"Alligators love dog meat."

“Alligators love dog meat” – just one more thing I’ve learned from faithfully reading Mark Trail.

Years ago, in the 1960s and ‘70s, I used to read the strip in the New Haven Register. Now I read it in the Lewiston Sun-Journal, where it vies with Nancy for the title of Most Boring Comic Ever (and wins, hands down, for Most Badly Drawn).

From Wikipedia: “as noted by Jack Hill [the son of cartoonist Tom Hill, who drew many of the Mark Trail strips from 1946 until his death in 1978], ‘the quality of Mark Trail declined after 1978,’ with a loss of accuracy and detail and ‘a free-floating approach to perspective.’ In addition, time froze: scenes and plots have been recycled from the past. According to King Features, Mark now stays ‘forever 32’. The characters no longer evolve or show much of their earlier personalities. Ironically, these changes, along with predictable villains (who invariably have facial hair with especially pronounced sideburns), uneven art work, quirky dialog, and misplaced speech balloons (often pointed at foregrounded animals), created an amusing charm that attracted a new following among fans called ‘Trailheads’.”

As bad as it is, reading Mark Trail is like watching a train wreck—as much as I don’t want to, I just can’t pull myself away.

And I’m not alone. A couple of years ago, the Sun-Journal dropped the strip, along with Spiderman (the only comic I never even bothered to glance at), and replaced them with Baby Blues and Crankshaft—one strip that resonates with parents of young children, and another that speaks to middle-agers looking after their own parents—a nice balance, I think.

It probably wouldn’t have taken me long to stop wondering whether Andy, the loyal St. Bernard, would arrive on the scene in time to save Mark from the latest sideburned villain, or whether the competitive, immoral, and annoying Kelly Welly would make yet another play for Mark’s affections. But after about three months of fielding vociferous complaints from loyal Trail fans, the newspaper reinstated the strip by moving Dilbert to the business page. (Now if only we could get them to bring back the TV Preview that used to come in the Saturday paper….)

Come to find out, Mark Trail is a pretty popular guy. Over the years, he has appeared in a number of coloring books published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, aimed at educating kids about conservation and the environment. (Although I don’t personally know anyone who ever owned the coloring book Mark Trail Tells the Story of a Fish in Trouble, I’m sure it was an exciting and informative read.)

There were two different Mark Trail radio shows in the early 1950s, one on ABC and one on Mutual Broadcasting System. A third radio show, Mark Trail Radio Theatre, ran for 11 years, from 1991 until 2002, on

Minneapolis-St. Paul public radio station KFAI.

In 1991, Congress designated 16,400 acres along the Appalachian Trail in Georgia as the Mark Trail Wilderness. (Do you think they know he’s a comic strip character?)

And in 1997, Mark became the official mascot of the NOAA, and the voice of the National Weather Service. (“What th’?! Another hurricane?!”)

Of course, Mark has also garnered his share of less than flattering attention. The blog Nobody Loves Rusty, which is devoted entirely to the strip, calls it “one of America’s oldest and most terrible comic strips.”

Then there’s the website that offers five “Bad Guy Rules,” just in case you should require assistance in recognizing Mark Trail artist Jack Elrod’s cleverly drawn Bad Guys for the villains they are:

• If a character has long sideburns, he is always evil to the core.

• Men with hair any longer than collar length are bad news.

• Any character, even if innocuous in appearance, is suspect if they hesitate when responding to a legitimate question.

• Unless smiling and of a friendly visage, Heavy-Set Bald Guys are always villains

• Bad guys often have bent or broken noses.

Here are a few other tidbits I learned today:

• The strip was drawn in a second floor studio in creator Ed Dodds' home (which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). The studio overlooked a 130-acre forest in suburban Atlanta called...you guessed it--Lost Forest.

• In the early days of the comic strip, Mark was rarely seen without a pipe clenched in his teeth, but he gave it up in 1983 under pressure from anti-smoking activists.

• Mark and Cherry finally got married in 1993, after a 47-year courtship.

• Supposedly, according to numerous websites, Andy was neutered in 2000, although I wasn’t able to find out any more details, such as whether Doc performed the surgery (he is a veterinarian, after all) or whether the procedure was prompted by any specific behavior on Andy’s part, such as a propensity for humping the furniture or a dalliance with a neighbor’s poodle. In any case, Andy had better watch his step because, as we keep reminding our dog Remy when he misbehaves, “Alligators love dog meat.”

