Snowshoeing Back In Time

It’s been a long, rough winter in northern Maine, and it’s not over yet.  The other day, for the first time this season, I got to do one of my favorite winter recreational activities: snowshoeing.  Up until mid-January, there had not been enough decent snow to do it, and since then, there has been one howling snowstorm followed by another, with extremely frigid temperatures and wind chills sandwiched in between them.  There have been a few snowshoe-worthy days here and there, but without fail they have come on days when I have been working.  When the thermometer read a tropical 25 degrees (‘nice’ is relative) on my most recent day off, I tossed my snowshoes into the back of my car and headed out into the country to my grandparents’ old place.

Much has changed on that property from the days when I spent at least a part of every school vacation there as a child.  The forest has encroached on much of the land, most of the outbuildings are now gone, and many familiar landmarks on the property like clotheslines and flower gardens have disappeared over time.  The house itself is still inhabited by my cousin, though his housekeeping and landscaping habits are worlds apart from those of my late grandparents.  As I trod around the property on my snowshoes, enjoying the exercise and lamenting the effects of the inevitable passage of time, I began to sharpen my focus a bit, and found that there were still some reminders of the days gone by.

For instance, I noticed that a pair of very old and heavy swinging gates were still standing near the rail bed that runs adjacent to the property.  The railroad tracks led past my grandparents’ place to the local airport, which was an air base and prisoner of war camp during World War II.  The gates had to be manually opened and closed whenever a train passed into or out of the base.  I tend to doubt that the gates would have kept an actual train from entering the base, but they probably provided some security that no one would be able to easily drive some other type of vehicle on the tracks into the base without authorization.  The rest of the base was ringed with barbed wire fencing, about four feet high, which is not much more than would be used to keep livestock corralled these days.  Some of the barbed wire can still be found in the woods there.  Securing a military base on home soil meant something very different in the early 1940s compared to today.

By the time my siblings, cousins and I came along in the 60s and 70s, the air base was long defunct and was now functioning as a somewhat sleepy regional airport.  The swinging gates near my grandparents’ place no longer served any purpose, but they still stood, leaning a bit with age even then.  They still swung however, and that was what mattered to us kids.  With great effort against the weight and rust, we would push the gates up to their nearly closed position, and then jump onto them.  The gates leaned enough that they would swing back to the open position on their own, providing a pretty cool ride with a very abrupt stop at the end.  The challenge of holding on when the gates crashed open against the brush that they normally leaned against was the best part of it all.

The gates were certainly not moving that day I was investigating them on my snowshoes, buried as they were in deep snow.  I would be surprised if they would move at all now under any circumstances, age having taken more of a toll on them.  That doesn’t mean I won’t at least give it a try once spring comes.

One of the gates in question. There was no swinging on it this day.

Just beyond those gates, a little ways along the rail bed, there is a small tree-covered hillock that seems out of place if you stop and think about it.  I recognized it immediately.  Underneath all that snow, and probably under quite a bit of brush, I knew there was a thin piece of steel sticking up from the ground.  My grandmother and I used to walk by there quite frequently when I was young, and she said that it was the site of a fatal plane crash years before I was born, occurring not long after the air base made the switch to a regional airport.  The pilot was killed in the crash, she said, and the remains of the small plane were left there  in the woods along the train tracks for some time afterwards.  She told me that it wasn’t unusual for people to walk in to see the remains of the plane and take pieces away as souvenirs.  My grandmother said she once saw a man carrying out a large piece of what looked like the plane’s tail.  In time, railway officials buried the remains of the plane in hopes of discouraging visitors.  

By the time I first saw the site in the mid 1970s, the railroad tracks were seldom used, and the trees still growing over the plane’s burial mound today were already taller than a grown man.  As a kid, it was quite sobering, thinking that a man had lost his life on that spot, and it still was on that snowy day of my recent visit, so many years later.

At the end of my snowshoeing trek, another memory of the days of my grandparents came upon me, also somewhat unexpectedly.  It had been my first snowshoeing adventure of the year, and that meant breaking new trails in deep snow while not being especially physically conditioned to the activity.  Quite simply, I was wiped out when I got back to my car.  Before I packed everything away to head home, I flopped down on my back in a nearby snowbank to rest and just listen, and was reminded of the sounds of being so far out in the country in mid-winter.  I used to do much the same thing when I was staying with my grandparents during the winter time and had spent a long afternoon outside playing in the snow, which I often did.

