At the Optometrist’s

          I wrapped both pairs of my glasses up in a dirty blue bandanna. When I got down the hill to the optometrist’s office I just handed the bulky cloth to the lady.
          She relocated here from Washington, too. 
          “What is your age?”
          “I—am—sixty.” I spaced the words out like the granite boulders along the carriage roads in the park.

          “I will be, too, next year!”
          She seemed too old to be living with her parents. She was smiley but unstable—a cat on a bookshelf. I could picture her screaming, easily. But I liked how she said “I love the Maine winters.”
          That's the thing nobody tells you about up here—it only gets better after the tourists leave. Winter is a hardship only in the sense that needlework, or Dostoevsky, is a hardship. Each storm is different from the last one, like the first page of a very good book.
          I was dilated and had to sit for 10 minutes. The doctor told me to relax. He said it twice, as if to make a point. I stared at the striped carpet squares, like giant Neapolitan coconut candies, each turned a different direction from its neighbor. The wall color was under-ripe banana, and the dark vinyl cove molding was like pen underlining done with a ruler. 
          The exam room door was open. I could hear the interviews.
          The first was a young male contact lens client. A lady told him only to wear them for four hours, to lubricate his eyes before a nap, not to shower with them in, never to sleep with them in, absolutely never to rub his eyes with them in (the lens will just absorb certain fats and solvents), and to call if his vision seems worse.
          I had stopped relaxing. I was physically cringing at what this boy would do not to be seen in glasses frames—such an aphrodisiac for me. The powerful eroticism of nerds! Gregory Peck in  “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Gary’s right index finger holding back the pages of a book.
          The next thing I heard was an older man interacting with the doctor.
           “Which is better: A ... or B?”
          I recognized in his replies my own refusal to simplify. After all, my life hadn't been simple. Why should I serve up something cleansed of the difficulty of its birth, finally resolved—thoroughly comprehended, after such struggle, accepted—bluntly binary.
           “B is a little bit better than A, but I wouldn’t say it’s a vast improvement.”
          Good for you!—faceless voice from the next room.
          This moment is now, this rectangular room with its soft yellow orbs of examination equipment lights, and I am the man bringing his glasses to the office in an old bandanna, my blood sugar eroding my retinas, my memories of my mother—younger than me, now.
          Life was a bell curve, and somewhere around 34 or 35—when I was still hiking the mountains in Acadia, still buying things because I was afraid I couldn’t be myself without them, still smoking on the back porch—I started heading back to the x axis.
          It’s a lot of experience. But I’m afraid it doesn’t do much good.
          The doctor came back into the room, and we talked about having my other eye done, and I said “Forget it.”
          “You're lucky it’s overcast—a good day to have your eyes dilated.”
          Jay-walking across Hancock and Elm Street I had to hurry to avoid a fast blue Subaru. I thought, God, it can't be Eleanor—but it was. She flew into her driveway, jumped out of the car and waved at me enthusiastically ... slim and tall like a model, her back still straight, the bones of her face perfect like Katharine Hepburn’s, and her silver hair carefully and tastefully arranged.
          She’s 94.
          I took Elm Street hill slowly. 
          I need to find an excuse to drop in on Eleanor again. She sees things quite clearly.

Night Drive

          When we left Robin's at 9:45 another couple of inches of snow had fallen.
          Earlier, she had looked out the window and said "Guys, I have a guest room upstairs!" We were finishing some peppermint tea, hypnotized by the lusty flames in her Jotul.
          Twice the plow passed in front of her house with its guttural run-on sentences—then disappeared. Her cats were asleep in individual foam beds.
          It would be a long, slow drive home, and leaving—putting our boots on, going out into the weird night—had the quality of a big decision, like divorcing, or quitting a job.
          The last words Robin said, one arm raised and pointing, were "Go that way." But she was standing in front of the door's light and I couldn't make out which arm she had raised.
          I said "That way?" I knew she couldn't mean the shortcut.
          The falling snow was like a thousand muted voices screaming.
          "No!" Now we were like two people in a foreign country, without a common language. "Toward—the—post—office!"
          I couldn't recognize anything in the altered landscape, and we almost missed our turn.
          Out on Route 1, the snow-covered boughs of the Eastern White Pines—crowded up against the edge of the road—all pointed southwest, toward Ellsworth.
           An approaching car was like the flashlights of a couple of boy scouts exploring a mammoth cave, magnified by the corridor of pines, coming from around a bend in the road ahead. After it passed, the ghoulish light of snow was everywhere, coming from nowhere in particular.
          A single electric candle in the front window of a clapboard house threw an ocher rectangle on the lawn in front, and I could feel its sentiment like a single line of poetry, a sentence underlined in a book—a modest, perfectly-timed embrace.
          The sky was low, and the vacant distances, the long views out across the bay, were blue-black holes. The Atlantic ocean was on our left—a deduction, a mere fact—as we drove, on the coast of Maine, in early April.
          

