A sodium-colored moon followed us home from Portland for the equinox.
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schreibergasse picked us up on Friday night, under the other moon. We were very grateful not to have to deal with any further public transit—we got to the hotel, we flung our stuff around the room, and we collapsed. And then it turned out that the hotel bed was yielding to the point of insomnia, and the pillows were without form and void, and I couldn't find any position in which my head was not at the wrong angle to the rest of my body, and in consequence I am kind of underslept for two days. It does not matter.
We got up on Saturday and went to the sea.derspatchel has some photos, although they are all from the early afternoon before the fog blew off and the sun started to lighten all the glassy, deep-roaring greens of the waves. I forgot to bring even the terrible antiquated digital camera that went to Orlando with us in December. I could have gotten a great shot of Schreiber' with his sweater tied round his waist, standing far out on a foam-skipped promontory like a cormorant. Rob was photographing time in the quartzite, phyllite, bark-flaking beds of Two Lights. The tide was high and still coming in as we climbed northeast over the ledges, so I couldn't show him the best tidepools, full of barnacles and gilt-green weed, but I fished out pictures from 2006 and 2009 to give an idea afterward. We could hear the foghorn sounding the closer we got to the old lighthouse. The seagulls were huge and unafraid, not even ruffling from the rocks as we passed. I don't think anyone got a picture, but at one point we passed huge rusty staples in the rock, like shackles or the handholds of a ladder, going down from high-tide into the waves; the sea had broken most of them open. The same tangle of netting and cables was still caught between two boulders that I remembered seeing seven years ago. We had late-ish lunch at the Lobster Shack where I used to eat tiny, sweet fried shrimp with lots and lots of tartar sauce (fried clams, this time, and the milk-soaked onions off the top of Rob's chowder) and then walked back up the road until we were distracted by a park trail. We found the fire control tower.
The weather forecast threatened rain for Sunday, so instead of heading back into Portland for museums, we stopped at a Hannaford's in South Portland so that Rob and I could buy some of the travel necessities we'd skipped on our way out of Davis and so that Schreiber' could show us an edge of salt marsh coming in to meet the bay, with salt grasses and a cormorant swimming in the smooth-rippling water and little olive-backed crabs crawling around in the roots and silt. I gathered stones there, because I hadn't from Two Lights. (They ask you not to.) We called my mother for directions and drove out to Beth El Memorial Park, where both of my grandparents are now buried. There were pine needles all over the nameplates. Rob helped me brush them off. I would like to have been able to introduce him to both of them, but telling stories has to do: leaving memories along with the cairn. We did not drive by their old house, mostly because of time. Google street view, though, thinks the two-story pussy willow is still there.
And then I gave myself culture shock by walking up and down Exchange Street in Portland's Old Port, which has almost no businesses remaining from the mid-'90's that I remember. At least the movie theater isn't dead, although its former lobby now seems to be occupied by something that sells stuffed animal lobsters to tourists; it moved to the Portland Museum of Art. I couldn't find the store where my grandmother bought the space pen that was stolen from me in high school. I think the place that sells and repairs watches might have been the same. Maybe one of the art galleries. Definitely not all the gastropubs. Or the clothing boutiques. Or the Starbucks. I had at least warned both of my travel companions that there would be yelling, but I think I had hoped there would be less to yell about. To recover, Schreiber' took us up Congress Street to Silly's: they lived up to their name. The size alone of the pulled pork wrap I ended up ordering was ridiculous, never mind the fact that the curry milkshake with which I accompanied it was delicious (I ordered it out of curiosity; I assumed it was a stunt drink. It was savory, spicy, basically Massaman, and I am only sorry it is not possible to order shakes made with coconut milk at Silly's—I'll try it with rice milk instead of dairy next time), never mind the fact that chasing the meal with Grand Marnier-, Frangelico-, and cayenne-spiked hot chocolate was a tasty and viable idea as opposed to a hideous miscalculation. I'm not even talking about anyone else's order. We walked with Schreiber' back to his place afterward, passing under the Portland Observatory, which I associate with Fourth of July fireworks over Casco Bay. Rob and I took the long way home, around the Portland Public Library and darkened record shops and art spaces and some things that used to be theaters and some things that still are, and I felt a lot better about the city.
(My poem "In Conclusion" has been accepted by Ideomancer. It's about Death. That's not bad timing for autumn.)
