In a way, until recently, we lived in the most notable house in Maine. Pretty much no one in the town knew it, but hundreds of thousands of readers watched me bang away on the guts of it, listened to my children bang away at music inside it, and wondered how much aspirin my wife must have taken to put up with the lot of us.
But Alice doesn’t live there anymore, and neither do we. We finished the house, and the kids, so to speak, and sold the old pile for a pile. Regular readers might recall that we liked to travel to Hallowell, Maine, and ride our bicycles on the rail trail that wends along the Kennebec River. Well, the other end of the rail trail was Ogguster, the state capital, and dang if we didn’t move there. It’s the big city for us. It has nearly 19,000 people in it, I think. The metrop. If I was going to be the town drunk, that’s just about the largest size of a place I could handle.
So watch the video from WCVB, and you’ll see the front and back of our new place about forty times. You can’t miss it. Of course I could tell you which place is ours, but where’s the fun in that? Normally, you could look for my sedan chair and bearers waiting outside the door, but I gave them the month off, because it’s February and has been 4 below zero at night. But get this: someone else shovels the snow!
Honestly, I’m not sure how to act anymore. City dwellers!
Ever watch Dr. Zhivago? It’s a David Lean movie. Made all sorts of money. It’s a tale from Russia, with love. The love part was a minor problem back in the day. Lots of critics, who are almost people, but not quite, objected to what they saw as mundane romantic subject matter ladled over titanic upheavals. They didn’t get it. They wanted the movie to be about the Soviet Union, portrayed as either very bad or very good, to taste. Some would have preferred the usual war is bad theme. Yes, deep thoughts there: war is bad. Thanks, I had no idea.
David Lean liked stories about (more or less) regular people caught up in great events, just trying to get by. For a backdrop, Zhivago had the end of WWI for Russia, the founding of the Soviet Union, and a civil war. It’s an excellent example of the old saying,”May you live in interesting times.” That sentiment sounds attractive to some ears. I see a lot of people nowadays wishing for great upheavals, morning, noon and night, because things aren’t going their way, or they are, but not fast enough to suit them. It’s actually a curse, not well-wishes. The Strelnikovs of the world, portrayed here by Tom Courtenay, want to live in interesting times, because big upheavals are the only opportunity they’re going to get to get ahead. They’re just cranks with pamphlets in uninteresting times.
Robert Bolt, about the greatest screenwriter I know of, tried to cut the critics off at the pass with that scene, but they’re up a stump and can’t ever come down. They can’t get it through their heads that trying to live a normal life in abnormal times can not only be commendable, it can be heroic. Movie critics have always had more in common with Strelnikov than Zhivago. They can’t relate to a normal person, even if they happened to meet one, which is highly unlikely.
When the nutters finally get the upper hand, their one, true wish is to extinguish the private life. Everything is political. This makes perfect sense to them, because they’ve suffered from scoliosis of the soul for so long, they don’t even recognize someone standing upright anymore. Or more to the point, they recognize any attempt at normality as a frontal assault on their worldview. On the bus, or under it. And by the way, the bus is full.
There’s a more nuanced explanation of the problem earlier in the film. Zhivago’s half-brother, Yevgraf, is an important secret policeman. Strelnikov is a famous terrorist, and he is admired or feared depending on whose ox you’re currently minding in Minsk. Yevgraf doesn’t do anything spectacular like burning villages for collaboration or just for shiggles or whatever. As Strelnikov says, “The village betrays us, the village is burned. The point is made.” It takes a village is a double-edged sword, apparently.
No, Yevgraf is the real deal. He’s not a would-be commissar on the make like Strelnikov. He’s already part of the big club, and wields a big club in everyone’s affairs. He shows up unexpectedly just as the locals in Moscow are hounding his estranged half-brother, rioting in his living room, and Yevgraf simply has to walk into the room to make his point.
Strelnikov uses his little army to scorch the earth to make a point, which may or may not be pointless, by his own admission. Yevgraf simply snaps his fingers, like a conjurer, and his will is obeyed without even being uttered.