Mind you, there are not many of sounds out there in mid-winter.  The silence is almost total.  If you’ve been playing hard, as I was that recent day, the only thing you can hear for a while is the sound of your own heart beating.  There are no busy roads nearby, and all the birds have gone south for the winter or are laying low, except for some hardy chickadees.  I could hear several of them twittering in the trees nearby, calling to each other in their language.  There has always been a large population of chickadees around that property.  To my amazement, my grandmother used to be able to hand feed some of them, who were possibly ancestors of the little birds I was listening to now.  A breeze came up and blew through the evergreens with a distinctive hiss.  There are no leaves on the deciduous trees at all, and the snow has buried anything on the ground that might rustle.   The shushing sound of the wind in the pines and spruces remains the defining sound of wintertime for me.  

Before I got up out of the snow, a jetliner passed far overhead with a distant rumble. I remember hearing planes high overhead after a long day of playing hard, and wondering where they were going and who was on them.  I liked to follow them with my eyes if I could spot them until they were out of sight.  A Cold War-era air force bomber and refueling base was located about an hour north of there when I was a kid, so the sound of B-52s and KC-135s flying high overhead was very common then.  I watched the jetliner from the other day leaving contrails in its wake until it was gone behind the trees, just as I might have nearly 40 years ago in that very spot.  

As I was putting my snowshoeing gear into my car, it occurred to me that none of the things I had been pondering had any monetary value or even meaning of any kind to anyone, except maybe to some of my siblings and cousins.  A rusty old gate, a small tree covered hill buried in snow, and the sound of jets high overhead would likely go totally unnoticed by most people who had walked the same path I had just taken.  Yet they opened up a floodgate of memories for me that day.  I want to try to remind myself that it is never a waste of time to stop and take the time to just look around and listen.  You never know the significance that seemingly insignificant things might take on in the future.

Showering with Spiders and Other Camping Miseries

During the long winter months in Maine, one of the things that keeps my spirits up is the thought of tent camping, one of my favorite warm weather pastimes.  It’s a fun and relatively affordable way to experience different parts of this beautiful state, and every summer I do it whenever I can, which is never often enough.  Maine is fortunate to have a terrific state park system, many of which are open to camping.  There is also no shortage of private campgrounds in every corner of Maine.  In my experience, they vary widely in quality, but when you find a good one, and there are many, you’ve usually discovered a real gem.

Not every day of camping is wonderful though.  There was one day last summer at a state park campground in southern Maine that stands out as being the very definition of the opposite of wonderful.

It was getaway day, the day when you have to pack everything up into the car and make the long drive back home.  That, in and of itself, is a bummer, but when there is a steady rain on the morning of getaway day, it’s even worse.  Everything that is not already drenched will soon be during the process of tearing down and packing up.  Pine needles, dead leaves, and dirt stick to everything, creating a mess of your equipment and your vehicle.  Upon returning home it’s necessary to unpack everything and lay it out to dry or else run the risk of mold and mildew forming.  Then you have to shake off off the needles, leaves and dirt, and sometimes wipe things down, before repacking your equipment.

This particular rainy day came after I had typically overdone it physically, having hiked up a mountain that was probably a bit over my head ability-wise.  Actually, there was no “probably” about it.  It WAS over my head, but I didn’t discover that until I had made it to the summit.  Once you’ve made it to the top of a mountain, you don’t really have much choice but to go back down again.  My feet were blistered and every muscle in my body was screaming that morning after.  Being a light sleeper, the rain woke me very early, around 5:00 a.m., so I figured I would get a jump start on the day with a hot shower, in hopes of loosening up my sore body before loading the car.  Campground showers are typically pretty quiet at that early hour, so I didn’t expect any waiting.  As is my habit, I tossed my wallet and cellphone into my car and locked it, then headed to the shower with my keys, towel, and toiletry bag.

As anticipated, the showers were quiet.  There were no other campers there, at least no human ones.  