And Sunday was museums. And bookstores. Kind of alternating. We had to be out of the hotel by noon, so we stashed our bags with the front desk and walked up Fore Street to the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum, which is found by following train-silhouette signs through a maze of brick warehouses and loading docks until you come to the old railyard fronting the water, where for the last two nights an idiotically immense cruise ship had been parked, lit up like Las Vegas. We'd missed the special event of the steam engine (and a soda speakeasy) on Saturday, but I do not think we felt any detriment wandering around the beautiful old passenger cars and signal lanterns and telegraphy paraphernalia. When I went outside, a massive tanker was being guided into the harbor by three little tugs. Then we turned in the direction of the Portland Museum of Art and were sequentially distracted by Vena's Fizz House (there will be an addendum to this post where I rave about their ginger julep, because it may actually have achieved my Platonic ideal of a ginger soda), Longfellow Books (not dead after all! also I should talk about Paul French's Midnight in Peking (2011), because I read it on the train back), and Yes Books (smelling terribly of old cigarette smoke, but I came out with a signed paperback of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), which I've been wanting to re-read since Boneland this spring), and rather distressed to discover that the Old Port Candy Co. and the rest of its block had been closed because of fire. We would not have been able to eat at Street and Co. on Friday night even if we'd gotten in at the expected hour. I hope they reopen soon; I once ate a whole fish there.
On the recommendation of the woman at the front desk, we started on the fourth floor of the Museum of Art and worked our way down, from Winslow Homer's engravings of the Civil War to the eighteenth-century portraits in the adjoining house. There had been substantial renovations since I was last there, such that I couldn't recognize where anything was: but unlike the gentrification of Exchange Street, it gave me no disorientation at all, because as we descended I discovered Kandinsky's Stramm (1929) and a bright still life of shell-flowers the color of pomegranates and sunset by Max Ernst and Delvaux's The Greeting (1938) and tumbling seascapes by Homer and Andrew Wyeth (N.C.'s was weirdly stiff and inorganic: the waves as grittily sparked as blue sandpaper) and other artists whose names I should have written down, except my usual pad of paper was back in my computer bag at the hotel. Marguerite Zorach. Dahlov Ipcar. Leon Kroll. I wish I had some idea who Henry Gustav Beyer, Jr. was, with his deep-set eyes and silvery close-cut hair. And then we found Benjamin Paul Akers' The Pearl Diver (1858), of which I cannot find a suitable picture on the internet, because I don't think there are any. It is the sculpture I would visit with my grandmother. I don't know how old I was when I saw it for the first time. I never remembered the death in the statue, only the long-lidded closed eyes, the hair streaming away like weed, the wet cording of the net at the diver's waist, dragged down with seawater and the weight of shells. The marble of his skin (it must be his, although I do not remember ever thinking about the gender, either) is so cleanly polished, it recalls nacre itself, the smooth-scoured inside of clam shell. The body bows backward, strangely fallen asleep; there is coral branching under the feet, little sea stars and coiled shells embedded in the sand to either side. Tossed up by the storm. I was disappointed when Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles (1863) turned out to have nothing to do with the sculpture, it seemed to have so obvious a story of its own, that I just didn't know. It was somewhere different in the museum then. They call it The Dead Pearl Diver now. We spent a while with it. I was glad.
And when we ran out of museum, we walked back along Middle Street to Duckfat, which I had remembered vividly since last December. We split a cup of tomato fennel soup, a paper cone of cinnamon-dusted doughnut holes, the smaller size of their house poutine because otherwise we'd have hurt ourselves. Truffle ketchup is a good idea. So is toasted curry mayonnaise. So are homebrewed sodas and a salted duckfat caramel chocolate milkshake. This time we caught the Downeaster, which turned out to run right through Somerville on its way from Woburn to North Station. I read most of the way. The weather had turned brisk and cold as we walked to Lechmere to catch the bus home. Which is where I am now, needing to shower and make myself sleep because tomorrow morning we are driving out withrushthatspeaks and gaudior to the Big E and there will be rides and pierogi and dog trials and the Avenue of States, whose most memorable features from last year were stuffed quahogs from Rhode Island, baked potatoes I don't know why from Maine, and that terrifying miniaturized experience of driving through Connecticut, total absence of apparent restrooms included. It will be wonderful.
