Pumpkin Pie for Breakfast

          The ecru tablecloth with its green and rust-tinted harvest gourds, the silver-edged china, and the milky old flatware sit on the table today just as they appear in a snapshot from 1967. In that picture, I am looking at the camera—my taped glasses sliding forward on my nose, a couple of lower incisors missing—and laughing, my right hand in a destinationless, joyful flight.

          The holiday feeling remains—the ground just beginning to freeze, the landscape outside the dining room windows opening up like a stage cleared after a performance, and the peculiar, almost sacred silence of a day spent cooking, a day that started very early, one that would stretch late into the night—cigarettes and coffee around the table, the identical alliances, the worn-out optimism.

          Having delivered us to this particular date, the calendar's vocation to organize life, its ruthless regimentation, is dismissed for a few days of eating and farting alone, a blessed amnesia of TV and comfortable clothing, unusually long walks and even more unusual thoughts about books and friends that have been surrendered back to time—and its priorities.

          Piles of dead leaves rotting in the center so aromatically, the chic monochromaticism of the grey sky, the odor of sage from the kitchen, being half drunk at noon—the drive shaft of life's forward momentum broken, abruptly halted, so artfully: the respite of the holidays never changes.

          Headed toward the shortest day, the old year's breaths become shallower, bourne on a silver tray of egg nog. Memories and scents grow indistinguishable in this brightly decorated, gaudy back alley between years. 

          The best of life is still ahead, yet it has been left behind.

          I squirt some Spray 'n Wash on the gravy stains and throw my mother's tablecloth into the washer. It has worked its magic again.

Warm November Afternoon

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.

—Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight

          The beach on the southern shore of Donnell Pond lies like a cresent moon between two mountains, laid between them like a long, bone-colored necklace—just a band of pale sediment at the bottom of a vast, bottle green cup. There is no road in.

          At the summit of the western mountain we ate our sandwiches in the wind. About halfway up, I did a strip tease: sitting on a rock, I peeled off my soaked T-shirt and wished I had worn shorts. We laughed that I might have to finish the hike in my underwear. 

          But I had dressed for a Maine November day and had stopped short of packing a wool scarf. 

          Harold produced from his pack three coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate, and we ate them on the granite, looking down on a misty canopy of ponds and woods, the horizonless bay, and a bog with an abandoned right of way from the Maine Central Railroad cutting through the center like an old wound. I thought, or half-spoke, a prayer.

          On the way down, a thick stand of oaks grew like an orchard on the sheer face of the cliff as if they could break your fall—a hammock of bare branches. Gauging every step on the piles of brown leaves that covered the rock, I was relieved to see the first patch of blue water through the tree trunks. Yet, it never seemed to be nearer, and I remarked to Marie that I believed someone kept moving it further away as we descended. 

          I was on 100 mg of gabapentin a day and not at my best.

          We crossed the little log bridge just before the beach, and through the trees I could hear male laughter. We reached a picnic bench, and I sat down and took out my thermos of tea. My heart was breaking. 

          They were swimming.

Church Picnic

          The first glimpse of the bay from the car is an excitement that cannot be explained.

          Ahead, framed by the pines that line the beach road like a tunnel, the water and the sky are indistinguishable, cocked at an oblique angle to the narrow road like driving down the capital letter V into a sort of shimmering, aquamarine eternity. 

          The ocean, still a mile ahead, is the end of the world.

          But by the time you start looking for parking the illusion has passed. The briquette smoke and screaming children restore the earth's perspective—flatten it again.

          A malevolent stretch of arid, sun-baked weeks had left New England sticky and argumentative. The cumulous clouds floated, each day, rather insipidly in a blue sky that never darkened, never jostled the leaves that, this August, have started falling early.

          No matter how low I get, I always attend the church picnic. And this hangover—still going strong at 1:00—defined low. In my wide-brimmed straw hat and chic sunglasses, I looked like Norma Desmond with distention. I am a bad person, and several people at this picnic know it pretty well.

          I am here to swim.

Summer Baking

          My grandmother's pies were balanced on her kitchen window sills like peach and apricot see-saws. But no cool air was coming in on those July afternoons, in the Pennsylvania of my childhood, with the red brick schoolhouse just across the yard, its old-fashioned bell silent by the time I came along, its gothic windows blocked or foreshortened, its tiny kitchen used for storage.