Yevgraf visits with his brother, and listens to his views on the events in Russia. By any regular standards, Yuri Zhivago is a harmless person. Commendable, even. He even professes a bit of admiration for the revolution. Yevgraf comments, in his head by voiceover, that his brother’s enthusiasm for The Party, the only game in town, is subtle, and that is the equivalent of walking around with a noose around your neck in revolutionary Russia. So, to paraphrase The Dude here, Strelnikov isn’t wrong, he’s just an asshole.
Yevgraf advises Yuri to leave the city and live obscurely in the country, in Varykino in the far-flung Urals, and he fixes them up with a pass to do so. He understands that his brother will never be able to stay alive in a milieu where every act and utterance, no matter how mundane, is a political football. His brother is a poet. Ambiguity is his business. Hell, in that atmosphere, even doing or saying nothing is a political act. Any of this sound familiar yet?
The author of the novel that the Zhivago movie is based on, Boris Pasternak, knew what he was talking about. He was Russian intellectual who refused to leave the country, no matter how bad it got. He was 27 years old in 1917, so he had a front-row seat for all the fun. He was a poet with a convoluted love life, just like Zhivago, despite a fairly close resemblance to Lurch the butler. And he tried, somewhat successfully, to just live in a world where that was made pretty hard indeed. Pasternak’s real-life version of a finger-snapping savior might have been Joe Stalin himself, who reportedly crossed his name off a list of people to be executed with the remark, “Do not touch this cloud dweller.”
It’s funny, but the critics got the world exactly backwards, like they mostly do. How you order your private life is a profoundly political act. Hell, in a world where everything is political, just living life on your own terms is a revolutionary act. You can say, “The private life is dead, for a man, with any manhood,” and make me listen to you at gunpoint. But you can’t make me cooperate.
My family has long since moved to our own Varykino. And what have I been doing there? Just living, and the living’s not easy. But I’ve got one thing going for me that Boris Pasternak, and his creation, Dr. Zhivago would have been wise to emulate. I’ve completely avoided the library in Yuriatin.
I live in Maine, if you call that living, and I’m here to testify that Maine is just like you see in the video. Why, lighthouses are thick on the ground, I tell you what. We were thinking of just stringing the telephone wires from one to the next instead of using those dang poles, but we got so many trees we decided to go the redundant route. Maine’s a redundant place. We got two of everything. We don’t have three of anything, though.
All the trees are always turning color like that, too. All the time. Everywhere. Why, you can just walk up to any old maple tree and turn the handy spigot that Maine installs on them and syrup flows right out of it. They issue pancakes to travelers at the Hampton toll plaza on Route 95 instead of receipts. True story.
The entire state is oceanside, just like in the video. There are rumors of some vast, undiscovered bogs or swamps or mountains or something out west, but no one would ever go there and find out. LL Bean is in Freeport, hard by the Atlantic, and you’re not allowed to be in Maine more than an hour’s drive from there. If we had police, they’d check. Bean’s used to have catalogs filled with shotguns and fishing poles, but now they only sell banana hammock bathing suits for Canadians that go to Old Orchard Beach and think it’s the Riviera, and button-down men’s shirts for ladies to wear.
The State of Maine has various slogans. They used to call it Vacationland, but Mainers couldn’t help themselves, and got to reading the Vacationland billboards while driving to work in the office park in Westbrook, and forgot the signs were for people “From away.” That’s the charming soubriquet Mainers use when they want to call someone a Masshole, but the guy hasn’t paid his bill yet. Anyway, everyone in Maine went to Disneyworld at the same time, on the same bus, and there was no one left in Maine to direct the tourists from Massachusetts to the best places to icefish in June, or where to find all the huggable bull mooses in rutting season, or how to properly approach a black bear cub. Note: Always get between Mama bear and Baby bear. They love that.