Daddy Longlegs "Pholcus.phalangioides.6905" by o.leillinger@web.de. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What there were plenty of, were daddy longlegs, a type of benign spider that is very common in Maine and most other places.  You see them all the time when camping, but never in my life had I seen so many in one place at the same time.  It was like something from that 1980s movie Arachnophobia.  I’m not sure if the daddy longlegs were attracted to the shower building because the lights left on overnight attracted prey for them like mosquitoes, or because they were seeking shelter from the rains outside.  Whatever the reason, they were everywhere: in the sink, on the shower curtain, on the walls, and in the shower stalls themselves.  While I am not afraid of spiders, I do draw the line at bathing with them, so I spent the next five minutes or so swatting at as many of them as I could with my sandal.  Defeating all of them was a hopeless cause, I soon discovered, so once the shower stall itself was mostly clear, I thought it best to move forward with my  showering plans.  I was decidedly jumpy by that point, with every slight sensation on my skin causing me to slap at it, thinking it might be a daddy longlegs crawling on me.

Warily, I stepped into the shower and began my routine keeping one eye open for daddy longlegs.  I was at about peak soap suds time, just about to rinse off, when I heard the sound of my pants, hanging on a hook just outside the stall, fall to the floor with a splat into a small puddle of water that was coming from my shower.  To make matter exponentially worse, my car keys were in one of the pockets, and when they fell, the car alarm button activated.  The wail of my horn came blaring across the sleeping campground like Hell’s alarm clock.

Things like that happen from time to time in campgrounds, and I have never failed to curse the name of the people who had awakened me with what I perceived at the time as their stupidity.  Only now, I was that guy.  I bolted out of the shower in full suds mode and rifled through my soaked pants to find my car keys.  Once I got hold of them, I immediately pressed the button to turn off the alarm.  It didn’t stop.  Apparently, I was on the very edge of the alarm’s reception area.  Close enough to activate the alarm, but apparently not close enough to deactivate it.  I could hear angry shouts coming from outside. In the distance, a baby started to cry.  

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to wrap a towel around myself as I dashed outside the shower building with keys in hand, which got me just close enough to shut off the alarm.  The damage was done, however.  It was the height of the summer, and the campground was filled to capacity with now-pissed off campers.  Thank goodness it was my getaway day, because I was now branded with a scarlet A for the day.  Only in this case, the A stood for “alarm”.

I took my time finishing up my shower and getting dressed.  Not only did I have the unhappy task of having to pack all my stuff up in the rain to look forward to, but now I would be doing so under the watch of scornful eyes in every direction.  It was a long perp walk back to my site, and the rain was coming down harder than ever.  Never before or since have I packed my stuff in such haste.  I literally tossed everything into the back of the car without caring about folding, packing, or putting away.  I was on the road within ten minutes, soaked to the skin.  The rain stopped about half an hour later, so I pulled into a grocery store parking lot and proceeded to set about ordering my gear so at least I would be able to see out the back with the rearview mirror again.  I spent the entire afternoon after I got home drying things out and setting them in order again.

I’ve since returned to that campground.  I went back about a month later, actually.  It’s one of my favorite spots in that part of the state, and I figured that the chances of any of the campers who were there that fateful morning still being there and remembering me and my car would be pretty slim.  There were important lessons learned though.  First of all, be sure your pants are secure before stepping into the shower stall, and second, remember to bring some Raid and a fly swatter with your soap and towel.

Goals

I always look to the New Year as a time to set new goals for myself.  I try not to view them in the tunnel vision many use to view “resolutions”, where they are black and white things that are tossed aside once they are broken.  You know what I mean: resolve to stop drinking soda, break down and have a Mountain Dew on January 3^rd, and tell yourself “oh well, maybe next year”.  It’s too easy to weasel your way out of them if you take that attitude.  I try not to even call them resolutions.

How one phrases goals is key to success or failure, I’ve found.  For example, I’d like to lose some weight this year, but “lose weight” is a pretty broad (pardon the pun) goal that can be tricky to approach with any kind of effectiveness. Where do you even begin?  So instead, this year I want to exercise more than I did in 2014 and eat less sugar than in that year, which are more specific and for me at least, more achievable.  They aren’t specific enough to set me up for disappointment, however.  Cutting sugar out of my diet entirely would do that, as would a goal such as going for a run five days a week.  Less sugar and more exercise can be as little or as much as my circumstances allow at any given time.  As long as I am ahead of where I was with those things last year, I am meeting with success. Hopefully, by exercising more and eating less sugar, the weight loss will come as a side benefit.

I do have one specific item related to that more exercise goal however.  Last July, I ran my first 5K and came in at just over 42 minutes.  Not bad for someone who really didn’t take training and preparation all that seriously, I think.  This year, I want to come in under 40 minutes in that event.  Whether it’s by a lot or a little, time will tell.