          Aunt Ada made blueberry pies, Aunt Mame made cherry, but my grandmother only made peach—or a blissfully tart peach and apricot. As I got into my teens, the crusts were always burned and the bottoms sticky and raw. But when I was a child, the extra dough was baked with a little raspberry jam on top. Nothing in my adult life has given me as much pleasure as those fragile, fragrant disks that burned the roof of my mouth because I could not wait.

          My mother was glad to get rid of me in June, and I didn't see her again until August.

          Round steel tins covered in decoupage were stuffed full of icebox cookies—sugar cookies made from refrigerated dough sliced paper thin—and sugar cakes with three raisins ritualistically placed on top that were like biting sand.

          So that I can't separate hot weather from the oven's bounty. I bake involuntarily, compulsively—therapeutically. I'm quite good at it.

          There were no air conditioners or electric fans or smoke alarms in my grandmother's tall house. Gallon glass bottles of milk were left in a dewy silver box at the foot of the back steps, and crusty tablets of bread came out of a truck that idled in the alley. After dark, the farmer's wife delivered butter the color of daffodils—Mrs. Calhoun: why did she always come at night?

          This simpler way of life is layered over the present like a subconscious dress pattern, and its agents are these loaves of bread I put on wire racks to cool. 

          The piano lessons and roadside fruit stands and after-church pot roasts of my childhood summers gather momentum in my memory as I head toward my birthday (I always requested orange sponge cake)—late July, the peonies and iris burned off and nothing but the hardy lilies and milkweed pointing their fingers toward the changeable sky.

          I can hear the low thunder of a storm approaching. The sudden rain spits against the metal shutters but then stops—leaving us with the oppressive heat.

          I punch down a dough that will make good sandwiches by lunchtime.

A Summer of Rain

          I.

          My coffee experiments have led me to the conclusion that the best-tasting coffee is the one you are used to. 

          All the fuss with the French press—warming the carafe, setting my timer for four minutes, depressing the plunger slowly—has suddenly made the K cup taste superficial, its brew a mere electrical function.

          Robot coffee.

          The best life is the one you are used to.

          The life I knew is suddenly gone. A fatality of those clipped living room conversations, brief games of checkers at five o'clock—all my round pieces stacked up beside Gary's lovely wrist. 

          His is narrower than mine, and he would always demonstrate this by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around it. Taller than me, smaller at the waist, he is a man of better proportions. Even after 31 years, his bracelets put me into an agony of desire.

          Christmas after Christmas, my lust was my only gift.

A Short Hike

 Everything comes gradually, at its appointed hour.
—Ovid

          It was 10:30 and high tide was at 2:30. Marie said "If we're off the island by 1:00 we should be OK."
          It turns out she was wrong, and as we crossed the bar back to Bridge Street at noon there was barely a couple of yards of dry gravel and sand between a vastness of water shimmering and bleeding together like the rusty greens and blues of Raku pottery. 

          I screamed into the water eroding our path with the excitement of a boy on a roller coaster. It was a moment of complete abandonment, a pulling off of adulthood like an itchy sweater, and I think Marie approved of it.

          I kept thinking of Rhinehardt Pavilion. It was one of Deale's carefully identified pleasures, in a life of pleasures that included just about everything except reciprocated love—global travel during the young, luxurious era of jets; British spinster penpals; painting classes; cupboards full of Royal Doulton china; and the wealthy, mysterious Vera, of whom I know nothing except that she had a log cabin right on the Union River banks and a persistent, proprietary claim on my uncle that, of course, could not be resolved in any bed.

          The octagonal Madmen-era restaurant was built into the side of what, I suppose, became—further back and higher up—the foot of Cadillac Mountain. Its uninterrupted bank of east-facing windows looked down on the Porcupine Islands and the bar that gave the name to Bar Harbor.

          I can still hear the plates clatter. 

          It would be mid-September, 28 years ago, and I would have had a mattress of blueberry pancakes with—so defining in my life—extra butter. I had only an accordion-folded, Scotch-taped trail map to guide me on my hikes up Sargent Mountain when I was 35. Deale was always photographing me, and now when I look at the pictures they are a museum of my different sneakers and backpacks. Elf slim, I was still living within the envious attention of the older generation, which was to be discontinued, surreptitiously as dropping a magazine subscription, sometime in the charmless uncertainty and puffiness of my late 40s.

          At the summit, I pointed across the bay to the hill. I couldn't see anything, but I knew where it was. Marie said "Oh, I do see a round building! Want to go see it?!" But we didn't.