* * *

          I had moved back to the land where my mother had grown up, and, three days before her birthday, again I tried to conjure her at 12. Her memories of Maine were a tiny part of her that hadn't been suffocated by Viceroys and Aqua Net. The nail of her right-hand ring finger, unpaintable, dull, still bore the marks of the apple press—or was it the root cellar door?—from when she was a girl, and there were stories of her father's pig that followed her around the door yard and the body they found under a dock up at Beech Hill Pond. There had been brown bread and finnan haddie and boiled dinner, and any lobster a restaurant dared serve my mother was "crayfish" compared to those of Maine.
          Thus the state entered my early consciousness.
          We made the long car trip up from Pennsylvania two or three times during my childhood, stopping over in Massachusetts for the night. My memories are dim.
          One night the adults left me in the care of my uncle "Fod." He took me in his pick-up down to the riverfront and parked. He pulled a bottle out from underneath the driver's seat and made me promise not to tell Aunt Leah.
          Now I know the woman who owns the big house across the river from that spot, but I didn't know anyone, then—fascinated by the cats that appeared and disappeared through tiny flapped doors in my aunt's kitchen wall, and the tales of my bachelor uncle who had been everywhere in the world. He watched me when I was 10, surmising how unhappy I would become as an adult.
          But now the public buildings of the town, the choked-off road out to an abandoned fairground, and the old houses that squat like piles of driftwood on their overgrown lots keep their secrets. My mother is not here. No one is here anymore. And like an old dinner plate or a keepsake afghan, objects transmogrify into the present, forgetting or denying the past.
          And I am myself, no longer my mother's child.
          A little out of place.

* * *

          It took us an hour to get home from Steuben, and as we walked the dogs the sky was low and opaque—Chekhovian. The trees, outlined in snow, and the tiny houses angled into the drifts composed a funny—but somehow ravishing—diorama. On the sidewalk ahead of me, Gary seemed far away, as if he had passed into another life, leaving me behind.

          Indignantly, I re-read all of Pine Tree Weather's posts to see just how adequately we'd been advised of this storm. The colored bands of the precipitation maps looked like a card of paint chips. 

          But halfway through the report, a couple of sentences struck me as oddly poetic.

Typical with spring along the 45° parallel, there is a constant battle between winter and spring in April, and this year is no different. There is still plenty of cold to the north that is slowly retreating. The higher sun angle and length of daylight will continue to erode at the cold over time. It appears that this will be a slow process.

          I hadn't expected the little shiver down the spine that comes in the presence of great art, and I sat quietly for a few moments in a sort of tribute to the forecaster-poet.

          I located the 45° parallel, tracing it with my eyes across central Maine, exiting just above Grand Manan into the Bay of Fundy.

          It has been a constant battle between winter and spring, between hoping and quitting, between obsession and lassitude. 

          And the snow that came late in the night—like a dreaded phone call, or a birth—fell on the living and the dead alike.

The Shortest Month

          The landscape thaws and refreezes, immortalizing the mailman's boot prints like a snapshot.
          The ground's surface is a dirty meringue, a white sheet thrown over summer memories. We walk like penguins to the car and back. 
          The branches of the lilac quiver in the north wind. Snow tires pull into the driveway with explosions of ice that fail to break the ennui.
          Blinded by scarves, we walk the dogs down the treacherous street on a trickle of macadam. Salt can't touch this stuff, and the iron blade of the ice scraper bounces off it like a basketball.
          Everybody makes their meetings, and the potlucks are jammed. The ladies are playing bunco every week without breaks. All this will pull apart like the heel of a sock this summer, when the tourists come. Our winter empathy—the huddled town itself, the banks and furrows along her sidewalks, the lights in the windows of City Hall at five, the homes with their stacks of firewood peeking out from under cerulean tarps, all this cookie baking—will cool on the first warm weekend of May, and we will become independent again, a little embarrassed by our hardy fellowship, our stockinged feet held up against the Jøtul, the puddles from our boots ruining the hallway floor. 
          Winter is hard.
          And I wonder what will become of my own tenacity and resolve—when I can go outside in just a T-shirt.
          But that seems impossible, now.
          And there's all of March to get through, if only we could start it.

A Success Story

"The less said, the better."

