We appear to have lost the instructions
It’s been awhile.
I was driving past the mall earlier this week, a day or two after a blizzard dropped a foot of snow on Portland. It’s been bitterly cold, so the snow is light and fluffy, drifting in the wind. I drove past a wasteland site with a singularly ugly building at the center. It’s a car dealership, almost complete, small signs saying “we’re hiring” and “coming this spring” dotting the entrance, mostly buried in the drifts.
There were two speakers at the club lecture night on Friday, both reporters. One was a retired foreign correspondent from National Public Radio, his voice bringing back memories of listening to the news in my bedroom on my old clock radio in the morning before school. The other was the chief foreign correspondent for Cuban national radio, a woman in her early thirties, which relieved me of the pressure of being the youngest person in the room. The crowd was typically Maine – that strange kind of liberal Republican that believes in small government and democracy and being left alone by the state, but also funds good roads and state parks and cringes at businesses which get too big or come from out of state. They’ll vote against the new casino for a variety of reasons, not the least of which the fact that the money for it comes from Maryland.
I read a book recently by a war correspondent, a woman, who had covered wars from the Spanish Civil to the Bosnian (the most recent Bosnian, not one of the innumerable ones prior to the most recent). It was not a book of her wartime experiences; rather, she had five essays of travels which all, in their way, had been for pleasure but which all, in their way, were less than pleasurable. She explained in the introduction that she wrote somewhat at the insistence of her editor and the demands of her finances, but also, she wrote because of what she termed her incredibly poor memory. All of the works had been written more or less when the travel had occurred – either as essays themselves or as collections of notes – but she remarked that memory was something that was always lost on her. The future, in her eyes, presented an infinite and surprising potential source of memories, which made her own past – closed as it was to new experience and limited by what her life had offered to her – seem unimportant to remember.
The drive across the country took six days. I left Seattle on a Monday night after picking my son up from school and spending the afternoon with him, the dog and I making good time to Spokane. I was pulled over, speeding through eastern Washington, but the state trooper seemed to take pity on us driving to Maine and let me off with a warning. We didn’t see much once we got past the mountains, driving in the dark across the plateau. We stayed at a soulless roadside hotel; they allowed dogs, which was enough.