Marriage equality takes a hit in Maine

I was hoping that I would wake up Wednesday morning, turn on the radio, and hear the wonderful news that Question 1 on yesterday’s ballot—the “People’s Veto” referendum to overturn the Maine legislature’s decision to make same-sex marriage legal in our state—had been soundly defeated.

The earliest poll results looked promising, with No On 1 leading, 55% to 45% when only five percent of the votes were in. But by the time I went to bed, 38 percent of the votes had been tallied, and the race was a virtual dead heat, with No On 1 leading by only about 250 votes, and I began to consider, for the very first time, the possibility that the referendum might pass.

I knew from the beginning that it would be close, but I honestly thought we Mainers would live up to our reputation as fair and decent human beings, not inclined to meddle too much in other people’s business.

I’m sorry to say I was wrong.

I never heard a single solid argument against retaining the law allowing same-sex couples to marry that wasn’t based on religious grounds, and I’m frustrated a) that people were apparently unable to separate the concept of religious marriage from that of civil marriage (you know, civil, as in “civil rights”), and b) that the religious argument would sway so many people in a state that ranks 6^th from the bottom in regular church attendance.

Since most of the time I think I come across as kind of a shy, quiet, frumpy 50-year-old mom, some people are probably surprised when they discover that underneath the dowdy exterior beats the heart of a flaming liberal, at least when it come to social issues. (This is probably why I get approached by people like the “Yes On 1” people who tried to interest me in signing their petition at the dump one day last summer.)

I try to be respectful of people whose viewpoints are diametrically opposed to mine, which isn’t usually very difficult, since I’m a big believer in the avoidance of confrontation, and since I usually figure that in most cases, people are a product of their upbringing and it’s pretty hard to change after the age of ten or so.

But I’m having a hard time watching the news footage of the jubilant “Stand for Marriage Maine” people (“Praise God for the work He has done!”), as they celebrate the “preservation of marriage,” without entertaining thoughts of sucker-punches, or at least the judicious application of a Nerf bat to a few thick skulls.

Because the thing is, those folks on the “Vote Yes On 1” side woke up on Wednesday morning with all their rights intact and their lives virtually unchanged—whereas if Question 1 had been defeated, they would have woken up on Wednesday morning with…all their rights intact and their lives virtually unchanged.

When it gets right down to it, they just didn’t have that much at stake…certainly not enough to warrant the kind of effort they put forth to deny others their basic civil rights.

And even if your viewpoint on this issue is a result of your upbringing, or your religious views, or your homophobia, or whatever, I’m sorry, but it’s time to grow up and think for yourself.

I was only dreamin'

On Saturday morning when I woke up, I was dreaming about Scrabble. I dreamed that I was at camp, getting ready to play a game of Scrabble with two other people, who were probably Tony and Will, although I never saw them in my dream. I had taken the game down from the shelf in the spare bedroom and opened the box to set up the board, when I discovered that the cloth drawstring bag with the letter tiles was missing.

In my dream, I didn’t sigh, or swear, or slam the lid back on the box. Instead, I went to the kitchen and got a box of Wheat Thins from the cupboard. I spread them out on newspaper on the table and sprayed them with a spray can of polyurethane that just happened to be sitting around close at hand. Then I took a permanent black marker and started writing the letters, and their numerical values, on the crackers.

Then I woke up.

My first thought, upon waking, was how clever my dream self had been to have come up with such a unique and creative solution—immediately, without any fuss, without wondering if it could possibly work, and without even getting annoyed about the loss of the original letter tiles.

For a whole thirty seconds or so, I basked in my dream self’s brilliance, and mused sleepily that if I were ever shipwrecked on a desert island with a fellow castaway who liked to play Scrabble (and a box of Wheat Thins), I could make my own Scrabble game—concocting ink from smashed-up berries and scratching a game board in the sand, of course. (And if I were shipwrecked without company, I could always play two hands myself, something my mother liked to do now and then when she couldn’t find a Scrabble partner, as we discovered from some old score sheets we found in her Scrabble box that detailed contests between “Right” and “Left.”)