Another goal I have for 2015 is to get back into playing my guitar on a regular basis.  Not join a heavy metal band or play Carnegie Hall, just get pick it up and play more often.  I’ve played the guitar off and on since I was a teenager, with some lengthy gaps in between.  The last time, in the mid 00’s, I made some major strides in my skills and almost reached the point where I was confident enough to play in front of other people.  Then I started a new job in a new field, went back to school and started doing a lot more writing, and so back into the carrying case the guitar went.  

But now the guitar is back out, dusted off and fitted with a brand new set of strings.  I’ve discovered that GarageBand, one of the programs that came loaded on my MacBook Pro has all kinds of toys and tricks to help me hone my guitar skills and extend my interests, and since my guitar is electric, I can plug directly into it.  Playing scales and learning chords is a lot more fun when you can give your guitar the same sound as those of Eddie Van Halen or Randy Rhodes.

I can almost guarantee that you’ll be reading more posts about my latest journey with the guitar in the weeks and months to come.

This blog is part of another goal I have for 2015: write more than in 2014.  I let my writing slip to some extent last year, and posts on this blog are a public and quantifiable way for see that I am indeed writing more.  That’s not to say that all my writing has been and will be on this blog.  I am knee-deep in revision and editing the first draft of a novel I wrote in partnership with another writer.  That project is where a lot of my writing time went in 2014 and where quite a bit will no doubt go this year.  I hadn’t been producing much by way of new content though, and that’s where I really want to step things up.

Now to come up with fresh and engaging post topics, which has been my biggest stumbling block in my writing in general lately, and this blog in particular.  Your suggestions are very welcome, of course.  I’d also welcome your input on my other goals, especially improving my time on the 5K and jacking up my guitar skills, even if it’s just sending me a tweet or an e-mail asking how it’s going.

Twitter: @countofbluecars

E-mail: chriscolter@icloud.com

Wheels

I was recently going over my finances for the past twelve months, and noticed that my car took a much larger chunk out of my budget than usual in 2014.  The reason is fairly simple: the car, a Hyundai Santa Fe, is a 2007 model year, which means that it has reached the vehicular equivalent of middle age.  Just as has happened with me in my own middle age, lots of things have suddenly come up needing some attention.  Luckily though, for both me and the car, most of it has been preventative maintenance.  I am known as a pretty frugal guy, so one would think that I would be bothered by all the extra cash I laid out on my car last year.  If those expenditures were on anything else, say my wardrobe for example, or my lawn and garden equipment, I probably would indeed be a bit irked.  The thing is, the primary set of wheels in my life at any given time has always held a rather special place in my heart.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say money is no object when it comes to my vehicles, but it is less of an object than it would be for other things.

Big Wheels Rolling

My love affair with things that go started very young.  At Christmas when I was almost three I got a low-slung plastic tricycle popularly known in the early 1970s as a Big Wheel.  These slick little machines were heavily marketed during children’s television shows as being the pinnacle of cool for the preschool set.  In addition to a storage box in which to keep important “stuff”, the big draw for kids like me was a hand brake on one of the rear wheels which effectively allowed the driver to spin out in the most awesome way possible.  And yes, it was well and truly awesome.  The house where I grew up had a long sloping driveway that was just perfect to barrel down at high speed and then yank up on the hand brake, spinning almost all the way around.  The end of the driveway was constantly marked by rings left behind by my spins.  I wore out my first Big Wheel toward the end of its first year by overusing the hand brake to the point where it wore through the rear wheel.  Such was my love for the Big Wheel, and my parents’ appreciation for it as an outlet for my energy, that I got a replacement the next Christmas.  It came with a parental proviso, however: Lay off the hand brake.

This vintage ad sums it all up nicely.

Big Wheel #2 ultimately received even rougher treatment than its predecessor.  Not only was I getting bigger, but since I was using the hand brake less, I needed to find another way to get a vehicular thrill, and found it in jumping the Big Wheel off whatever makeshift ramp I could concoct.  I rode it as fast as I could off curbs, low steps, or any other slight elevation, lifting up on the front end.  It was an attempt to “get air” before “getting air” was even a thing.  Heck, this was even before the Dukes of Hazzard.  Much like the spinouts, these jumps were well and truly awesome in my mind, even if they were usually only an average of four inches off the ground.

I think this was Big Wheel #2.