Portland was wonderful, too.
schreibergasse picked us up on Friday night, under the other moon. We were very grateful not to have to deal with any further public transit—we got to the hotel, we flung our stuff around the room, and we collapsed. And then it turned out that the hotel bed was yielding to the point of insomnia, and the pillows were without form and void, and I couldn't find any position in which my head was not at the wrong angle to the rest of my body, and in consequence I am kind of underslept for two days. It does not matter.We got up on Saturday and went to the sea.
derspatchel has some photos, although they are all from the early afternoon before the fog blew off and the sun started to lighten all the glassy, deep-roaring greens of the waves. I forgot to bring even the terrible antiquated digital camera that went to Orlando with us in December. I could have gotten a great shot of Schreiber' with his sweater tied round his waist, standing far out on a foam-skipped promontory like a cormorant. Rob was photographing time in the quartzite, phyllite, bark-flaking beds of Two Lights. The tide was high and still coming in as we climbed northeast over the ledges, so I couldn't show him the best tidepools, full of barnacles and gilt-green weed, but I fished out pictures from 2006 and 2009 to give an idea afterward. We could hear the foghorn sounding the closer we got to the old lighthouse. The seagulls were huge and unafraid, not even ruffling from the rocks as we passed. I don't think anyone got a picture, but at one point we passed huge rusty staples in the rock, like shackles or the handholds of a ladder, going down from high-tide into the waves; the sea had broken most of them open. The same tangle of netting and cables was still caught between two boulders that I remembered seeing seven years ago. We had late-ish lunch at the Lobster Shack where I used to eat tiny, sweet fried shrimp with lots and lots of tartar sauce (fried clams, this time, and the milk-soaked onions off the top of Rob's chowder) and then walked back up the road until we were distracted by a park trail. We found the fire control tower.The weather forecast threatened rain for Sunday, so instead of heading back into Portland for museums, we stopped at a Hannaford's in South Portland so that Rob and I could buy some of the travel necessities we'd skipped on our way out of Davis and so that Schreiber' could show us an edge of salt marsh coming in to meet the bay, with salt grasses and a cormorant swimming in the smooth-rippling water and little olive-backed crabs crawling around in the roots and silt. I gathered stones there, because I hadn't from Two Lights. (They ask you not to.) We called my mother for directions and drove out to Beth El Memorial Park, where both of my grandparents are now buried. There were pine needles all over the nameplates. Rob helped me brush them off. I would like to have been able to introduce him to both of them, but telling stories has to do: leaving memories along with the cairn. We did not drive by their old house, mostly because of time. Google street view, though, thinks the two-story pussy willow is still there.
And then I gave myself culture shock by walking up and down Exchange Street in Portland's Old Port, which has almost no businesses remaining from the mid-'90's that I remember. At least the movie theater isn't dead, although its former lobby now seems to be occupied by something that sells stuffed animal lobsters to tourists; it moved to the Portland Museum of Art. I couldn't find the store where my grandmother bought the space pen that was stolen from me in high school. I think the place that sells and repairs watches might have been the same. Maybe one of the art galleries. Definitely not all the gastropubs. Or the clothing boutiques. Or the Starbucks. I had at least warned both of my travel companions that there would be yelling, but I think I had hoped there would be less to yell about. To recover, Schreiber' took us up Congress Street to Silly's: they lived up to their name. The size alone of the pulled pork wrap I ended up ordering was ridiculous, never mind the fact that the curry milkshake with which I accompanied it was delicious (I ordered it out of curiosity; I assumed it was a stunt drink. It was savory, spicy, basically Massaman, and I am only sorry it is not possible to order shakes made with coconut milk at Silly's—I'll try it with rice milk instead of dairy next time), never mind the fact that chasing the meal with Grand Marnier-, Frangelico-, and cayenne-spiked hot chocolate was a tasty and viable idea as opposed to a hideous miscalculation. I'm not even talking about anyone else's order. We walked with Schreiber' back to his place afterward, passing under the Portland Observatory, which I associate with Fourth of July fireworks over Casco Bay. Rob and I took the long way home, around the Portland Public Library and darkened record shops and art spaces and some things that used to be theaters and some things that still are, and I felt a lot better about the city.
(My poem "In Conclusion" has been accepted by Ideomancer. It's about Death. That's not bad timing for autumn.)
