Other Lives Other Times

As one might imagine I pass many kinds of houses and properties as I venture around this area.  Lately I've been doing something that I used to do as a kid to pass the time when traveling.  I look at a particular house and imagine that I've always lived there.  I can see myself standing on the front porch--what it would look like to be surveying the yard from many different perspectives.

I can imagine walking around the yard at different times of the day and in different seasons of the year.  I see where "we" did this or that renovation, how the trees looked when "we" first moved in and where the water pools in the yard during heavy rain storms.  Was I a child when "we" moved in there?  Was I born there?  Or, was it the house I bought with my young wife; ready to start a life in this or that town?

There is a house and yard in South Portland that reminds me of my childhood home in Yarmouth.  There are mostly pines around the house and small rose bushes, lilacs that are just budding and patchy grass, in need of attention.  No matter what we did in Yarmouth, there were spots on the lawn that simply never grew.  Then again, my parents were clueless about plants, landscaping...well, just about everything that had to do with nature--and a lot of other things too.  The front of the house in Yarmouth faced just about due east, just like this South Portland house.  In the afternoon the sun would flood into the backyard.  When I build a house it will be oriented in this way.

There are brick buildings at the university campus of USM in Gorham that remind me of my freshman year in college attending the University of Maine at Farmington.  Farmington was a much larger campus but the same kind of country college spirit permeated the town.  I recall walking around Farmington in the fall and resting in the grass; lawns covered with red, orange and yellow; maple, oak and birch leaves.  Gorham is the same way in autumn.  There is something about the sun at that time of year, the sight of large brick buildings, and the cold wind of winter making preview-appearances at night that seems to tie it all together.  I often thought of this connection when I lived in Gorham.

Along Broadway moving south out of South Portland are the little crowded neighborhoods.  Kids play, dogs bark, power tools whine.  Some have boats.  Some have old neglected cars covered by blue plastic tarps.  Some yards have gardens and some are sandy and overgrown.  For moments at a time, house to house, yard to yard, stretched out into decades - lifetimes - I've lived in each.

I pass a large house every evening that has all its lights on (I mean every single room), with the family in only one room watching TV.  It reminds me of a friend while I was growing up who's family came into money suddenly during his parents' generation.  They had been dirt poor before that for as long as any of them remembered.  These nouceau riche were still uneducated and uncultured, though they didn't realize it--and still don't.  They thought that the money that had fallen upon them was equivalent to a short-cut into upper-class culture.  They considered themselves destined to be where they were.  They left the lights on, the TV on, the radios on--even when they weren't home, because that's what "rich" people can do.  And they were right, rich people can do that.  They threw plates of food away.  And they avoided working every chance they got.  They considered that being "rich" meant a virtual obligation to waste energy, sustance and time.

Around Cape Elizabeth are the large mansions of the well-off.  These people do not "simplify."  But they don't waste either--too much.  They do not come to places that make them question what is missing in life, unless they are shaken up by some negative experience.  Generally speaking, they don't need to consider such things.  They are good people and so are the new rich, who still may be considered to be fools.  Relativity is the principle that rules the physics of social strata.  Although I haven't been there yet, there must be a new way to exist, where the accumulation of money is tempered by the desire to pair things down. 

As I said though, these mansions in Cape Elizabeth are not occupied by such fools.  It is especially satisfying to imagine myself living in one of these.  I see my three car garage off to the side--with no car of course.  Large stone walls covered in ivy and trumpet flower vines.  On the back deck is my chair and blanket.  Five feet away I could step inside the multi-paned and stained-glass french doors, where my wet bar with a granite counter top stands ready for the evening martini(s) to be shaken.  In the mornings the sun rises above the choppy sea, filled with white caps and green depth.  I eat breakfast as I watch the large tankers and cargo ships pass silently in the distance, through the mouth of the bay, on their ways to deliver the foreign items that Mainers crave, and to pick up the stuff we export.

Many gables and porticoes jet off in asymmetric passages in my mansion.  Potted plants that need attention candle sticks and cupboards line the hallways.  At the center of the house I stock the large fireplace in anticipation of having friends over for the evening.  We will dine on lobster and steak, fresh salads, red and white wine, and homemade bread.  We will stay up late discussing politics, religion and music.  In the dream...in the fantasy...I am somehow completed as a person and satisfied in my soul.  Somehow all that Western culture has promised made its way to me, and life is rich and warm.  But it IS a self-deception, one that even from my more enlightened standpoint I both luxuriate in and try to abolish.  I have a way to go yet, obviously to undo the training I have absorbed over more than 40 years.

Then I walk on to the next house, the next yard, the next landscape of imagination, as I make my way back to my attic, in the cold wind of an overcast afternoon; feet sore, stomach rumbling, but happy to be able to go inside every now and then. I'm not going inside a building, but rather inside the light and power of my own mind, thence to order my inner wanderings, fighting the urge to be lost in dreams of comfort, while appreciating that I still retain the ability to do such things.  That yields TRUE satisfaction.