I Am So Popular: Maine Stay

Tony could not be accused of being a romantic during our brief time together. One night, after yet another bender, we got the idea to visit a friend who lived on the outskirts of town on a non-working farm. Our friend was asleep and so Tony lured me into the abandoned building that had once been a pigsty. When I awoke, in the splitting headache grog of yet another hangover, he was gone. It makes for a good anecdote now—“You think you had bad boyfriends? I had one who left me in a pigsty!” At the time though, it wasn’t very funny.

Yet despite this and other moments of rejection that I fought to rationalize or ignore, Tony certainly had some good qualities. What he lacked in the flowers and chocolate department, he made up for with other gifts. He might’ve been crap at the time for a potential longterm partner, but the man knew his way around nature the way I knew my own way around the inside of a liquor store. During our brief fling in Tennessee, and later on my platonic visits to West Virginia, he showed me glorious things. Leaves changing, river rafting that started pre-dawn and culminated with a night sky bejeweled with a full moon rising, drill cores striped with layers of colorful rock.

Shortly before he left me behind, we took a road trip to, of all places, New Jersey, where he— a nature worshipping only child— could not comprehend the chaos of my eight siblings and my father’s declaration that he was going to chop down a black walnut tree as a solution to the squirrel’s spitting nut juice on the old beater cars he kept in the yard. During that excursion, I took him to see the Atlantic, his first time to see an ocean, and I took a pride in that, as if I personally had fashioned this massive body of water for his pleasure.

We stayed in touch, sporadically. Once, years later, living in Austin, nursing my heart broken yet again, I called him. “I just wanted to tell you what an asshole you were to me when we dated,” I said, years after the fact.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“You were an asshole,” I said.

“I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”

Fast forward to last week. I was on my third annual trip to Monhegan Island, twelve miles off the coast of Maine, to partake in a knitting retreat. For days I hiked this paradise, knitted til my hands hurt, and enjoyed gourmet meals served at frequent intervals. Bliss doesn’t capture this escape. When I am on that island, I am out of my head with joy.

Tony lives in Maine now, with his wife and their two kids. Pamela is a stunning human and over the years we’ve built a friendship at least as strong as that I share with her husband. In 2008, after my island trip, I drove up to spend a couple of days with them, a city girl envious of what they have created: house in the woods, sustainable food garden, goats and chickens, a freezer stocked with meat they hunt themselves. Pamela spins and knits and loves on those kids and I fantasize that in another place and time I could have had such a life—no, I don’t mean married to Tony. I mean immersed in a lifestyle less focused on driving and web surfing and city comforts and revolving more around the self-sufficiency of hard back-to-the-earth work, dirty hands, and daily hikes.

This year, I invited them to join me on the island. The kids had never been to an island and their giddy anticipation was palpable as Pamela and I exchanged emails about logistics. When Ana and Hayden spotted me walking into the Monhegan House where we were all staying in little rooms reminiscent of Van Gogh’s bedroom portrait, they embraced me. They gave me homemade gifts—hand loomed potholders and hand stamped cards, these made from gifts I’d bestowed on them two years prior.

To the delight of my fellow retreat attendees, Ana and Hayden sat down to knit with us. Picture this: a six and seven year-old sister and brother happily knitting away among a group of 40, 50, 60 and 70-somethings, exclaiming about their hike into the forest, describing the little fairy houses they built from twigs and shells and moss, showing off a pebble smoothed by ocean tumbling.

They didn’t stay long, not even 48 hours. But we fit in a hike together, just the four of us-- Tony having stayed home to care for the animals. We marched out to cliff’s edge and watched the sun sparkle across the Atlantic, the same ocean I’d once shown their father for the first time. We spotted a seal, and then another. They climbed over a wrecked and rusty ship hull, and called me to the tide pools, pointing out natural beauty I surely would have overlooked on my own. We scoured the rocks for sea glass, filling our pockets. In each of them I could clearly see elements of both of their parents, physical attributes and curiosity, determination, strength, and an absolute pure delight in nature’s gifts.

Time and again, Hayden would sidle up to me and take my hand in his, steering me up or down a rough patch on the trail, gently pointing out a protruding root, a loose rock, cautioning and encouraging me at once. I couldn’t help but recall the hell hikes his father led me on, decades before, charging up ahead, toughening me up, demonstrating I had a heretofore unknown tenacity and the burgeoning skills to stumble from point A to point B on my own, if not gracefully then at least with satisfaction at my accomplishment. Pamela, familiar with this sink-or-swim technique of her husband’s, recalled a hike early on in their courtship when, attempting to keep up, she found herself tangled in a branch, her only hope of moving forward cutting off her long braid.

I have, I know, often made sport of analyzing, dissecting, lamenting, and eviscerating any number of wrong men with whom I’ve mixed it up over the years. And I know—really I do—that despite my complaints there’s some value in embracing the notion that everything happens for a reason, that whatever pain I experienced was, as the saying goes, another fucking opportunity for growth. But what I am, at long last, coming to value even more is the incredible gift that time’s passing and only hindsight’s clarity can allow.

It was this looking back as I tromped around the island, my hand clutched by the little son of a man who, I once melodramatically imagined, had broken my heart beyond repair, that fed the week’s bliss. Unintentional patience-- forced upon me by decades of lessons taught through all those times that, in the moment, seemed so muddy and senseless—now yielded joy.

I never mind getting older. I still have my outbursts, my low moments of thinking that whatever it is that is eating me might never pass, might really take me down. But too, I have now acquired enough data so that— if only I can remember to breathe deeply and look out across the sparkling ocean of experience— I can see that sooner or later, almost everything can make some sort of sense. Tony and I, barely into our twenties when we met, came together perhaps in a “wrong” way, not at all cut out for a partnership. But we were drawn to each other not without good cause. And as we have maneuvered around the root and rock riddled path of our lives, we have managed to come to a clearing, our long distance friendship nurtured in fits and starts, giving us gifts neither of us could have foreseen, packaged in these stunning children and their amazing mother, the embodiment of a different but no less powerful kind of love shared.

Spike Gillespie highly recommends Maine as a vacation destination. She blogs for KnitBuzz and herself. And she’s hosting Bitch, Bitch, Bitch at the Cactus Café on October 6th at 8 pm—it’s a free show so come on out.