Of Ghosts and Mice

31 October 2021

[Above photo:  Sunset from my living room window.]

The weather forecast announced showers today but it has  been brilliantly sunny, blustery, and with a variety of clouds threatening but never leaking.  It called for a bike ride and I layered and set out, riding on bike paths past the Portland waterfront and around Back Bay. It took me 2+ hours of steady riding and provided a good workout. I felt like one of the high school wrestlers who work out in plastic bags before a meet to sweat down to their weight class, though, since I’d over-layered.

I’ve begun to explore maps of the many bike trails in Maine, especially the East Coast Greenway, which leads from Calais at our northern tip to the Florida Keys, over 3000 miles. Some is on byways but much is on abandoned railroad lines, similar to the one I took last weekend with Harold and Connie. These are springing up all over the country. Removing the danger of being eliminated by a passing motor vehicle makes for a much more pleasant ride, even if the former railroad trains would make good sense today.

Back Bay is a large tidal pond with marshlands for nesting shorebirds. Many walkers were out, a few runners, and fewer cyclists. On the next sunny day, I’ll head from S. Portland down the Eastern Trail, which leads through the Scarborough Saltwater Marshes (3000 acres) to Kittery at the New Hampshire border.

I visited my storage space in Bar Harbor once again, staying in an “inn” in town since it wasn’t convenient for me to spend that night at Ari’s home. I finished sorting, took another load to the Blue Hill dump, left my stereo system and some power tools with Ari, and moved everything to a smaller space. Linda created a wonderful lunch for us from her very productive garden and we caught up. Her energy at maintaining a 3 story-plus-full-basement home is a wonder to behold; this climate is tough on homes.  I would have down-sized long ago but she enjoys filling the house with friends and family. Also, she built it, so it must feel like an extension of herself.

I caught two mice in my 4 traps. Overnight I caught another entering into my new storage space. “Poor boundaries.”, I say. “What’s private property?”  they say. I left the new space after setting 8 traps, hoping I can discourage a new crop of mice from homesteading. I doubt that encountering the dead bodies of their cousins will prove much of a deterrent to newcomers, however. I’ll check them over Thanksgiving, as I’ll be visiting Ari and enjoying the fare at the Brooklin Inn, as I did in 2019 before the virus struck.

As well as mice, I came across dozens of journals I’d written and letters I’d sent to my siblings and mother. Two of the latter shocked me. In one I noted to her how uninterested in talking with me she was when I called her on her birthday and on a second occasion. I don’t recall her acknowledging or apologizing. In yet another, I was responding to some explosion on her end that I’d forgotten her at Christmas. I soberly explained that we’d sent her carefully chosen present to my brother’s home, 5 blocks from hers, because we knew she was out of town over the holidays. Then I noted how easily she came to call me “a bum”, “a shit”, and “a fake” at different times. The major surprise to me was that I had completely repressed it all. She once exploded at me that I “looked like a schizophrenic” when she met me at the airport. I was coming to visit from medical school in New York and was wearing Can’t Bust ‘Em overalls, perhaps provocative of me, I’ll grudgingly admit. How my dad put up with this, I don’t know. She was like a mouse trap; a slight disturbance in the field would trigger a disproportionate response by her. It did affect my self-esteem for years but less now that I can recognize it as emanating from her fragile self, quite unrelated to me.  It also helped to explain why my sister-in-law once mentioned that my mother hadn’t treated me very well. I had remained puzzled by that for many years and, I suppose, never wanted to explore her conviction.

With this trove of material—-letters and old writings—I have no external excuse for not resuming the writing of my life story. Internally, I think it still frightens me to approach all those memories. But I’m fortunate that it will stir up dreams which will help me to decipher my submerged struggles.  I also have come across a huge number of slides—-Remember photographic film?  Shortly before the end of my marriage I bought a photo scanner, so I can imagine cold winter days spent reviewing reflections of warmer ones.  The local quality photo shop suggested that rather than purchase a light box, why don’t I just use an old laptop? I tried it. With the brightness at maximal, a Slide Show view of a blank Power Point slide makes a terrific LED light pad!

Off to NYC by train on Friday for a friend’s 80^th.  How quickly we’ve aged!  So has Joe but look at him go, trying to shift the machinery of state to actually help people and the world, rather than just facilitate the unbridled grabs of the wealthy. Silver-tongued old Ronald Reagan certainly was a friend of lower taxation (especially for los ricos) and less government regulation of industry. He did ring up a whopping, for that time, national debt. See where it has gotten us, as the world crisps and the rich-poor gap is wider than ever. Then think of FDR. For a wealthy and patrician fellow, he really helped the Little Guy in so many ways.  Despite their marital struggles, Eleanor was his better angel, I am certain.