Frogger

August 29, 2006

I just walked out to my car in my green robe to check the odometer because I knew I couldn’t write this well without it.
I have 8 things on my todo list today. Todo as in Dorothy’s Dog. Not as in everything because everything is more than 8, in more than an obvious way. 8 musts. I’m hoping to complete 4 of them.
but b4 I do, I’m taking charge. since returning from Maine, and each time I’ve visited the ‘ville in the last six weeks, time has sped up. everything feels saturated and wound like a jack in the box. the way I was is multiplied, rather than the way I’ve (hoped to have) come to be. No te preocupes, I am still the same Brian; there is no new me, I really do mean “way.” My way is more paced, productive, easy, and alone. My way is inklings, and this return is the test. But in my new way there is no failure; every thing is a victory.
If you count my 27-hour round trop to Pocahontas County, West Virgina in late June, I have driven well over 5000 miles this summer. But this story will just be this goal-laden plan, carried out without too much pressure.
Departing on July 14th, I aimed to beat the traffic and I mostly did. First I had to pick up my unknowing partner for my journey/self-reflection/visionquest/summer solace/artist retreat. Spriggy. Spriggy is two years younger than I am. Spriggy is a black cat, and she’s the boss.
Remember, July was not like August. July was a scorcher, and spilled over into the beginnings of August until humidity’s back started breaking again and again, until almost fall chill, swollen in today’s rain, took hold. My car’s air conditioning is broken. My car now has over 205,000 miles on it. Spriggy does not like the heat.
It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her pant and she really doesn’t like her retro-before-it-was-cool-to-be-retro carrying case. I tried to get her to drink water at the first Maine rest stop. She was too mad.
I made it to Turner before dark, and Wally great me, tromping down the hill with welcome. The “hottest day in Maine in two year” left us behind upon entry into the almost frigid barn-converted-into-guesthouse AC. the place was beautiful, if it weren’t the only place I paid to stay this summer, I would’ve felt like I was stealing it. Blue and red walls. Black and white diamond bathroom floor tile. Four beds essentially. Cute, tiny, widescreen, high def TV, but without cable (big rule of the trip). That first night, Wally and Jodi and their best couple friends treated me to amazing dinner (smashed potatoes, succulent chicken breast, sautéed asparagus, and raspberry pie).
highlights.
Emily joined me to visit her alma, Colby, where we saw Bob (my boss Robert Gardner) and poet Ira Sadoff discuss The Impulse To Preserve, Bob’s memoir whose title comes from a Phillip Larkin quote. We got Gifford’s ice cream—all this on the first full day. Sunday was a state park with swimming space and more quiet than I’d had any day from recollect, esp. with company. We read and enjoyed “the outdoors.” But then she left me to me, solito, and Sunday night I finished the music to lyrics I had written in West Virginia. “I don’t need to be more of a man,” #5 in the BDS collection.
Monday I took the canoe out, after braving cold lily pad swim before Emily’s arrival. The Nenziscott River was beeeeeeutiful, and I didn’t see a single sole the whole hours I was out. It’s murky but just the right amount of distant. Tuesday I got myself to run despite a major hill, and later figured out it was three miles—I turned around halfway when faced with another steep climb.
Although no cable and no internet lay on the second floor, and I was able to ignore the freezer full o’ vodka (one of an egregious amount of amenities in this stunning first-summer renov), there were a ton of DVDs sitting, baiting me on the shelf and the aforementioned tiny but sharp TV with a built-in DVD player. oh jesus.
Most of the movies weren’t that great, but this summer I have begun to reappreciate the comedy. There was nothing I needed more than a good laugh in the quasi-wilderness—full on wilderness to alone me—and these films evoked: Failure To Launch (not a misprint), Intermission, and on one of the brief late-summer soirees with city life, Little Miss Sunshine, from which I came bounding out of The Coolidge and up onto elevated sidewalks as if they were in wilderness and I was the kind of the woods. Also, feel good movies sometimes made me feel good. I esp. recommend the Swee dish high school girls in love film Show Me Love.
Sometimes I took naps in Turner and they gave me headaches. Sometimes the bugs got to me shortening reading stints beside the pond. But mostly, five wonderful dogs, all rescued, all different, snuggle next to brightly painted colors and me on wooden Adirondack chairs, and I listened to the diminishing choir of toads, holding on to an illusion of spring. I tackled that second hill twice finding the church in East Hebron, one day casting its shadow out upon a triangle of grass I was trying to claim. Four miles to get there and back. Lungs still pumping, hope simmers.
Day trips to Bates and Bowdoin, to complete the trifecta and nourish my somewhat obsessedness with college architechture, a night in Portland when I for the second time unknowingly crashed a date of a friend when hoping to be on one (WHAAAOOOPS), and one time to Arlington and back for a meeting with the Esther Kingston-Mann New England Center for Inclusive Teaching Student Awards Committee broke up the trip so that when Monday night came, and I for the third time ate dinner at the big house up the small hill, I couldn’t fathom that my first leg was over. This time they had family visiting from Florida, too, and told tales of Floridian and Virginia intense racism. Once, Wally sublet his house in central Virgina to a black family in an all-white neighborhood, and when he came back at the end of the summer, the neighbors sprayed N—– Lover! and other profanities on his car. When he complained to one of his neighbors, a local judge, the judge said, “You shouldn’t be bringin those sorts of people in. Serves you right. This is a nice neighborhood.”
Full of hospitality, and tasting initial triumph, I set off for North Adams to meet up with Moonlight Picnic Excursion 2006. Spriggy, with her usual subtly, crept quietly around the guesthouse, and made the red-blanketed bottom bunk of the kids room her own, but I could tell from out trip up that she wasn’t ready for the stops to come. My now-former roommate, Rachel, reunited with her boyfriend and affianced en route to San Fran, offered kindly to cat-sit the Spriggster until her departure. So I dropped the boss off in Somerville, reunited with her tough love friend yellow lab Max, and sought the Berkshires.