My second Big Wheel died when it broke in half.  Yes, you read that right.  It broke in half!  While I won’t disagree that I played pretty hard with it, it is also worth noting that in those days before video games, DVDs and the like, kids spent MUCH more time outside, at least several hours a day for me and even more in the summers and on weekends.  The majority of that time for me was spent on wheels.  Big plastic ones.  Therefore, some attrition was to be expected.  Those things got a whole lot of use before they finally gave up their ghosts.  Believe it or not, my parents did actually get me a third Big Wheel, but fortunately for their pocketbook, a market in used ones had emerged locally at yard sales, the toys having been around for a while at that point and kids were outgrowing them.  They were able to get my last one at a steep discount. 

Frankenstein's Bicycle

My third Big Wheel did not meet the same untimely end as my first two, because shortly after I got it, I got my first two-wheeler, which subsequently dominated my attention.  My first bike did not arrive with a lot of fanfare.  It was not a Christmas or birthday gift.  There was no anticipation, and I did not even ask for it.  It just kind of happened.  One Saturday in the summer before I started kindergarten, my father and I were nosing around in my grandmother’s garage and found the remains of several of my uncles’ old bicycles, which had been sitting in there for ten years or so.  It didn’t take my father very long to determine that he had all the parts he would need to assemble one Frankenstein’s monster of a bicycle for me from the remains of the old ones, and later that afternoon I had my first bicycle.  The only expenditure on my parents’ part was a couple of dollars at Western Auto for training wheels.  I only used the training wheels for little more than 48 hours, however.  The bike had a pretty heavy frame compared to most contemporary bikes of that time, and the training wheels were not made for that kind of weight, so they started bending almost immediately.  When it was pointed out to me by my friends that I was riding on two wheels anyway, I took the training wheels off by myself.

I had several bicycles after that first one, but that bike my father cobbled together in my grandmother’s garage was the best.  It was too big for me when I first got it, but that didn’t keep me off it for a second.  A shade of dark metallic green with a white banana seat and huge handlebars, it looked like no other bike on my street.  The tires were of an early 60s vintage, very wide and thick, and the frame was virtually military-grade.  That bike was solid as a tank, and many neighborhood kids recognized its uniqueness.  Sure, it wasn’t as sleek and attractive as some of their newer ones, but it was solid as a rock and remarkably fast.  I distinctly remember an older boy named Kevin admiring it and asking me how much I wanted for it, and I replied that it wasn’t for sale.  Even though I was just a little kid, I could tell that this ten year old was trying to con me when he offered me a hundred dollars, then a thousand, and then a million.  “I’ve really got it at home,” he said, counting on a preschooler’s lack of money sense.  I only had to let him have the bike now he said, and he’d come right back with the money.  Yeah, right.  My final response was that I would only sell it “for the highest number there is”, and then pedaled off, with my suspicion that I had something special on my hands confirmed.  

Bicycles were my primary mode of transportation and the symbol of my personal freedom for the next nearly ten years.  I always felt naked if I didn’t have my bike within easy reach, and it was always a sad day each year when the first snow came and my bike had to be put away for the winter.  It proved to be my parents’ most effective discipline tool in my childhood, as few punishments were worse for me than to have my bike taken away for a day, much less a week or more.  Send me to my room. Take away the TV.  But leave my bike alone.

Beloved Rustbucket

My first car came to me before I even got my driver’s license.  Living in a rural area, my parents had to do a lot of chauffeuring for my brothers and me, so my being able to get myself around would be a real plus for them.  However, they didn’t relish the idea of having to share the family vehicle with another driver, so they encouraged me to start saving for my own car as soon as I laid the subject of driver education classes out on the table.  I started working a part time job in the spring of the year I turned 15, and by that August, I had enough saved up for a very used car my father had found and approved.  I paid $575 for a rusty, 13 year-old Chevrolet Caprice with nearly 100,000 miles on it.  It sat in the driveway taunting me by its presence for the four weeks between when I got it and when I actually passed my driver’s test.  Needless to say, by the time I got behind the wheel to drive it by myself for the first time, I had polished and detailed that car to the point where it probably would have glowed in the dark, in spite of the rust.  I spent nearly as much on Turtle Wax, Windex, Armor All and paper towels as I did for the car itself.

It looked a lot like this, only less sexy and more rusty.

