duty, and that is admirable, but it is not love. But as soon as your duty becomes your love the self-sacrifice is taken for granted, and , whatever the world calls it, you call it so no longer.

On human nature (quoting Lord David Cecil) in "Creed or Chaos?":

As Lord David Cecil has said: "The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us, we still talk of the present 'return to barbarism.' But barbarism is not behind us, it is beneath us."

On the role of recognition in true art, from "Toward a Christian Esthetic":

This recognition of the truth that we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing observing: "Yes, yes, very good, very true--that's just what I'm always saying." I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves within our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.

Special shout out to Troy and Britt for the book turn-on. Good stuff!

"Tragedy" Starts with Tea

This may be my last post; I expect Child Protective Services to be arriving momentarily in their large black helicopters. But it was all an accident, I swear.

It started out as a standard Daddy's-home-and-making-tea kind of morning. L got up and demanded her usual portion. It was a fresh brewed pot and I filled her little sippy-cup about 3/4 full. We were just about out of milk, so she got a dab rather than the usual 50% mix. I added the sugar and went to cap the cup. I couldn't find the little flow restrictor stopper that fits in, so I went without, thinking L is a mature young lady who can handle her drinking. Wish that were the case with Daddy.

As I bring her cup over to her at the table I launch into a paternalistic lecture on the dangers she will soon contend with. "There are two things you need to be aware of," I said. "The first is that the tea is a lot hotter than usual since we didn't have much milk. The second is that there isn't a stopper, so be careful when you drink it."

At that point, standing right over her, I plugged the sipping spout with my thumb and gave the cup its standard sugar-mixing shake. All you physics-inclined folks already know where this is heading, but for those less engineering-geek types, or for those engineering-geek types who tend to do things without thinking, there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when relatively cool air in a cup is suddenly shaken violently with tea that's sitting a mere degree or two from 212. It wants out.

Stacy, who was sitting one seat down, managed to give one of those Janet Leigh/Psycho kind of screams as an explosion of molten tea lava erupted from every seam of the cup and rained down on our daughter. L, on the other hand, had the uberdramatic one second of shocked silence before adding her part to the cacophony. Do you have any idea how long it takes all those writhing bubbles of liquid pain to fall silently to earth once things switch into slow-motion world? I'd say fifteen to twenty minutes.

L was quickly scooped up by Mommy while Daddy was banished from the room in shame. Fortunately L inherited Mommy's mane rather than Daddy's and other than the need for a good shampoo, the damage was minimal. Cold Elmo was called into service nonetheless - that's her Elmo-decorated owwy icepack - and other than Mommy's glare at Daddy, which is, not surprisingly, as cold as the tea was hot, things generally are all resolved. Julie Andrews might have summed it up in a more 60's psychedelic version of the song:

Tea - a drink that scalds your head.
That will bring us back to "Doh! Doh! Doh! Doh!"

Stacy calls this my typical Daddy-guilt post. But Hey! - my thumb was owwy too, you know.

Dramatic reenactment.