It has been a while since I last wrote. I was busy with family and travelling a bit. The first part of my stay was quite solitary and some days I didn’t really speak aloud. So when I had to interact with people in my travels, there were immediate contrasts.
I live in a big city suburb and I have, unfortunately, incorporated some traits that I don’t really like. My commute is finely-tuned and it only takes a small unforeseen event to throw everything into chaos. It’s stressful. I am impatient, uncharitable and unforgiving. It is the armor I wear just to get by. I’m surrounded by people but we are alarmingly disconnected, hurtling through our daily lives with little time for self-reflection and no time to consider our place in a larger community.
In contrast, people in Maine seem genuinely content. There is a little traffic on Fridays as “people from away” come here. Mainers are generally patient and tolerant of differences in appearance and in economic privilege.
In true country fashion, they hope that you will learn something while you are here and shed city ways. If traffic is backed up along Route 1 in Wiscasset, it is a trifling inconvenience to allow someone to turn left. If you happen to come behind another car along a country road, a country driver will pull over to let you pass. As my contractor explained, “you look like you must be in a hurry.” Two lessons there. First, ask yourself whether you really need to be in such a hurry. Maine country roads are a joy for someone who normally has to fight 45 minutes of traffic to travel 10 miles. Second, pulling over for a car racing up your tailpipe is a lesson in doing for others what you would have them do for you. Where hospitals are separated by long stretches of country miles, maybe the car behind you really does have somewhere to be.
This week I was driving around Miami. I got honked at for trying to turn left. A guy yelled at me at the gas station as I was trying to explain that he was welcome to use the available right handed pump since I was waiting for the left handed pump. I was trying to be neighborly in a place where interactions are presumptively hostile. The guy one pump over witnessing this astonishing exchange laughed and said “welcome to Miami!”
Truthfully, this easily could have happened in DC, although it might not even occur to me to be neighborly. But I would be surprised if it happened to me in Maine. There is no room for such hostility in a place where everyone knows your grandparents. Because here, when my holding tank needs pumping on a holiday weekend, I have my septic guy’s home phone number. My parents used to call his dad, and when he passed away, his son took over the business. He will charge me a fair price, and I will give him a jar of homemade jam.