The Caprice was huge, and even in those days of cheaper gasoline it cost me a fortune to keep it filled.  I could fit a lot of my friends in it however, which was a real plus because I was one of the first in my class to get my license and one of the only ones to have his own car.  My services as a taxi driver to and from school were in high demand.  The car wasn’t very reliable.  It was always a roll of the dice as to whether it would start when the temperature dropped below freezing, and it had a habit of stalling in almost any weather.  There was a constant blue cloud coming from the exhaust pipe, and the interior smelled like burning oil, which I tried to cover up by using a half dozen cherry-scented air fresheners.  For a while toward the end of its life, I actually had to keep the passenger side door closed with a piece of rope.  It probably would have never passed inspection again, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Environmental Protection Agency had a warrant out for its arrest.  Nonetheless, it was all mine, my ticket to freedom, and I loved it.  That Caprice had one of the smoothest rides of any car I’ve ever driven, and was so large that if I had been in an accident, it would have kept me relatively safe compared to the ubiquitous compact cars that were on the road at the time.  Plus the radio had great reception and was LOUD!  I only had that Caprice for a year before the cost of upkeep got to be too much, and I downsized to a newer, smaller car which had fewer problems and expenses.  It just didn’t live up to the standard that the first clunker had set for me, though.  I sold the Caprice to a man who wanted to use it for parts.  To this day when I smell cherries, I am reminded of the air fresheners I used in that old car and wonder if it is still around, rusting in the woods or in a junkyard somewhere.

I’ve had quite a few cars in the thirty years since I bought that Caprice, all of which came to be central players in my life.  My latest is no exception.  It’s my chariot, my set of wheels.  I travel a lot, and when I am on the road, my car acts as a mobile comfort zone when I am staying in pleasant but strange places surrounded by welcome but unfamiliar things.  There’s always a slight sense of satisfaction when I catch sight of my car in a parking lot after having been away from it for an extended period.  I don’t think it is so much the car itself that stirs these feelings, as much as what it represents: freedom, opportunity, and the ability to ultimately return to the things that mean the most to me.

A glamour shot of my current chariot, from the manufacturer.

Summer Hiatus

Between the heavy revision required on the first draft of my most recent writing work in progress and the fact that it is actually summer in northern Maine, and thus time to enjoy the outdoors without risk of polar bear attack, I am putting Wicked Awesomology on hiatus until after Labor Day.  I'll be back then, and maybe sooner if one of those posts that just drop out of the sky into my head and write themselves arrives.  In the meantime, I'll still be dropping in on Twitter fairly frequently @countofbluecars.

Enjoy your summer!

Carded

In the six or so weeks between late April and mid June of this year, I will have dealt with Mother’s Day (I have both a mother and a grandmother to think of), Father’s Day, my mother’s birthday, my father’s birthday, my parents’ wedding anniversary and my nephew’s first communion.  That is one heck of a lot of cards to buy.

You see, I am still a sentimentalist at heart, and hold on to the belief that buying actual physical cards and either delivering them in person or sending them through the U.S. postal service is a kind tradition worth preserving in our increasingly impersonal electronic-based culture.  Don’t get me wrong. I fully appreciate the convenience of modern communication technologies.  I interact with most of my friends and family through e-mail and text messages for routine correspondence, but those modes of communication just seem hollow for special occasions.  They require something different.  And e-cards just don’t cut it, in my book.  Ever since I saw the first one back in the 1990s, I thought they were both cheesy and pale imitations of the real thing, much like The Munsters were to The Addams Family.

So, I continue to trek to the drugstore when special occasions come up to choose just the right card.  And for those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know that there is the rub.  I am the type of person who can handle metaphorical bags of porcupines tossed at him with grace and dignity, but I can also take something very simple like card shopping and turn it into a task on the level of complexity of establishing peace in the Middle East. 

First, there is finding the appropriate level of sentiment in the card.  I am a caring person, but not mushy.  As a kid, I was sad when Bambi’s mom died, but I didn’t cry.  Much of my family is the same way.  A card with too many butterflies and cloying lovey-doveyness would embarrass both the recipient and me.  At the same time, giving one of those joke cards (which I love getting, by the way) for anyone other than a fellow male whose sense of humor arrested at the age of 15 would come across as being overly emotionally defensive.  So the search is on for just the right tone.  Card companies seem to like to go for the emotional jugular, however, and most cards are either too emotional or too cold.

Next, there is a question of cost.  I am a practical guy when it comes to finance, and most of the people I am closest to are as well.  I know that when I get a card, I read it and appreciate it, but then it goes into a drawer somewhere until an indeterminate period of time has passed and I can toss it into the trash without feeling guilty.  And don’t even try to tell me you would never do such a thing!  I challenge you to come up with even one card from two birthdays ago. 