“Maine: The Way Life Should Be,” was another one. It was less of an overt threat than New Hampshire’s motto, it’s true, but it left too much room for rumination on its meaning. I haven’t been to New Hampshire in a while, but if memory serves, their slogan is “Live Free, Or Else,” or something to that effect. Maine’s sounds friendlier, but its ambiguity rankles some. It’s never wise to get the tourists thinking. It smacked a bit of “Your life is bad, and you should feel bad, and we’re here to tell you so.”
Well, I’m sorry, but your life is bad, and you should feel bad. You should totally move to Maine. The clouds here move, and the tide goes in an out, and we’ve got so many goddamn lighthouses we use them for traffic lights and fenceposts and fire hydrants, and when all else fails, we string clotheslines between ’em. Now if you flatlander Philistines will excuse me, my wife is almost done chipping the ice off the well, and coffee break generally follows soon after that.
The Maine Craigslist isn’t a collection of items for sale. It’s a happening. A cultural phenomenon. It is an encyclopedia of hopes and dreams. It’s Maine, so the hopes and dreams don’t cover a lot of ground. It’s understandable. The ground isn’t entirely frozen any more, so it’s harder to cover a lot of ground this time of year. It’s kinda squishy, and will capture the odd Bean boot if you move too quickly.
Maine’s a big place, geographically speaking. It’s about the size of Ireland. It’s entirely bereft of blarney, however. Mainers are incapable of projecting the false front of bonhomie that blarney requires. They are bereft of whimsy. This Maine Craigslist Cultural Encyclopedia is a great example of the heartfelt sincerity of the place. There is nothing ironic in the Maine Craigslist. Or more accurately, there is nothing deliberately ironic. It’s refreshing to live in a place where you are what you is, as they say.
So please — no mockery. These people are in dead earnest, and deserve, if not respect, at least a hand in front of your mouth while you giggle.
It’s a Kim size mattress. Kim’s pretty big by the looks of it. Not washing with a rag on a stick big. More like shopping at Marden’s on a hoverround big.
Maine people are kind to one another. It’s nice to see plain affection stated publicly once in a while. It refreshes the senses. It’s nice to know that somewhere in Arundel, Kim’s beloved wanted the whole world to know that she’s older, but still comfy. Hallmark’s got nothing on that guy, I tell you what.
Don’t you hate it when your boyfriend has eczema, and you don’t, and you wear out the pleather couch unevenly?
People seem to think Stephen King is a good writer. I don’t. I don’t even think he’s a writer. He just lives in Maine, looks out the window from time to time, and writes it down. That’s not writing. That’s typing.
This Craiglist poster must be “from away,” as Mainers so charmingly refer to anybody that wasn’t born in Maine. What gives it away, you ask? The description. That’s no way to appeal to a Maine connoisseur. An Augusta aesthete. An Edgecomb epicure. A Bowdoinham bon vivant. That unique selling proposition isn’t going to fly with a local. You’ve gotta put in some features and benefits if you want to sell a thing like that in Maine. He tried to pull it out at the end by lying and calling himself “Skip” to sound like a normal person, but any true Mainer can see through a flatlander ruse like that in an Umbagog heartbeat. He shoulda tried something like:
Louise Nevelson sculpture for sale. Wood with black paint. Will burn pretty fair in a stove during shoulder season. Black paint ignites well. BONUS! You’ll be able to salvage a perfectly good doorknob from the ashes. No swaps.
And I believe I’m Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg. As the immortal bard, Steve Perry, once wrote, “Don’t stop believing.” And I am dead certain that this guy had Journey blasting the whole time he was painting this.
[This video is dedicated to Kathleen Murphy, whose support of our boys is as constant as the sun]
If you’re new in these parts, Unorganized Hancock is an Intergalactabilly Band from Maine. If you’re a regular reader, well, Unorganized Hancock is still an Intergalactabilly Band from Maine. The band consists entirely of my two sons, a plywood bass player named Laverne, and a whole lot of gumption. I call them The Heir and The Spare. Sunshine and Ravioli. Garlic and Gaelic.