But by the time I was fully awake, I was already criticizing my dream self’s clever solution, pointing out in my head that a) Wheat Thins are actually too big to fit on the spaces on the board, b) polyurethane would have taken time to dry, and c) the whole exercise would have been unnecessary, since there are at least three extra Scrabble sets on the shelf at camp from which I could have pirated letter tiles. (Whenever my mother saw a Scrabble game at a yard sale, no matter how dilapidated the box or how ragged the game board, she bought it, out of an ever-present fear that someday she was going to lose at least one letter tile from her own battle-scarred set—the one with family scoring records dating back to the 1960s written on the inside of the lid. Despite her worry, I don’t think we have ever lost a single letter tile from a single Scrabble game, and I believe each of those beat-up maroon boxes contains a perfect set of 100 tiles. But still, you never know, and my mother liked to have her bases covered, just in case.)

The dream, and my reaction to it, both initially and after I woke up a bit and began to think “rationally,” have made me think a lot about the potential of dreams for problem-solving.

There are lots of websites devoted to using dreams to solve real-life problems, so apparently there’s actually something to it. As I understand it, when we’re in deep, or REM, sleep (the time when we’re most likely to dream), our minds are not constrained by pesky things like logic or practicality, so we’re able to see and consider possibilities that we would automatically dismiss when awake. (Thanks to Wikipedia and Will for some interesting information about REM sleep.)

Unfortunately, I seldom remember my dreams, so I’m probably missing out on some great problem-solving potential. Maybe I should try harder. I remember a book on dream analysis that Maria had when we were in high school, which advocated falling asleep at night to the repeated mantra, “I will catch a dream tonight.”

There are also websites on mastering “dream incubation techniques,” that tell you how to improve your chances of having and remembering useful dreams. There’s even an article at eHow.com on “How to Have and Decipher a Problem Solving or Insight Dream.” (There’s also an eHow.com article on “How to Cast a Spell for Getting Prophetic Dreams.” Hmmm.)

Maybe I’ll try tapping into my dream self’s obviously brilliant problem-solving potential. God knows I have plenty of things I wouldn’t mind having worked out for me while I sleep.

A New Month's Resolution

Last New Year’s Day, I made a resolution to floss my teeth every day, and I’m happy to say that, ten months into 2009, I haven’t missed a single day. This marks the first time in my entire life that I’ve actually kept a New Year’s resolution, and I’m pretty excited about that.

For 2010, I’ve been thinking that I need to resolve to do more reading and writing—I’d like to vow to do some of both every single day—and wondering how I can be as successful at keeping next year’s resolutions. I thought maybe a trial run would help, and since today is the first day of a new month, it seems like a good time to start. What with my annual confusion over the end of Daylight Savings Time and a night of odd dreams (quite possibly brought on by the consumption of too much of the Halloween candy we didn’t give out to trick-or-treaters--because we didn’t have any trick-or-treaters), I forgot to say “Rabbit rabbit” when I woke up this morning, but perhaps making a New Month Resolution will bring me good luck, as well as be good practice for the coming New Year.

I’m thinking I should start small: at least 15 minutes a day of each, with some fairly lenient rules about what actually constitutes reading and writing. While I’d like to spend several hours every day working on the Great American Novel, and several more reading books to improve my mind/my writing/my soul, I think that if I want to have a shot at success, I’d better work up to that in stages.

Since I already read nearly every night at bedtime, I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble keeping that resolution. (Whether or not my usual reading is the sort of stuff that’s going to improve my mind/writing/soul is open for debate, but, as I said, I’m starting small.)

The writing, however, is more of a problem. It’s far too easy for me to talk myself out of sitting down at the computer (or sitting down with a notebook) unless I have an uninterrupted stretch of, say, two to four hours ahead of me. And since that happens…oh, maybe once a month if I’m lucky, I’m going to start with a resolution to write at least 15 minutes a day in a journal.

Since I type a lot faster than I write longhand, and since I’m eternally hopeful that, when I sit down to write about whatever pops into my head, I might accidentally produce something brilliant that I will then want to save, post, or publish, I’m going to do my writing on the computer whenever possible.

It has occurred to me that possibly the best way to ensure that I keep my resolution would be to post everything I write, every day, on my blog, thereby creating Lofty Expectations among my faithful readers that I might feel compelled to meet. However, it has also occurred to me that it’s very likely that most of what I write in a 15-minute burst of emptying my head onto the screen, usually at the end of the day when I’m tired and quite possible cranky, won’t be worth reading. Since I’m reluctant to risk losing readers (or having anyone use phrases like “verbal vomit” in connection with my blog) I’ll wait and see how these daily entries turn out before deciding whether or not to post them.