Mmmm-hmmm…I thought so.  My 88 year old grandmother could probably do it, but none of us mere mortals could if our lives depended on it.

I don’t head directly for the 99 cent card rack when I am card shopping, but I do set a limit of $6 maximum per card, even those I get for Gram, who has cards in shoeboxes and drawers dating back to the Eisenhower administration.  It makes little sense to me to spend more money than that on something that will be read once or twice and then be stored away until it is thrown out.

Another rule I have for card shopping is no singing or talking cards.  Those can be tacky, or creepy, or both.  Plus, it is always awkward when people open them in the presence of anyone else.  I believe that there is a special place in Hell for people who send musical or talking cards.  The hottest part of that place is reserved for people who send Disney Channel pop star-themed musical cards.

Cards that people make on the computer are okay I guess, but they don’t quite meet the mark for me.  Knowing that almost anyone could put one together and print it out in the space of less than five minutes just seems like the sender didn’t put forth the same amount of effort as they would have getting a store-bought card.  Now handmade cards are the very best of all, hands down.  To me, they show the very highest level of thought and engagement by the send.  However, I can’t draw straws and my handwriting looks like I hold the pen in my mouth, so that’s not a practical choice for me.

The greatest problem I face when card shopping is finding one that addresses the recipient with the same term that I do.  I call my father “Dad”, as I think most people do, so finding cards for him that say things like “To my dad” is not too difficult.  However, I refer to my mother as “Mum”, and not “Mom”.  After 44 years, it is way too late to change that.  Almost every card you can find for a mother addresses her as “Mom”, and that just will not do.  At all.  That restricts me to choosing from among the cards that use the emotionally-distant, third-person term “Mother”, since I have yet in my life to locate one that uses “Mum”.  With all the above requirements I also have when buying cards, this cuts back my choices considerably.  To make matters worse, I have referred to my grandmother as “Gram” my entire life, and not “Grandma”.  Much like the Mum/Mom situation, one can very rarely find cards addressed to “Gram”, though there are tons of “Grandma” cards out there.  So I am usually restricted to choosing from those distant, third-person “Grandmother” cards.  

Honest to goodness, it took me over an hour and trips to three stores in order to pick out a birthday card for my mother the other day.  Thankfully, this six-week period of intense card-shopping only comes once a year for me.  The other birthdays and special occasions in my loved ones’ lives are mercifully spread more or less evenly around the rest of the calendar.  It’s a good thing too, or else I’d probably have to quit my job and become a full-time card shopper.

Save the Bookstores!

Sadly, bookstores are fast becoming a dying breed in the United States.  Having grown up in a small farming community in northern Maine that had no less than three of them, I assumed that bookstores were a given part of the landscape of any city or town of any size and always would be, much like a post office, school, library or church.  Even as a kid, I could spend hours in a bookstore (and the local library as well), exploring books and topics I had often not even considered.  And any trip out of town inevitably meant a chance for me to check out the bookstores in other locales.  For that matter, it still does.

In the mid-1990s my eyes were opened to the plight bookstores face when I started dating a woman who worked in a terrific little independent one near where I lived.  It was a quirky little place, one of the first bookstores I knew of that served coffee and offered places to sit and read.  The selection was wide for such a small shop, and they enjoyed a small but loyal clientele.  It was the kind of place that people made a point to visit when they were in town, myself included.

My girlfriend was worried, however.  A new “big box” book superstore, part of a large national chain, had just opened in the next city over, offering even greater variety of titles than the little indie at which she worked, and at prices that were often quite a bit lower.  While the indie store’s base clients held firm, the casual book shoppers who often made the difference between the store making a profit or not in a given month were flocking to the superstore.  As much as I loved the little indie bookstore, I was a struggling young schoolteacher with a limited budget for books for my students, and found myself frequently shopping for classroom literature at the superstore as well, so as to stretch my dollars as far as I could.  I still patronized the little indie, but financial reality prevented me from doing as much business there as I would have liked.

A few months after my girlfriend and I began dating, that little indie bookstore where she worked went out of business.  The superstore ten miles away had won the battle.  In the final days of the indie, I spent a lot of money on discounted books at their going-out-of-business sale, and even purchased some of their fixtures for use in my classroom.  I had incredibly mixed feelings doing so, mind you.  It made me feel like some sort of vulture, scavenging from the remains of something that was once so vital.