This video is fresh off the assembly line, but they recorded Go, Go, Go! sometime in 2015, I think, when The Heir was hey nineteen, and the The Spare was eleven years old. The Heir sings and plays the guitar, bass, and keyboards, and The Spare plays the drums and tells jokes.
It’s a song about gumption, as I said.
gumption
[guhmp-shuh n]
noun, Informal.
1.
initiative; aggressiveness; resourcefulness:
With his gumption he’ll make a success of himself.
2.
courage; spunk; guts:
It takes gumption to quit a high-paying job.
3.
common sense; shrewdness.
My kids have gumption, and recognize it when they see it, hence the video, but that dictionary definition is way off. It takes gumption to quit a high-paying job? That’s like telling me it takes gumption to rope and brand a Sasquatch. Let’s stick to the possibles, as the cowboys used to say. It takes gumption to keep working for peanuts. It takes gumption to keep going when it’s hard, not to quit when it’s easy.
The Heir and the Spare know all about that. They recorded this song in an attic room without heat or electricity. They dutifully dragged an extension cord down the hall whenever they wanted to play. That’s gumption.
What’s Unorganized Hancock Up To Now?
Stay with me, and I’ll explain. In 2015, the boys entered a contest to write and perform the fight song for the local minor-league hockey team, the Lewiston-Auburn Fighting Spirit. The couple who own and operate the team are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. It’s hard to run a semi-pro hockey team in an out of the way place. It takes gumption.
The contest was promoted by the local radio station, Z-105. They’re in Auburn, Maine. They have an affiliated station called WOXO, too, which broadcasts from Mexico, Maine, just over the river from where we live. They also have a studio in Norway. Norway? Mexico? Maine’s funky, isn’t it? It takes gumption to live here.
The children were interviewed on the radio station as part of the promotion. I was amazed by the people that own and operate that company. It’s nearly impossible to make a go of it in the radio business in this day and age. They manage it while being pleasant to everyone. That’s impossible, I know, but they do it all the same. They have gumption.
The universe still rewards gumption from time to time. My kids won the contest with another song they wrote called Spirit Score!. The hockey team loved it. They were all 19 years old or so, and wonderful young men. They treated The Spare Heir like a little brother, and made him feel ten feet tall. One of the greatest moments in my life was standing in the concrete runway between the rows of seats in the Lewiston Colisee and hearing Spirit Score! blaring over the PA system when the team skated out onto the ice, and again every time they scored. They scored a lot. That team has gumption.
Unorganized Hancock signed a contract to have the song played for one year at the rink, to make it all legal. The following year, the team had another band write another fight song. The hockey team refused to play unless the old fight song was restored. It was. That took gumption.
Which Leads Us To
My boys were interviewed on Z-105 a few more times after that. The station noticed that The Heir had a sonorous voice, and he had the kind of aplomb that radio hosts need. They hired him. He’s now on the air six hours a night, five nights a week. He sometimes hosts call-in shows on the weekends, too. That takes gumption.
The radio job was too far away from our home for him to drive back and forth, so we lost him to the world. It’s a hard thing to raise your children to leave you. It takes gumption, and breaks your heart a bit.
The Unorganized Hancock YouTube page recently passed 100,000 views, a notable milestone for them, I thought. Their performance of Minor Swing has over 25,000 views, although their live version of the song is, er, livelier. But Go, Go, Go! is their own thing. It encapsulates their approach to life. They have gumption. I hope the Go, Go, Go! video helps to Give America Gumption Again.
Say, that’s a cool slogan. We should make hats.
You can download an MP3 of Go Go Go! at their Bandcamp page for 99 cents if you like:
Of course you’re welcome to listen to it for free by hitting play on the YouTube video, too. Unorganized Hancock just wants to get a little more gumption out in the world, and doesn’t care how it happens.