—my mother, to me, September 1997          

          Success in life can be measured by an ability to make oneself important to others. In short, to be loved. As a lifelong outsider to this process, I've marveled at how counter-intuitive it is—you can't want it. In fact, the less we desire anothers' approval, the more it is bestowed. Or so I have observed.
          It's better to be sassy than nice, and if I had children I would encourage them to establish a strong personality and charm the world—be large—rather than long for it, or, worse, live in stunned resentment of its coldness.
          Yet, important things happen to people who are not important, and this is the essence of loneliness, the hardest part of it. To grasp the full force of this is to begin to develop compassion—the sort of compassion that, with time, includes one's own self. When this takes hold, however late in life, there is a thawing of frozen things.
          An important thing has happened to me, and I am feeling lonely because I'm not sure that anyone cares. No one cares because no one knows. No one knows because I am not—especially—important. 
          I'm nice.
          I'm also a black-out alcoholic.

The Cook at the Bantam Cafe

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's
weather to all who can read it. 
—Martha Graham

          

          The day before, I started thinking "They won't have the deviled eggs." They had felt like something capricious on the menu—somebody had simply bought too many eggs that first week of October. 
          My life has prepared me for disappointment, and I snuggle my face into it like a suffocating old sweater. I hypothesize that this gives me character.
          We dropped the dogs off and cantered two doors up to the tiny building, separated from a row of old, three-story brick storefronts and a third their height—like a one-car garage with a gabled roof.
          They have them. 
          Gary said this to me as he might have said, just as gravely, The surgery went well.
          This time, I found myself in a seat facing the kitchen rather than Main Street. 
          We had crossed the frozen, yellow-white Penobscot on the new bridge and followed the marshes up through Frankfort—its Congregational church, post office, and general store huddled together in the bright noontime cold—into Winterport, and the views out the car window not even Andy Wyeth's burnt umber and ultramarine could beautify. It was nothing but desolate, frozen mud along the banks, the dead grasses combed through by the retreating water like the hair of a corpse.

Any Dinnertime

          The music that came in under my bedroom door as a child was Dinah Washington.        
          Drinking again
          And think-ing of when you loved me ...
          My mother would have been sitting out there alone, in coffee-colored knit slacks and a crisp sweater, her loafers under her chair.
          If you listen to Dinah long enough, deeply—intentionally—you hear certain things that are perfect; perfect in a way that we hardly encounter in our lives at all.
          One memorizes the phrases and transitions, and repeats them on the lips, like little religious texts, until they can be sung out—with depressing results but, still, in competent mimicry.
          But here I come back for more,
          Open the door,
          Please—please—please
          Mis-ter Blues.
          Dinah—and my mother—belong to that world of 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute, of hypnotic, slow circles ... a rippled indigo-black lake that reflected the low lights of the living room at night.
          Which found their way under the crack of my door. My bedroom was dark, and I was awake, too, but not in the way my mother was awake, at that moment.

Neighbor Moving

          They had a big black dog and a baby. 
          One morning last summer, when I turned onto Pine Street suddenly they were there, ahead of me, the four of them walking. After that, I never saw them out on the block again, and I never saw them all together again.
          They never spoke to me or nodded Hi, but Gary says they spoke to him a couple of times. 
          On Saturday night, someone told me they sold their house. They had to really drop the price. Sunday morning, as I skipped church again, from my bedroom window I saw their dresser and swivel chairs and coffee table on the tiny front lawn.
          At first I thought it was a yard sale. Then I saw the modest-sized U-Haul backed up the short, steep dirt driveway.
          So, of course, I was suddenly sad.
          I have a heart that breaks inappropriately—an old dishwasher of a heart that jostles the ceramic mugs and glass inside, noisy and inefficient, barking through its cycles and blowing steam.
          I think: Why is the truck so small?
          At Christmas, she hung huge plastic colored balls on the frozen boughs of their lilac. They were there until April. When spring finally came, on Sundays they brought the baby out front, dipping her in and out of the plastic pool like a laughing pink egg roll. The big black lab leaped around the tiny yard, running nowhere, crazy with the freedom, an uncontrollable foal. As they held on to his leash he dragged them up and down the driveway.
          The baby started to scream.
          They were genuine homeowners and they did everything right, but I never got to have small talk with them. 
          I know everyone else on this block.
          What did she want to say with the big Christmas balls on the tree, and the lights in her windows? That she was just happy Christmas was here, or did she wish her neighbors a Merry Christmas? Was she (secretly) expecting someone to drop by with cookies? Did she make too much fudge herself, hoping to give some away? Now I'll never know. She had a wooden daisy, missing half its petals, hanging on the clapboard. It's down, now. Did she love flowers? 
          There's a little bed of chrysanthemums at the foot of the driveway, but it feels like a period at the end of a sentence.  
          The truck is gone but some final things are being loaded into cars. Already the windows have their curtainless stare out toward the street. Boxes appear and are carried away, and a bald man is holding a tiny pet carrier lopsided, like Gary holds pizza boxes. I hear her giving instructions to the men—too loudly, like certain types of girls in high school always spoke.
          From where I sit I hear a motor start, and tires crackle on the gravel, and I have a terrible lump in my throat.
          Why is that truck so small?