Day One

Day One

Things were busy in the office so I worked in the morning and we took an afternoon flight out of Akron to Boston.  When I made the reservations I thought we would stay with my brother Fred in Boston for the night but he and Cindy were out of town.  With no good reason to stay in Boston for the night, I arranged to drive up to Christmas Cove, Maine and spend the night at the McCreary compound, summer home of my business partner Rob and his wife Merry. 

Christmas Cove is on Rutherford Island, just past South Bristol and adjacent to Booth Bay Harbor.  It is a charming old summer community filled mostly with hard-bitten New Englanders but also containing some nice, friendly Midwesterners like the McCrearys.  Christmas Cove was where the McDaniel family long had summered and, since Merry's dad Gus McDaniel died a few years back, Rob and Merry not only have their house but Gus's house as well.  This gives them an opportunity to put a little distance between themselves and their grandchildren but also presents them with the usual maintenance headaches that come with an 80 year old summer cottage.

Christmas Cove

Speaking of hard-bitten New Englanders, I have a theory about why they are so reticent and reserved (and generally look as though they just sucked on sour grapes).  You will recall from your visits to New England that there are stone walls everywhere.  The ancestors of modern New Englanders dug these stones out of their fields by hand, thereby demonstrating their determination, work ethic and limited intellectual capacity.  This hard life made them surly and depressed.  The walls made it difficult to maintain relationships with their neighbors (recall Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall).  Accordingly they developed a culture of insularity, negativism, and (as demonstrated daily by the "Red Sox Nation") stupidity.

Typical New Englander

At the same time, Midwestern pioneers had plenty of rich, fertile land with few stones.  Since leaving the hard life in New England was the equivalent of winning your town's intelligence test, a Darwinian process brought the best and brightest from New England westward.  There was no stone digging, wall building, surliness or insularity.  As a result, we in the Midwest are blessed with happy, outgoing, smart people—a stark contrast to our eastern brethren. 

But back to Maine and the story at hand.  My dad and his family spent summers across the bay from Christmas Cove at Squirrel Island, a nice summer community filled with the same hard-bitten New Englanders and the same sprinkling of nice Midwesterners.  I spent a summer there as a young kid.  My grandfather, whom I never knew, was reportedly a difficult SOB with a somewhat sadistic, dry sense of humor.  He probably fit in with the New Englanders just fine.

We drove up Route 1 along the coast and arrived at Christmas Cove fairly late--around 9:30.  Rob acted as ground control on the cell phone and brought us in for a perfect landing at Gus's house where we would spend the night.  His son in law Rob Hartford and daughter Jennifer were there and welcomed us with a beer and some peanuts.  Merry unfortunately had left that day for Cleveland to tend to her ailing mother.  We were introduced to the Hartford's King Charles Spaniel, Gilbert (a tennis ball junkie) and my old hunting pal, Rob's chocolate Labrador, Buoy.  We were honored with the master bedroom and sacked out early in Christmas Cove comfort.