          I had returned to Maine at 58 to live after my family were all dead. It felt like putting on a dead person's glasses: I walked the same streets, talked to the same people, climbed the same mountains, but everything looked somehow different. I could never decide if the surprising turn of events that brought me back here was fate, or just a gathering of stars in an anonymous constellation.

          When Deale died suddenly in the summer of 2017, I thought my hiking days were through. I put my old maps away with all the brochures—one of them for the Rhinehardt Pavilion—he was constantly handing me. We cleaned out his house and I wept in the car as it headed south, the white pines and little tucked-away lakes blurring by in the passenger door window.

          Maine was a gift life gave back to me, like a benevolent refund, an acknowledgment of the pleasure I took in its coniferous, granite emptiness. Yet even the sweetest relationship diffuses in the airlessness of the present—the vicissitude of a morning after hard drinking, the tiny frowns of disapproval that aggregate in the subconscious, the daily relinquishments of age. The play, even if well-written, seems to drag on.

          We passed no one going back down, as if the small island was ours. Jack Perkins owned it in the 1980s and supposedly found God through simple living—one and a quarter miles from some of the most unaffordable seafood restaurants, day spas, and resorts in the state. The lights alone must have ruined the night sky.

          Our hair whipped as we crossed over, the pools—closer and deeper on either side than half an hour ago—like shellac over the speckled, ovoid granite. 

          And I had my scream—into the jade and cerulean, ineluctable tide.         

The Kitchen on a March Morning

           Outside, the morning sun falls across the driveway in striations of coral on the light blue snow. Inside, the cat is on high alert, staring at a cabinet door. 

          Absurdly loud in the silent house, the tsk! tsk! of the regulator clock measures the heartbeat of a brand new Friday. Everyone is asleep but me.

          And I wonder about the case of my self: was I really extraordinary? Or the opposite: impulsive and selfish—small.

          Mine is a world of superlatives: coffee in the morning and wine at night, concentration and irresponsibility, the sun's warmth on another two inches of snow that fell during the night.

          I work so hard, and then I just don't give a damn.

          So we beat on, boats against the current, and then suddenly with it—a fist clenched then slackened as the blood is drawn. I form resentments then melt them, mourning a mother I despised as a child.

          What other pottery is there to break and repair?—my life a kintsugi of abuses and profligate affections. My heart was always in it until ... it wasn't.

          The kitchen smells like coffee and sleeping dogs.

          I line up my pens and ruler and magnifying glass in a squad across the table. What shall we take the measure of this day? I never struggled with boredom—only control. I contort my handwriting into 90-degree angles and straight lines because my curves are so ugly. The brittle marks please me, marching across the paper like a navy blue hieroglyph.

          Presence and absence, fondness and disregard, the dishes form a strata on the countertop: fossilized mashed potatoes, the purple crust at the bottom of a wine glass, a wooden spoon pointing straight up from the basin like a soldier shot in a trench. 

         Everything is motionless except the sun, high above the garage now, eradicating the shadows. The neighbor's car door verifies that another day is underway.

The Obituary of No One In Particular

          While he was alive, there was always fresh mint and parsley in the house.

          There was tea at 4:00 in tiny blue and white porcelain cups as thin as stationery.

          Little arrangements of shells and pine cones sat here and there. The kitchen sink was below a window that looked out into eternity—as all kitchen windows do.

          The clock was wound when its tenor chime became too melancholy, and in the afternoon he sat on the floor with his dog, trying to learn a few words of its language, never quite finding the right touch.

          His mind had room for a single passion only, so that when he drew, he did not play piano—the beautiful instrument would sit, a silent coffin, for months at a time. So, too, it was with people: he clung to only one at a time, breathing in their self-confidence, believing in them absolutely, as he had believed in God when he was a child. The unbearableness of being a casual friend held no charm for him. Every interaction had to be singular and intimate as a prayer.

          His vices distorted him as a photograph is ruined by sunlight. Something deadlier than age sat below his jawline and behind his eyes. He rose up each morning poisoned by the night before. Sleepless and shaken, he crawled toward the golden light of late afternoon, when the lines began again to rhyme.

          His hands and arms and legs were smaller by a percentage that seemed deliberate, as if he were hobbled together from the pie dough trimmed from around the edges of the pan. His voice was music.

          He cursed God at the drop of a pencil yet always stopped to smell beach roses as if for the first time. He made a caricature of others—rapid and accurate—but could not hold his own in serious conversation.

          Vapid but eloquent, we loved the sob just on the other side of his words.