This quiz (thanks to Jason for the link) nailed my accent perfectly. Uncanny, when you consider that I wasn't even totally sure on some of the questions whether I pronounced them the same or differently.
Eastern New England. Whether or not you pronounce r's, you have the sound of Boston, New Hampshire, and Maine about you.
Another photo from my vacation -- my erstwhile college roommate's back yard.
It occurs to me I never posted any photos from my August vacation trip to Maine. In truth, I didn't take many, but there's a few that I liked. Here's one.
For today's trivia, I read in a recent issue of Down East Magazine that the president of the Maine Sheep Breeders Association is named Brandon Wooley.
Kudos to Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of my home state of Maine -- and brickbats to Senators George Allen and John Warner, of my current state of residence, Virginia -- for their recent votes on the Marriage Amendment bill.
I'd like to think that my late brother, who had more or less permanently exiled himself from his home state because of the generally gay-intolerant atmosphere, would have appreciated Collins' and Snowe's votes as well.
It's a shame to see the apparent deterioration in vigilance of the once alert agents of the US Border Patrol in Calais, Maine. When I lived up there back in the early 70s, nothing got by them. Why, the production manager at the local paper mill got busted smuggling in a car-trunk full of undeclared lobsters. Bringing them into the country wasn't illegal, mind you, but not declaring them was, so Customs confiscated the whole lot. (I'm sure the reports of a big steamer pot being fired up behind the Customs House were just a vicious rumor.) Believe you me, we were damned careful to declare our two quarts of Nova Scotia strawberries, or four loaves of bread (the Canadian bread was better than anything we could get on the US side), or whatever, each time we crossed the border; we didn't want to take the chance of being deported, or whatever they do to people caught bringing suspicious groceries into the country.
The Border Patrol was also routinely involved in high-speed car chases to help apprehend some drunk who had eluded the Mounties by sprinting across the border. (I'm not sure how far the BP could go before having to pass the chase off to the county sheriff, the Maine State Troopers, and/or the Indian Police on the reservation just up Rte 1.) And this was long before the war or terror.
Now, however, things seem to be a tad more lax, judging by this AP news story.
Fortunately the police in Massachusetts were more decisive when they found the guy wandering down the highway in a sweatshirt with red-brown stains on it. He's now charged with a double murder (one involving a decapitation) that was discovered in New Brunswick the day after our vigilant Border Patrol couldn't find any reason to detain him.On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States....
[A Customs spokesman] conceded it "sounds stupid" that a man wielding what appeared to be a bloody chain saw could not be detained. But he added: "Our people don't have a crime lab up there. They can't look at a chain saw and decide if it's blood or rust or red paint."
I grew up in a small town in Maine, about 2000 people. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to attend school right in my home town, all the way through high school, with no bus riding. (This was around the approximate end of the Dark Ages.) My class, the Class of '68, was the last to graduate from Mechanic Falls High School. The following year the high school population was swallowed up in a "School Administrative District" or SAD, which consisted of of the nearest city, Auburn, plus our town. Unlike some of the state SAD's, where numerous small and medium towns banded into one district and the students were all bussed in and all pretty much on an equal footing, the Mechanic Falls students were resented and/or ignored outsiders in a large, established school population. The kids who had been sophomores and juniors when I was a senior, and thus knew what attending a small-town high school was like, hated the move with a passion. Those who came after perhaps had a somewhat easier time, but not much, always treated as second-class citizens.
In the 50s and 60s, Mechanic Falls was in many ways, I now realize, an idyllic place to grow up. Most people didn't lock their doors (heck, some of my neighbors didn't even know where the key was) or their cars; most kids could walk or bike to school (and AFAIK no one owned a bicycle lock), and if you lived close enough you could even go home for lunch. Illegal drugs were essentially non-existent -- that was something in New York City -- as was crime in general. Oh, there were a few "bad kids" in town; everyone knew who they were, and the trouble they got into was pretty much limited to getting drunk and hotrodding. We still had an old-fashioned 5 & 10 cent store; several mom and pop grocery stores (I'm talking small convenience store size, but they weren't convenience stores, which I don't think had been invented yet), at least one of which had an honest-to-God butcher who would cut and grind your beef to order while you stood there and watched; and a drugstore that was really a drugstore (not a wannabe supermarket) with a pharmacist who knew everyone by name, including the kids.
I suppose from today's perspective I had a deprived childhood. Like I said, convenience stores hadn't been invented, shopping malls didn't exist, and -- I swear to God I'm not making this up -- I had never heard of McDonald's until I spent the summer when I was 16 in an NSF science program for high school juniors. (There may have been a McDonald's in Lewiston or Auburn 10 miles away, but if so it never impinged on my consciousness.) My high school didn't have a cafeteria, or teach calculus or any foreign languages except French. We got three TV stations when the weather was right, on a black-and-white TV with an antenna on the roof. But somehow, even now, I don't feel I was deprived at all.
OK, enough nostalgia for now. Except for this: a piece of a 1956 topo map that shows my home town. I was 4 years old, and I lived in the house that the red arrow is pointing to. About one inch to the right, you'll see a building with a little flag on top, down near the Little Androscoggin River. That's the high school from which my Class of '68 was the last to graduate. Last I knew (it's been 12 years since I've been back to Maine), the building was still there, but it's now the Town Hall, and seems strangely cramped and small.
Trivia time: The town of Mechanic Falls holds the perhaps dubious distinction of having been mentioned, in passing, in a national best-seller novel -- I believe it was called "The Stand" -- by one Stephen King. When I was a freshman at the University of Maine, Steve King was a senior, writing a column in the weekly student newspaper called "King's Garbage Truck." No, I never met him.