By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were not nearly as many independent bookstores compared to just a generation earlier.  The large chain superstores had taken their toll and carved out a good chunk of the book-buying market.  Not only could they provide greater variety and lower prices for books, but they also had the room to sell music and videos, and to install full-service cafes as well.  They had the ability to set up discount clubs and to stage special in-store events on a regular basis with which most independent bookstores just could not compete.  

It wasn’t all wine and roses for the superstores, however.  The internet was taking a larger piece of the book sales pie.  Online-only booksellers with gigantic warehouses but no actual physical stores were growing in popularity.  If the chain superstores could deal with books in volume, the internet retailers, unrestricted by geography, could deal with them in MEGA volume.  You could shop for an almost infinite variety of books from your living room, and easily compare prices to get the very best deal.  E-books, which you could purchase usually much cheaper than a paper copy, and begin reading instantly, also grew in popularity.  That was and is a tough thing for any bricks-and-mortar bookseller to go up against, even a large corporate chain.  Several national chains went out of business, and others have closed stores or changed their marketing focus in order to try and stay afloat.  Unless you have a strong online component, these are very hard times indeed for booksellers.

Compounding the troubles is a problem faced by all booksellers, whether independent or chain, online or bricks-and-mortar, and that is the sad fact that people are just reading fewer books these days.  You don’t have to look very hard to see that more people, especially the under-30 crowd, are interested in television, video games, and interactive media than the “old-fashioned” linearity of a book as a means to pass the time.  It’s a seismic cultural shift.  I frankly don’t think it can be fully stopped, nor do I think it is entirely a bad thing, but I do think it can be slowed, and that we should be doing what we can to read more books ourselves and to encourage others to do the same.

I’ve had an e-reader for over three years now.  When I first got it, I used it almost exclusively for my reading.  Over time however, I’ve cut back on its use, and not intentionally.  I’ve just found myself drawn back to the sensation of having an open book in my hands.  I still read e-books, but the ratio of actual books to e-books for me has shifted to about 70% : 30%.  The whole e-books versus “paper books” debate is fodder for a separate post.

When I buy a paper book, I have been making an effort to do so from bricks-and-mortar retailers over the past few years, and avoid the online-only retailers when I can.  Bookstores still hold their allure for me, and I find myself drawn to them whenever I am nearby and have a free moment.  I travel around the state of Maine a lot, and make it a point to explore at least one or two bookstores on every trip.  Even if I have a stack of books still waiting to be read, I always buy at least one book when I visit a brick-and-mortar bookseller.  It’s not unlike buying a glass of lemonade from a child’s stand along the sidewalk.  Even if you are not thirsty, you want to support and encourage the effort.

To that end, I’d like to share a list of some of my favorite bookstores that I have explored in my travels in Maine.  Some of independent, some are parts of small regional chains, and a couple of part of large corporate chains.  

• Sherman’s Books and Stationery: A particular favorite. I’ve been to the stores in Bar Harbor, Freeport and Camden, and look forward to visiting their brand new store in the Old Port in Portland soon.
• Longfellow Books: For me, this is one of the very hearts of downtown Portland. I have yet to make a trip to the Old Port without stopping at Longfellow.
• Owl & Turtle: A cozy must-visit when exploring downtown Camden
• Stone Soup: Secondhand books galore in Camden
• The Briar Patch: Children’s books and toys in downtown Bangor.  A great place for gifts for the younger set.
• BookMarcs: A Bangor institution, featuring an extensive collection of Stephen King’s work, among numerous other titles.
• Barnes & Noble: While a different overall experience from the smaller bookstores, I really enjoy spending a few hours at B&N’s Augusta store whenever I get a chance.
• Bull Moose: With stores in Maine and New Hampshire, Bull Moose is my very favorite music store.  Their locations in Bangor, Scarborough and Mill Creek in South Portland have extensive book selections as well. Between the books and the music, I could literally spent a whole day at Bull Moose.
• Books-A-Million: Another national chain, BAM has stores in South Portland, Auburn and Bangor that I can explore for hours.

Fortunately, there are still many more Maine booksellers than these, though not as many as there once were.  I’ve chosen to restrict this list to my favorites that I have visited over the past few years.   With travel season not too far away, I am looking forward to visiting most of these again, and highly encourage you to do the same.  We are all better off for having thriving bookstores in our communities.