[Update: Many thanks to Michael K. for leaving a big fat tip on the boys’ Bandcamp page. It is very much appreciated]
[Update: Many thanks to Kevin S. for leaving a tip on the boys’ Bandcamp page. It is much appreciated]
[Additional Update: Many thanks to longtime friend Dinah H. for her generous contribution to the PayPal tipjar. It is very much appreciated]
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. –Marcus Aurelius
Kind of amusing to see an argument over who’s to blame for a snowstorm that didn’t happen. The idea that you were promised bad weather, and it didn’t arrive, so you have been put upon, is comic when considered dispassionately. Then again, I’ve seen the internet. No one on the internet is dispassionate. Some start out pretty fair, but eventually out pops the cloven hoof.
It’s especially piquant to see arguments about a snowstorm that didn’t happen when you know for a dead cert it did happen. The wind blew 50 MPH, which made it hard to measure what fell. It was somewhere between sixteen inches and two feet at my house in western Maine. When sixteen inches of densely packed snow is delivered at Jimmy-Carter-era highway speeds, you notice.
For the first time since I’ve lived here in Maine, I had to begin shoveling snow while I was still standing inside my foyer. I opened the front door, and there was six inches of snow against it, even though the door lives beneath an eight foot overhang. It took a little while to simply shovel my way to a place where the crystal blue sky was above me. That was unusual.
Blizzards are funny. Like city dwellers, blizzards just put snow anywhere they like, without a care for the neighbors. There was no snow on my roof to speak of, because the wind blew so hard that it couldn’t linger in the open. On one side of the car, you could walk up to it and open the door. On the leeward side, the snow was level with the roof. The blizzard had a sense of humor, and it filled in all the slit trenches I’d dug in the snow that came before. Snow likes equanimity.
Where my driveway met the road, the snow was up to my chest. It was compact stuff, too, and it required you to stand in one place for a long time and throw the snow some distance to make headway. It was honest work, and I didn’t mind it. One chews a mental cud during such exertions. I wondered what frame of mind would make people angry about a storm that didn’t come. I wondered more about anger about a storm that did come, but you denied its existence.
My countrymen live in an interesting world. This world is not real. They did not say that the storm did not come to them in their concrete dovecotes. They said that the storm did not exist because it did not happen to them, and meant it. More to the fact, they said the storm did not happen because it did not happen in the imaginary world they inhabit, composed solely of the media they consume.
I am not real to those people, because I am not on television. They have joined an Amway of the mind. They sell their worthless factual surfactants only to each other. Eventually, when that doesn’t work, they end up selling their intellectual soap to themselves, but still think they’re going to get rich on selfie commissions.
Every once in a while, they’ll invite someone who looks impressionable to join their little covens, but for the most part, it’s a closed shop. You do not exist because you do not buy their soap, and sell it back to them in return.
[Editor’s Note: Originally offered three years ago. We don’t burn firewood any more. Using our firewood furnace with our neglected, unlined chimney was a form of Russian Roulette, but you do what you have to do sometimes to get by. We also got tired of freezing half to death every time I fell asleep for more than three hours at a stretch. We burn wood pellets now, and the Spare Heir follows in the Heir’s footsteps by carrying the bags up the stairs]
Winter came like a postcard a long time ago. The snow drifted down in slow motion, the big, fat flakes parachuting in and accumulating gently on the frosted earth. There was a lot, all at once, and in the morning the birdhouse wore a pope’s hat, and the birdbath was a cheesecake. The sun shone and the trees wore their coat of flakes like ermine.
Then the rain came. It turned the pope’s hat to a drunkard’s fedora, and the cheesecake to a dog’s breakfast. It came down mechanically, at an angle that could be measured anywhere along its route, as methodical as a secret policeman; the icicles on the eaves turned from a little fringe to dragon’s teeth. The trees threw their coats on the ground with their shivering, and left craters like the moon in the slumping snow.
Then it did it all again. Snow fell on top of the icy film over the styrofoam snow, and brought Currier and Ives back to town. Then the ice came and put Currier and Ives in the stocks in the town square for the crime of being jolly out of turn, and pelted them with everything handy. The roads turned to suggestions. The pavement was just the bottom layer of an arctic lasagne of sand and ice and mud and snow and general corruption. My wife’s car and my truck told me to shove it more than once when I turned their keys.