My main intention, now that I’m no longer writing every day at work, is to keep the writer in my brain functioning fairly smoothly, so that when I do have some bigger blocks of time, I’ll be able to sit down at the computer and just start writing. Otherwise, every time I get ready to write, I’m apt to find myself having to slog my way back through all the other parts of my brain—those parts that would rather check email and Facebook, search for recipes, or browse Amazon.com instead of getting down to business.

I should also confess that I’ve just finished reading the introductory chapters of a book called No Plot? No Problem!, written by Chris Baty, who created National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s now known. During NaNoWriMo, which happens to begin today, aspiring novelists take on the challenge of producing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. NaNoWriMo began in 1999 with 21 writers, and last year had over 120,000 participants.

I don’t have time to write a novel in November, not this year, and probably not ever. This year, I’ve just started a new job, I’ve just checked three interesting-looking books out of the library, and I’ve just vowed to get my house clean (or at least cleaner) by the end of this month. Next year, I’ll probably have another bunch of good excuses, and, anyway, with Thanksgiving and Christmas looming, November just doesn’t seem like a good time to take hundreds of hours away from everything else in my life.

February, however, is looking promising. I won’t say that I am going to try to write a 50,000-word novel in February; I’ll just say that, after reading Baty’s book, I’m intrigued, and, well…I might. The weather in February doesn’t have much to recommend it, as far as I’m concerned, and I do have a week off during that month. So, as my mother was fond of saying, “We’ll see.”

In the meantime,

Resolved: I will spend at least 15 minutes a day writing in this journal, and if what I produce happens to strike me as creative, amusing, pithy, or brilliant, I’ll post it here. Don’t hold your breath.


PS: It took me way longer than 15 minutes to write this—almost an hour—but it’s about a thousand words. Does that mean I could write a 50,000-word novel in 50 hours? Probably not, since novels require a measure of planning and cohesiveness that journal entries (and blog posts) don’t, but it’s an interesting thought.

"Will anyone know I was here?"

Well, it turns out that I am a Scanner. At least that’s the name self-help book author Barbara Sher coined for people like me, in her book Refuse to Choose!: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love.

I don’t usually put too much stock in the ideas presented by self-help books, since I think most of the information they provide is stuff most of us could probably figure out for ourselves if we had a chance to sit down in a quiet place and think about things long enough, but every once in a while I do read something in one that gives me an “aha moment.”

(The unfortunately-named John Hildenbiddle, Senior Vice President of Mutual of Omaha [which, incidentally, is now calling itself “the official sponsor of the aha moment”—what’s up with that? Isn’t that kind of like calling yourself “the official sponsor of fun” or “the official sponsor of enlightenment” or “the official sponsor of peace” or the official sponsor of anything else that means something completely different to everyone? But they probably paid someone big bucks to come up with the idea of sponsoring the aha moment and to get people interested in voting on the ten best aha moments, which they’ll then make into commercials to sell insurance…go figure. {One of my personal aha moments recently was figuring out that if I had all the money back that I’ve spent all my life so far on insurance I haven’t needed, I’d have…well…maybe enough money to buy insurance for the rest of my life.}] calls the aha moment “a moment of clarity, a deeply personal defining moment where you gain real wisdom.”)

This is Sher’s description of Scanners, the thing I read this morning that gave me an aha moment: “Intense curiosity about numerous unrelated subjects is one of the most basic characteristics of a Scanner. Scanners are endlessly inquisitive. In fact, Scanners often describe themselves as being hopelessly interested in everything….A Scanner doesn’t want to specialize in any of the things she loves, because that means giving up all the rest.”

Aha!

I’ll be starting a new job tomorrow, for the eighteenth time in my adult life. Is that a lot? I think maybe it is. To be fair, it’s only my sixteenth different job, since I did two jobs (substitute teaching and working at the Sunday River Inn) for two separate stints. Still, I suppose that’s quite a few jobs over the past 30 years or so, especially when you consider that I did manage to stay at one of them for nine years. (I actually worked at Bob’s Corner Store for twelve years, but most of that time it was very part-time, and I did other things—lots of other things—at the same time.)

