[Above photo: Coyote ramblings at Pinelands Farm.]
7 March 2022
I am considering buying a condo here. I maintain my cabin on the Island and don’t want to care for two houses. Plus, I can get my dose of Nature there. Each day I walk across Portland to better know the town and its districts. I also walk for exercise. I looked into indoor squash or tennis but it is pretty expensive and not within walking distance, even though I know I’d enjoy it. On my walks I always include at least one hill, generally coming home via Commercial Street and the waterfront. I am in much better shape than I was even a month ago.
Yesterday a woman, perhaps 40yo, and I passed each other. She was on the phone, saying anxiously, “I don’t even know what’s going to happen today or tomorrow.” I wondered to whom she was speaking—-I first imagined a daughter, perhaps because of my own. There was a plea in her sentence—Help! Then I began to think about what she’d said: Was her uncertainty because her interior was so scrambled she couldn’t make sense of Time’s passage? Had poor Judgement led her to erroneous acts? Had Fate whacked her yet another blow? Likely, it was some combination of the 3, although I really can’t tell. I just know that most of us are our own worst enemies. This is not true of anyone in Vladimir Putin’s orbit, of course, when the products of his cruelty and indifference overwhelm all other factors.
Yesterday I discovered at the extreme of my walk a small park, Fort Sumner Park, with several nice benches overlooking Back Cove and the 295 freeway. The park is at the highest elevation in Portland and yet is so flat that snowmelt has created puddles in which a large trout might live happily.
As I descended to the Eastern Promenade, the views of Casco Bay and the islands therein provided an engaging backdrop to the more proximate cannons and fortifications built during our two wars with Britain. Having bombarded and burnt Portland down once, after the development of the batteries the Royal Navy limited their hostilities to less well-defended towns further north along the coast. The Peaks Island ferry was cute from that distance, a toy transecting the Bay with a load of ants and legos.
Dropping down to near sea-level I noticed, for a second time, Micucci’s Italian Grocery. I entered and discovered a large range of Italian gourmet foods. I’d been reading a recipe for bucatini all’ amatriciana. If done well, and it was at Hosteria our go-to Italian in Blantyre, the slurpy, savory dish is addictive. Despite my attempts to order from elsewhere on the Hosteria menu, when push came to shove I always ordered the same thing. The point is, bucatini is not so easy to come by—a long, substantial pasta with a hole in the center. Equally scarce is guanciale, salt-cured pork jowl that vies with the pasta for the dish’s spotlight. Without batting an eyelash—how to bat just one?—the man at the meat counter sliced 6oz for me. This will be my next pasta dish after puttanesca, which I mastered in Yangon, creating it on one occasion for Poker Night.
Walking affords me the opportunity to reflect on life. I recalled, for unknown reason, a trip from Denver to Phoenix during Spring break of my last year in high school. With two friends and a friend of a friend, we planned to go for…. What? Not Spring Training. I have no idea why we were so inclined. It surely seemed foreign and appealing, although it doesn’t today. My ’36 Ford, “The Flower (of the Automotive World)”, wasn’t up to it, with its bald tires, mechanical brakes, and consumption of oil. That Chas and I later drove it to Cambridge from Denver without incident belies my lack of trust. One of my friend’s parents demurred when we wanted to use their car. It wasn’t really up to such a long trip, they said. Translated, they weren’t up to worrying about their car and what 4 teenagers might do to it on such a road trip, understandably. My mother, bless her innocence and generosity, volunteered hers. This was a beast, a new 1957 Ford V-8 with a 4 barrel carburetor which boosted the horsepower to 245. Did I mention that it had a stick shift with overdrive? We were drifting across dirt roads at 110mph on the way down, no guardrail between us and the Green River, 150 feet below. We somehow got there intact, rented a very questionable motel room on the outskirts of Phoenix, and developed our strategy.
The motel had two great advantages, other than price. First, no one asked any questions about our age and consumption of beer. In addition, there were grapefruit trees outside our room yielding the most intoxicating scent day and night. The entire city at that time of Spring smelled like citrus blossoms, which, like the lilacs I later encountered in Cambridge, I still associate with untamed yet unrequited lust. We were stunned that all the front yards were regularly flooded to maintain the grass. It all was very exotic and outside our ken.
I don’t recall where or what we ate. We did manage to fool our way into the Biltmore and the Camelback Inn, fancy places with lovely pools where we could spend the day. We once were lectured in the locker room at the Biltmore by Paul Whiteman, who was famous in the 1920’s and ‘30’s as a bandleader and composer. I don’t recall precisely what he was trying to tell us but it was something about being all washed up. Not letting it happen to us. His day had come and gone. It was 10AM and he was drunk as a lord.
A very attractive, albeit 2 inches taller than me, girl from my high school was in Phoenix with her mother. I asked her out, commandeered the car, and took her to a snazzy nightclub where we had supper and saw Sammy Davis, Jr. I have no idea where I got the money, or nerve, to do that, never having been in a night club previously. There was a certain tension in the air, as there were hints that she had “gone all the way” with someone.
Her older brother abruptly disappeared from high school; he probably had a drug problem or got depressed and made a suicide attempt. But the story circulating was that he masturbated “too much” and was being hospitalized for “an operation”. Jesus, since we all thought we masturbated too much, it was a little terrifying.
After the show we returned to where she and her mother were staying and she slouched down in the seat. Our chemistry wasn’t right and I was likely too anxious so, after some desultory conversation, we said “Good night.”
The only other thing I recall about the trip was driving too fast, again, on a road that was being resurfaced. A manhole protruded 6’ above the dirt and I hit it hard with my left front tire, knocking the wheel so out of alignment that the car shuddered all the way back to Denver and required two new tires and a re-alignment.
The most remarkable part of the trip, other than our survival, was my mother’s behavior. First, in lending us her new car, trusting us to be safe and to take good care of it. Next, after we returned the Ford considerably the worse for wear, she was never critical or inquisitive about how I damaged it. Nor did she ask me to pay for the new tires and the realignment of the front end. She had a kind of generosity of spirit about it, presumably assuming I would learn from the experience and wouldn’t require her to hammer the lessons home. I didn’t inherit that capacity with my children, to my regret. She was correct; I did learn.
It feels strange to purchase $82 worth of groceries at Trader Joe’s, eat 3 squares, sleep undisturbed through the night, and hear wonderful music in my neighborhood—I heard a Celtic father-son duo, a very interesting jazz performance, and a classical menage performed by the Portland Conservatory of Music faculty on each of three consecutive days in the past week.—while millions of Ukrainians are fleeing their country, hiding in cellars and subway tunnels, and fighting a much larger, if less-spirited, Russian army. Men, women and children are dying and the country is being destroyed. In hindsight I wonder if we should have sent US and European troops (not specifically NATO) before the invasion to discourage it. Putin repeatedly said he wasn’t going to invade, so he might have grumbled loudly but wouldn’t have lost much face. It seems that it would have been very risky to the world. But this alternative is assured devastation of a country and a populace. At the very least, we know that our leadership is acting with deliberation and a plan, not arrogantly or impulsively.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 