Then the thermometer began a truth or dare phase. It had been ten degrees below normal for months, but now it wanted to impress people. Pinch the unwary. Show you who’s in charge around here. Twice it showed me twenty below and kept going, and days ticked off the calendar, one after another, without ever reaching the number one. The ladder to spring had been drawn up into the calendar’s treehouse. We’d have to set a spell and wait for it.
There is no heat but what we can make. I shoveled the logs into the stove like a man in the belly of some great, dripping, iron ship, while icebergs passed by the portholes in first class. Nothing you could do could touch twenty below. You could set your house itself on fire and not raise the temperature in the living room ninety degrees. What chance do you and your disassembled birches and beeches have? But one bails a leaky rowboat whether you have a bucket or a teaspoon.
My neighbor passed by and said he was angry at his thermometer today. I understood, because he felt the thermometer had betrayed him. It was still five below at nine o’ clock this morning, and that was a shiv in the guts from a friend. He was promised by the man on the TeeVee, who combs his hair a lot, that it would be warmer today.
We were out of firewood. Well, not out, exactly; I’m a fool, but not that big of one. There were still three cords sleeping in the back yard where we stacked them in August to dry. But there was no more in the house. We’d put three cords in the basement, and all but a few junks were gone in a puff of woodsmoke already. It will rain again tomorrow, and be miserable to be outside, and handling firewood in the rain is a penance not to be inflicted on the innocent. The time to get more was today.
My son came out with me. He shows no enthusiasm, but does not complain. It’s the mark of an adult, I think. The sun looked like a cataract and hung low in the sky, skulking across the horizon for the few hours it deigns to shine in January, and looks ashamed of itself the whole time. You could look right at it, but why would you? You look at the ground right in front of you, and that’s that. We shoveled the top layer of snow and ice to get halfway to the ground, and walked on the skin of ice over the first heaping of snow as we went. The ice was almost strong enough to hold my weight for every footfall, but every once in a while the heel of my boot would punch a hole in it, and my knee would hinge backwards and remind me that I hit a hurdle when I was in tenth grade and that I wrecked a car when I was nineteen. Winter is very solicitous here, and worries you might get the Alzheimer’s, and tries to help you remember things.
In the fall, we’d made and installed four, great big swinging barn doors leading out of our basement into the paved yard where the firewood slumbered. The firewood only had to travel twenty feet. The nature of those twenty feet was the issue. There was a buttress of ice eighteen inches thick holding the doors closed. The eave above had basted the snow that collected there with water, over and over, until it was as solid and unyielding as any revetment. We stood like Napoleons looking longingly at Moscow in the winter.
My son got an iron bar we keep for some reason. It’s six feet long, as big around as a toddler’s wrist, pointed at one end, with a sort-of chisel at the other. This tool is of absolutely no use, until it’s essential, like a lawyer or a prostitute. I laid into that bulwark of ice like, like — like it was the only thing between me and heat tomorrow morning. Ten minutes and the big door swung clear. We dumped the plywood that covers the woodpiles overboard, and then layed them on the iffy ice and snow layer cake on the ground. We rolled a handtruck back and forth over them, and assembled the clanking junks of wood into a wall four feet high and twenty-four feet long in the basement. People here call a piece of firewood a “junk,” and firewood that’s been dried properly rings with a ceramic tone when you handle them. The last of the wood outside came hard; frozen solid six inches below the level of our feet. The iron bar levered them out, and they joined their brethren. The last of them will no doubt go in the furnace still wearing their necklaces of ice, because it’s not warm enough down there to melt it.
My son, who is no longer a child, really, never flagged, never complained once. We spoke almost not at all, because there wasn’t much to say. The work would whisper done when there wasn’t any more of it. I thought to myself that I would not have been able to do it without him to help me. I wondered — I very dearly wished — he might say the same thing about me.
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