The new normal

I have a smallish refrigerator, and thus I try to make meals which won’t have many leftovers, but that also means I have to shop pretty regularly. Apologies to our readers in London or Paris or Singapore for pointing out the obvious, but keep in mind I live in semi-rural southern Maine, where most people have fridges the size of small SUVs, and thus cook roughly six months in advance. It shows both a kind of thriftiness which I find impressive, but also an unconscious faith in the stability of the electrical grid which I find touchingly naive.

That’s not the point though. There’s a luxury grocer up the road from me – just far enough that I need to drive there, not far enough that I can’t smugly appreciate its presence’s impact on my home value – that I shop at almost daily. On their door, there are three postings. One is the more or less required laminated sheet describing the requirements for entry – it used to require shoes and a shirt, but now also includes a mask, self-identification as not having any flu-like symptoms, a commitment to six feet separation (and since our Canadian friends can no longer visit southern Maine beaches, they don’t bother to clarify that it means two metres), and a request not to handle items unless you intend to purchase them. There is also a small decal for a local merchants association, and as of this past weekend, another decal which says “New Normal” in a circle with a line through it.

It got me thinking: what is the new normal, and why do we need to reject it? I had a few theories which bubbled inside me, as I purchased ridiculously fresh vegetables – keeping in mind that this is mid March and in Maine, so the wind chill is below zero Fahrenheit despite bright beautiful sunshine – and a circle of perfect French goat cheese, followed by a nice bottle of Madiera and some locally made creme fraiche and a decadently marbled and three finger thick bone-in pork chop from Quebec. Also I bought some lemons – we were running low down on the ranch – and some sesame oil. I didn’t buy a baguette because for reasons I don’t fully understand, this grocer has French bread that really isn’t all that great – I’d rather go up the street to get the good stuff from the local bakery.

I live in a neighbourhood which has been built up over 350 years. The oldest house is just around the corner, listed as being built in 1750 but no one really knows. My house, and most of those on my stretch of street, were built between 1935 and 1940 – an odd time, really, sort of Great Depression era but also just pre-war, when military money was starting to pour in. The beach down the road has plenty of 1930s and 1950s houses, slowly being renovated or replaced by big money palaces, but there are farmhouses up the road from the late 19th century and the 1910s when truck farming and shellfish made this a kind of small boomtown. The grocer’s store up the street, in fact, dates from those early 20th century boom years, when the building was put up as a schoolhouse, when Dunstan Corner justified a train station, a fire station, a grange hall, and a hardware store (still there) in addition to its school house.

The normal for my house, when it was built in 1940, would not have included fresh vegetables in March, with the wind blowing hard and the skies bright but unforgiving. It may have involved some seaweed scavenged from the marsh – which actually inspires me to do some scavenging this afternoon, but purely as hobby, not as a means of fending off late winter scurvy. It would not have had any goat cheese from France. It may have had cheese but it would not have been French, and certainly not anything from a goat, not in southern Maine. There may have been Madiera; Mainers have always had a shine for sweet wine, but in 1940 Maine was mostly still dry, so it would more likely have been dull thick and unpleasant molasses that would have sweetened my sauce. The pork, mind you, probably would have been local, although it might have come from the pork farms around Lac Megantic, because back then – pre pandemic, pre NAFTA, pre border controls – the pork up in Quebec was already known as the best, and its quality has squeezed out the local producers here, who themselves – as prudish Protestants with a kind of subconscious distaste for raising swine – had left the production of bacon and pork and good chops to the Catholics north of the border.

I’m just talking food, mind you. I’m not talking about the ways in which the first resident of this house would have kept a garden – or not – in the back. Whether this house would have been considered “coastal” or not. Or where the owner would have worked – here in the house, like me as an online professional (certainly not) or here as a traveling salesman of some sort or on the water fishing or driving out to a factory or schoolhouse or repair shop – no, I’m not talking about that yet. I’m just talking about shopping for tonight’s supper, so far.

My house has been standing for 81 years, just almost exactly one human lifetime, but the idea of a normal has been flipped on its head several times since then. Again, let’s just talk food. My neighbours often pay me off – for the service of watching their kids and for ignoring their dogs’ devastation of my yard – with shellfish that they catch in the course of their jobs. That, interestingly, hasn’t changed: but the fact that they are paying a mid 40s male banking professional surely would challenge the simple assumptions of their forebears who would have paid a mid 30s female laundress in the same currency, all the while assuming that she was some kind of a whore for not having a husband. I don’t know what they think of me – whether they think I’m gay or just a loser – but there is little to no chance that I would have been alone in the 1800s in such a state.

I might have been a decent cook back in the day, of course – plenty of stories of good men who could make a good dish from back then – but the idea that I would be at once a banker – or as someone put it recently – a financier, and a good cook, and a single father, without a maid, without “help”, would have been absurd even a hundred years ago, let along two hundred. “Normal” would have involved me having at least one live in servant, in addition to (naturally) a woman who would have been my “companion” whether or not we felt any emotion for one another. Thus my son would have a “mother” to supply the tender emotions which I, as a man, am obviously be incapable of providing. And I would thus be able to conduct my public life in the manner befitting an adult man in his mid 40s, at the prime of his influence in society, in wielding capital, in asserting his existence.

But I’m getting beyond myself. I’m trying to just focus on food and the grocer up the street.