Barbara Sher begins her book with a quote from a woman she calls “Charlotte, a Scanner,” a quote that could have come from me: “I wish someone would just shake me and tell me exactly what to do with my life. I hate getting excited over something and being reminded by a well-meaning friend of all the other things I’ve tried and failed. Will I ever actually get to use what’s inside me? Will anyone know I was here?”

I’ve been a painter, a baker, and a reporter (both regular and freelance). I’ve worked in offices as a receptionist, a bookkeeper, a secretary, and a PR director. I’ve done home daycare and kept the books for Tony’s business. I’ve been a seasonal call center employee for L.L. Bean. (I had five nights of training to work about six nights on the phones, and during those three weeks or so I made four trips to the Magical Employee Store in Freeport, where I bought, among many other treasures, a dozen pairs of shoes, a room-sized braided rug, and two couches for about 90% off retail. It was so worth it.) I’ve been a bank teller, a substitute teacher, a convenience store clerk, and an Elderhostel coordinator.

And I’m not even counting stay-at-home mom, which I did pretty much full-time for about nine years. (It’s not because I don’t think it counts! It’s just that I’m only counting my paid jobs at the moment.)

I’ve loved some of my jobs and hated others. Some were really, really fun, but offered none of those pesky essential benefits, like health insurance or paid vacation. Or decent pay. Some made me feel as if the soul was being slowly sucked out of me. Some made my feet hurt. Not one of them ever made me think, here’s a job I could happily do for the rest of my life!

Now, if I had been born a generation earlier, it might not have even occurred to me that being happy—or at least, not miserable—in one’s job was a valid expectation, because security would have come so far ahead of satisfaction. For instance, Donna’s father worked his entire career for the telephone company. Luckily for him, he really liked his job. But Donna once asked her mother, “If Dad had hated his job, would you still have wanted him to stick with it for almost 40 years?” and her mother answered with an unqualified “Yes!”

I guess things were simpler a generation ago. Frequently miserable, maybe, but simpler.

I also blame my place in my family’s birth order for my inability to settle in, and my expectation that my work should make me happy and fulfilled. (I don’t like that word blame, and I’m not trying to imply any sense of “victimhood” here. I was going to use “attribute” instead, but then I’d have to rewrite the whole sentence.)

Apparently last-borns are supposed to be “spoiled, manipulative, immature, self-centered, and capricious,” “do not like to be tied down to commitment,” and “just want to do their own thing at their own pace.”

Yep, that’s me.

What is it that I really want to do? What do I think would make me (relatively) happy for a (relatively) long time? I want to write the Great American Novel, of course. Or the Great American Memoir, or the Great American Book of Essays. Or how about the occasional, middling-good, free-lance magazine article, or middle-grade novel, or even picture book? Isn’t that the secret (or not-so-secret) ambition of just about everyone hanging around here in the blogosphere?

But since I also need to provide health insurance for my family and, ideally, some sort of income besides, just deciding to stay home and sit at the computer all day, as appealing as it sounds, isn’t an option, so I have to have some kind of “real” job. I want my real job to be something I can genuinely like, or at least not mind, doing—something I love may be asking a bit much—and, at this point in my life, it seems like it would be a big plus if it were something I could also feel good about doing, something that, perhaps, makes a positive difference in people’s lives. I’d like a fair amount of variety from day to day, and even within each day, because from my track record it appears that I may, just possibly, be someone who is easily bored with routine. And it would be really, really, really nice if it didn’t take up all my time, dammit!

Barbara Sher calls this kind of job "the Good Enough Job," and says it's "the best friend of almost every type of Scanner" (after they've accepted, as one person she interviewed put it, that "no one is going to pay me to...sit under a tree and read 19th century novels").

Up until this past Friday, I had a job I liked most of the time, and sometimes almost loved. I was working about 1,920 hours per year, which is pretty much what you do if you have a full-time job. I was also getting paid to write, although small-town newspaper reporting isn’t exactly the kind of writing that either challenges one’s creativity or gets a lot of notice.