And Sunday was museums. And bookstores. Kind of alternating. We had to be out of the hotel by noon, so we stashed our bags with the front desk and walked up Fore Street to the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum, which is found by following train-silhouette signs through a maze of brick warehouses and loading docks until you come to the old railyard fronting the water, where for the last two nights an idiotically immense cruise ship had been parked, lit up like Las Vegas. We'd missed the special event of the steam engine (and a soda speakeasy) on Saturday, but I do not think we felt any detriment wandering around the beautiful old passenger cars and signal lanterns and telegraphy paraphernalia. When I went outside, a massive tanker was being guided into the harbor by three little tugs. Then we turned in the direction of the Portland Museum of Art and were sequentially distracted by Vena's Fizz House (there will be an addendum to this post where I rave about their ginger julep, because it may actually have achieved my Platonic ideal of a ginger soda), Longfellow Books (not dead after all! also I should talk about Paul French's Midnight in Peking (2011), because I read it on the train back), and Yes Books (smelling terribly of old cigarette smoke, but I came out with a signed paperback of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), which I've been wanting to re-read since Boneland this spring), and rather distressed to discover that the Old Port Candy Co. and the rest of its block had been closed because of fire. We would not have been able to eat at Street and Co. on Friday night even if we'd gotten in at the expected hour. I hope they reopen soon; I once ate a whole fish there.
On the recommendation of the woman at the front desk, we started on the fourth floor of the Museum of Art and worked our way down, from Winslow Homer's engravings of the Civil War to the eighteenth-century portraits in the adjoining house. There had been substantial renovations since I was last there, such that I couldn't recognize where anything was: but unlike the gentrification of Exchange Street, it gave me no disorientation at all, because as we descended I discovered Kandinsky's Stramm (1929) and a bright still life of shell-flowers the color of pomegranates and sunset by Max Ernst and Delvaux's The Greeting (1938) and tumbling seascapes by Homer and Andrew Wyeth (N.C.'s was weirdly stiff and inorganic: the waves as grittily sparked as blue sandpaper) and other artists whose names I should have written down, except my usual pad of paper was back in my computer bag at the hotel. Marguerite Zorach. Dahlov Ipcar. Leon Kroll. I wish I had some idea who Henry Gustav Beyer, Jr. was, with his deep-set eyes and silvery close-cut hair. And then we found Benjamin Paul Akers' The Pearl Diver (1858), of which I cannot find a suitable picture on the internet, because I don't think there are any. It is the sculpture I would visit with my grandmother. I don't know how old I was when I saw it for the first time. I never remembered the death in the statue, only the long-lidded closed eyes, the hair streaming away like weed, the wet cording of the net at the diver's waist, dragged down with seawater and the weight of shells. The marble of his skin (it must be his, although I do not remember ever thinking about the gender, either) is so cleanly polished, it recalls nacre itself, the smooth-scoured inside of clam shell. The body bows backward, strangely fallen asleep; there is coral branching under the feet, little sea stars and coiled shells embedded in the sand to either side. Tossed up by the storm. I was disappointed when Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles (1863) turned out to have nothing to do with the sculpture, it seemed to have so obvious a story of its own, that I just didn't know. It was somewhere different in the museum then. They call it The Dead Pearl Diver now. We spent a while with it. I was glad.
And when we ran out of museum, we walked back along Middle Street to Duckfat, which I had remembered vividly since last December. We split a cup of tomato fennel soup, a paper cone of cinnamon-dusted doughnut holes, the smaller size of their house poutine because otherwise we'd have hurt ourselves. Truffle ketchup is a good idea. So is toasted curry mayonnaise. So are homebrewed sodas and a salted duckfat caramel chocolate milkshake. This time we caught the Downeaster, which turned out to run right through Somerville on its way from Woburn to North Station. I read most of the way. The weather had turned brisk and cold as we walked to Lechmere to catch the bus home. Which is where I am now, needing to shower and make myself sleep because tomorrow morning we are driving out with
rushthatspeaks and gaudior to the Big E and there will be rides and pierogi and dog trials and the Avenue of States, whose most memorable features from last year were stuffed quahogs from Rhode Island, baked potatoes I don't know why from Maine, and that terrifying miniaturized experience of driving through Connecticut, total absence of apparent restrooms included. It will be wonderful.Portland was wonderful, too.
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