Blue Point was first settled in the 1600s, although it was quickly burned down by the local First Nations peoples and was only resettled, let’s call it permanently, in the mid 1700s. Scarborough had been firmly established at that point – although the neighbourhood still needed to defend itself against French and Indian incursions – and the forests that my dog and my son and I now roam through were, back then, cleared out pastures for cows and sheep, and the flatlands on which my house is perched were poorly-thought-out fields of wheat and rye and barley. This is not good farming country, and after a hundred or so years, most of the residents realised there was more promise in the sea than in the land. They abandoned the fields – they could trade for bread and vegetables, especially once the bread came in a bag and the veggies in a can – and took to nets and traps and line. The fields reverted to the scrub forest of maple, northern oak, pine, and ground bush that they had been before, albeit without the towering beauties that had grown before axes came around.

There was a stage stop here in the short interval between the demise of the farms and the rise of the subdivision. The beach – a mile away – had been an attraction since the Civil War, even though our neighbourhood was irrelevant as to either farm or tourist interest. The train came through just to the south – it was built closer to the shellfish landings, closer to the beach and its tourist trade. All we had in Blue Point was a couple of vegetable and fruit shacks – selling whatever came out of the ground, when it came out, to the wagons and then trucks heading into Portland and Saco and their mills and their people, and selling milk and cream year round, especially in the winter when there were no vegetables to sell and in the summer when people wanted something cool.

The school was built around then, the school that would become the high-end grocery store, with vegetables from Peru and Mexico and California, with beef from Oklahoma, cheese from France, sesame oil from, well, somewhere that has sesame, with spices from everywhere but Maine.

They made a lot of fish dishes then, especially chowder. Chowder was cheap – you could dig the clams from the flats on the marsh, and whatever milk or cream you couldn’t sell could make the broth. The vegetables were easy and kept well – carrots and onions, and maybe some celery if you could get it but if you couldn’t, there was always some bitter green out in the field or the forest to spice it up – and of course salt pork, lots of salt pork. They had cows and pigs and root cellars and they could always go to the sea. Chowder came from the hard northern shores for a reason. Not much pepper back then, and the crackers – well, they were always built to travel, they came in barrels, so hard they could be used as hammers. But just drop a few into the stew, mate, and after an hour or so it was a slurry, and the whole thing was good.

Last night, though, I made a bone-in pork chop with cippolini onions and carrots. I seared the chop in olive oil, and set it aside; I melted butter and added a dozen halved cippolinis and four carrots, thickly chopped. After six or seven minutes, I added the Madiera, and some beef broth that I had not made myself, and some balsamic vinegar. I let them cook, and reduce, and when the sauce coated the back of a spoon, I added the pork chop back in, and let the whole mixture meld. I made a Caesar salad – with anchovies and mustard and vinegar and oil, only one of which anyone in Blue Point would have had handy a hundred years ago – and pulled a couple of baked potatoes from the oven. The potatoes are genuine – the backyard garden would have had them, long ago, before I lived here. My son loved the dinner, and so did I, actually.

And I thought back to the dinners of 100 years ago here in Blue Point, before my house was built. They would have been simple but plain. The families who lived here – who still live here – would have eaten to survive, not eaten to enjoy, especially not on a middling Sunday evening in early March, with the wind howling, with no charge to have gone fishing in the last few days due to gales and ice. They would have simply made due – canned beans; salt pork and cod; potatoes, yes potatoes, and hopefully enough pickles or canned peas or tired apples or anything to relieve the ache in their jaws which was saying they needed more vitamin C. And then the dinners in this house in the 1950s, after the first subdivision and the first people to move here who weren’t Turners or Moultons or Snows: they were eating TV dinners and canned goods and maybe the occasional iceburg lettuce salad with too much blue cheese dressing (which my son loves as well, mind you); lots of sandwiches, lots of ham and roast beef on Nissen white bread and lots of Jordan’s hot dogs on New England frankfurter rolls, with lobster salad as a treat in the summer after Ken’s opened in 1922.

At some point the school closed down – so far as I understand, it was due to a desire in the 1960s to consolidate the middle and high schools in town, combined with the realisation that between the lead paint, asbestos insulation, and poor ventilation, the old schoolhouse up the road was a liability attorney’s dream. After a decade of disuse, it was renovated (and de-toxified) and became a restaurant, and after another decade or so, it became the grocery store, with high-end butchery, spices, vegetables, patisserie, and wine. The farms shut down, replaced by homes and forests. The fishermen keep plying their trade but now sell to the Saudis and the British, and only barter with the locals for childcare and yard work.

The new normal is not normal. We have turned over the normal so many times in the last 150 years in the developed world that speaking of “the normal” is actually offensive to the rational mind. There has never been any normal. We live in an evolving world, and always have. The very concept of a “normal” is not just false, it’s misleading – it makes the listener think that they have to normalise even when such an act is impossible.

I’ve been trying to talk to my son about what life will look like after the pandemic’s restrictions draw to a close, and it’s been difficult. He wants to go back to what, in his mind, is “normal” – life in Seattle with his mum, living with me for five or six days every other week in our old apartment, playing with his friends. I’m doing everything I can to disabuse him of the idea that that was normal – to try and convince him that that was just a special, blessed, very nice time in his life where he lived with his mum, lived with me for five or six days every other week in our old apartment, and he played with his friends. He has a few Maine friends now, and he lives in my house here, but in his mind that isn’t normal. I’ve failed him in that regard, in letting him think there was a normal and a variant, a normal and an altered state.

And the grocer is contributing to that with their annoying decal. Do not think that the new normal is bad. Think, rather, that there never was a normal, and our distress at dealing with the pandemic, the distress of dealing with change, is our own failing: a direct consequence of our ever imagining that there was a normal in the first place.

I’m looking forward to getting my vaccination, and am hopeful that there will be one for my son soon as well. In the meantime, the world moves on, changing and evolving and eternally destroying any notion any of us have of what is normal. As it always has.. There is good and bad, I firmly believe; there is right and wrong. But there is no normal, and therefore, once we all get our jabs: bring on the new.