Tomorrow, I will start a job I don’t know if I will like, love, or…? I do think it has potential for the “making a difference” requirement; it’s in the social services field, and the agency’s motto is “Helping people, changing lives.” It provides health insurance, and it sounds like my days will be quite interesting and varied…and shorter: the job is only 30 hours a week. Best of all, it’s 37 weeks per year, with summers off. That’s 1,110 hours per year. That means I’ll have an extra 810 hours a year to do something Really Important with my life.

I figure that, unless that Great American Novel thing pans out, I'm going to be working for at least another 15 years. So I’m really, really going to try to make this work for me for the long term.

Look for me at camp next summer…I’ll be holed up in the treehouse with my laptop.

I get paid for this?

Writing for a small weekly newspaper is a pretty interesting job. It's unfortunate that it doesn't pay enough to live on (and has several other fairly significant drawbacks, like the fact that I’ll probably spend more on health care in 2009 than I actually earn…are you listening, Congress?) because it's the first job I've had in a while that I haven't quickly become bored by. (Note to the grammar police: Yes, I know that phrase should be “by which I haven't quickly become bored,” and yes, grammar is inordinately important to me, but this is not a grammar blog [at least not today], and “by which” sounds a bit stuffy for the conversational tone I'm going for here. Oops, I mean, “for which I'm going here.”)

I've been there for over a year now, and it hasn't made me feel as if the soul is being slowly sucked out of me. That's an important quality in a job, and one not as easy to come by as you might think.

For the most part, I get to do something different just about every day, and although I'm not entirely sure this is good for me (mainly because I suspect that it could be worsening my self-diagnosed ADD, and I could end up like the whole generation of kids who grew up on “Sesame Street” and, as a result, can't pay attention to anything for more than a minute unless it's shiny or it shouts or flashes or wiggles or beeps), it has kept me from wanting to pull the covers back over my head on weekday mornings.

A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I went out to interview two local kidney transplant recipients who will be walking in the Halloween Kidney Walk in Portland next month. They are both about the same age (late fifties), have both lived in the area for decades, and both worked in elementary education, but they hadn't known each other until, after Martha got her new kidney about three years ago, she volunteered to serve as a mentor to Mike, who was undergoing dialysis and waiting for his turn.

Mike and Martha have become fast friends, and on the morning I visited, they were sipping coffee at Martha's kitchen table, listening to a Peter, Paul and Mary CD (another note to the grammar police: Yes, I know that I have, in the past, ranted at length about the importance of the serial comma, but I checked their website [you should visit it, especially if you're “of a certain age,” like me, but be advised that the site currently features a touching tribute to Mary, with words from Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey that are refreshingly honest and might make you cry], and Peter, Paul and Mary don't use the serial comma...so even though the middle finger on my right hand is itching to hit that comma key, I'm going to respect them by leaving it out, too), and reminiscing about Mary Travers—who had passed away just the day before—and the importance of that iconic trio during their formative years.

Martha welcomed me into her kitchen, which had beautifully-done stenciling in a blueberry motif and matching curtains (yes, she had both done the stenciling and sewn the curtains, she told me when I asked) and offered me a cup of French vanilla coffee that smelled good enough to make me wish I were a coffee-drinker. Her sweet Labradoodle leaned against me for a scratch while she and Mike answered my questions, and I had one of those “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this” moments.

I had another one of those moments—a couple of hours, actually—a few days later, when I got to cover the eastern end of the Bethel Historical Society’s “Barn Tour.” The tour encompassed ten historic area barns, two of which, the Abbott barn and the Weston barn, were in Rumford.

It was a beautiful day, perfect for touring barns, both of which were fascinating and actually pretty awe-inspiring, architecturally speaking. At both places, I met wonderful people who showed me around and told me all about the history of their barns. And there were snacks!

Best of all, at Bill Weston’s barn, I even got to go up into the unique octagonal cupola to take in the view of the Androscoggin River valley. I’ve always wanted either a cupola or a round tower room of my own (ever since, when I was about eight years old, I read The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder), but as far as I can recall, this was the first time I’ve ever actually gotten to go up in one. It was very, very cool!

Surviving the Empty Nest

This is really kind of cheating, but I haven't blogged in so long that I think I can get away with it, so I'm posting a story/column I wrote for next week's Rumford Falls Times. Note to all my kids, especially Will: I don't want to hear a lot of complaining about the violation of your privacy; you'll notice I didn't use any names in the paper!

We'll be moving home from camp, back to the world of Internet access, on Monday, and I'm vowing to post regularly after that!

So, here we go--"Surviving the Empty Nest:"

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I drove our son to college to start his freshman year. We helped him unpack and get settled in his room, met his roommates, and checked out the dormitory laundry facilities.

We listened to the dean of first-year students explain all the ways in which the college would help him to stay happy, safe, and well-adjusted.

We reaffirmed that he was more than ready for this step, that it was the natural next phase in his journey toward independence and adulthood. We reflected on his amazing personal growth over the past few months and reassured each other that he was exactly where he needed to be. We congratulated him for making the perfect college choice, one that seems to suit him in every way.

We left him chatting amiably with his roommates, looking forward to the upcoming orientation activities and the start of classes in a few days. On the way to the car, we told each other how wonderful everything seemed, how much at ease he was, how good we felt about everything.

Then I cried all the way home.

For the first time in our 20-year marriage, our nest is empty, and there's no getting around it: we're going to miss him.

Our son is the fourth and youngest child, the “ours” part of our “his, mine, and ours” family. I've been a mom for 26 years – almost my entire adult life – and since my husband and I each came into this marriage with kids, we've never actually lived alone together.

Our three daughters, all in their mid- to late-twenties, have been gone from the nest for a long time now. For the past six years, it's been just the three of us, and I have to say, it's been a wonderful time.

In spite of everything I've heard and read about the horrors of raising teenage boys, and at the risk of sounding smug, let me just say that our son has been the kind of kid every parent dreams of having.

He's smart, funny, well-adjusted, and adept at balancing an active social life with time spent entertaining his doting parents.

We've nearly always known where he was, and when we didn't, he never gave us a reason to worry that he might be getting into trouble.

And somehow, without us even being aware it was happening, he went from being the baby of the family to one of our favorite young adults.

Like I said, we're going to miss him.

One of my daughters called the day after we took him to school, just to see how I was doing.

“I’m OK,” I told her. “I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I’m going to try to think of ways to fill my time until I do. Maybe I’ll sign up for a yoga class, or redecorate the bathroom. Or maybe I’ll dig out my sewing machine and make a quilt, or some curtains, or some new clothes.”

“Mom?” she said. “We’re all kind of worried that you might not be able to deal with the empty nest. We're afraid you might start dressing the dog up in silly outfits or something.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “I'm going to be fine.”

After a few days, I stopped crying every time I picked up a stray dirty sock from under my son's bed, or caught a glimpse of his abandoned high school ski jacket hanging from the bedpost.

After a week, I went grocery shopping and asked the clerk if she was sure about the amount of the bill – about half what I had been used to spending.

Last weekend, I set aside a day to do laundry and had it all done by mid-morning.

But I still miss him.

Like my son, I was the last one out of the nest when I left for college in the mid-1970s. Back then, my mother had two options for staying in touch with me: write a letter (which would take two or three days to get from Connecticut to Maine, then might languish in my campus mailbox for another two or three days before I got around to checking my mail), or call me on my dorm room extension (which might be answered by me, but more likely by my roommate, a random floormate passing by our door as the phone rang, or no one at all, since I was seldom actually IN my room).

In this age of advanced technology, however, it's going to be a lot easier for me to keep tabs on my son. I can call him on his cell phone, or send him an email. I can send him a text message, and I suppose if I really wanted to figure out what Twitter is all about, I could send him 140-character “tweets.”

Perhaps most horrifying of all (to him), I can post messages to his Facebook page, where I can also see what other people are posting there. I can look at the names and photos of all of his new Facebook friends and wonder which ones are nice kids and which ones might try to lead him astray. (And who are all these new girls?!)

I've read a lot of advice for empty-nesters, and all the experts say parents should give their kids plenty of space. “Wait for your child to contact you first,” they say.

So I'm doing my best to let my son set appropriate boundaries, to let him decide how much contact he needs with us. It's hard, but I'm trying, because what I want most – really! – is for him to complete the process of becoming a happy, healthy, well-adjusted adult.

But I can still post a few photos on Facebook to remind him of home, right?

Last week, I posted a photo of my homemade pizza (trust me, it's to die for)...just to remind him that, while his college's dining hall food may be ranked second in the country (a big factor when he made his choice), Mom's cooking will always be best.

And I can't wait to hear what he thinks when I post a photo of the dog in his new raincoat and matching boots!