Greenwood Maine

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“All of Greenwood will feel this loss”

I lost an old friend last week, someone who has been important in my life for nearly half a century. His passing was not unexpected, and, in fact, not unwelcome, coming as it did at the end of a long and difficult decline from Alzheimer’s disease. But the finality of his death has prompted a period of deep reflection for me. Gilbert, and his family, have been very much in my thoughts, and in my heart.

When this photo was taken three years ago, Gilbert may not have remembered our conversations at Bob’s Corner Store, but I’ll never forget them. And I’m pretty sure he still remembered me.

A small convenience store in Locke’s Mills, Maine, might be one of the last places you’d expect to find a wise philosopher, a perceptive observer of humanity, a quick-witted, insightful, brilliant thinker.

But that’s exactly what I found there, back in the summer of 1978, in the person of Gilbert Dunham.

I was nineteen years old and had just landed my dream job—working behind the counter at Bob’s Corner Store. As a “summer person” from Connecticut for most of my life, I’d recently—finally!—moved to Maine to live full-time.

Rural Maine is notorious for being tough on “people from away,” but I couldn’t imagine a better path to acceptance in a small town than waiting on its inhabitants day after day, ringing up their beer, groceries, and cigarettes; pumping their gas; exchanging small talk and learning about their lives.

There was one problem, though: I was almost pathologically shy, and, except for Bob himself, I didn’t really know a soul in town. I’d never actually been good at small talk, and there were so many new names and faces to remember that I was too afraid of mixing people up to inquire after their kids, or their jobs, or to ask anything more than “Do you want a bag for that?”

I usually worked evenings—the store was open until 9 p.m. most nights, and until 10:00 on Fridays and Saturdays—and most of the coworkers I was paired with were somewhat taciturn. Or perhaps they were just suspicious of the clueless college student who’d been dropped into their midst and didn’t expect to find much common ground to talk about with me.

Gilbert was different. From our very first evening shift together, he asked questions and listened to my answers, drawing me out of my shell. Our conversations made me feel that growing up in Connecticut, rather than being a detriment, had given me a different perspective that he was interested in hearing about.

Gilbert was a master of self-deprecating humor, in the deadpan manner of Bob Newhart (who was a favorite of my mother’s. When she met Gilbert, she liked him immediately; she said he reminded her of Bob). His approachable, everyman persona made him a friend to all and a favorite among both customers and coworkers.

I watched and listened and learned from Gilbert. His easy rapport with customers and the good-natured banter they exchanged showed me, in time, that it wasn’t so hard to strike up a conversation, and I learned that most people were happy to get to know “the new girl” and share a bit about themselves.   

For more than a decade, Gilbert and I held the fort at Bob’s Corner Store together, usually one weekday evening, every third Saturday night, and every other Sunday afternoon. When we weren’t pumping gas, keeping the beer cooler filled, or waiting on customers, we would sit on the counter, or on the old Coke cooler behind it (where the Narragansett long-neckers were kept) and philosophize, reminisce, and solve the problems of the world.

Somehow, Gilbert had acquired the wisdom of an old soul and the insightfulness of an erudite scholar without ever leaving his hometown—all the more remarkable to me when I realize that he was still in his thirties when we met.

A lifelong resident of Greenwood (except for a brief time when he and Barbara were first married and lived in West Paris), Gilbert spent his entire life nearly within sight of the place he was born. He worked at Penley’s Mill, a few miles from home, for more than 40 years. He married Barbara two weeks after her high school graduation, and they were married for nearly 62 years.

One of the most memorable things he ever told me, during one of our many evenings together behind the counter, was, “I realized early on that I could either decide what I wanted to do for work, and go where I had to live to do it, or decide where I wanted to live, and figure out what I could do for work there.”

Gilbert’s full-time job was filing saws at Penley’s, and in addition to his part-time work at Bob’s, he shoveled camp roofs in the winter, mowed lawns in the summer, and filed handsaws and circular saw blades in his basement shop year-round, all to make the best possible life for his family. Even with all of his jobs, and all of his volunteer work—he served on the school board and the fire department, and was always quick to answer the call whenever someone in town needed help—he was, first and foremost, a family man.

There can be no better tribute to the kind of life Gilbert lived than the words his three kids used to express their loss, words filled with love and admiration, words that give a glimpse into the kind of man he was.

“He taught me so much by his example and he left such a wonderful legacy through his family and everyone who knew him,” his daughter, Tammy, wrote on the day he died. “My brothers are kind, gentle men because of him and I am stronger because of his example. My children have Papa stories that have shaped them, that have given them joy and fun and that will remain with them forever. We were blessed to have him in our lives.”  

Gilbert’s older son, Jeff, shared a Facebook post he had written for Father’s Day ten years ago, which read, in part, “[He] taught me to fish, how to play ball, how to saw, how to chop wood, how to treat a woman, how to never let yourself be treated, taught me compassion, taught me strength, taught me work ethic, taught me how to be a non-hunting pacifist in a backwoods rural town in Maine. My wonderful sense of humor? yep thank Dad for that. Taught me to love my town and heritage, yet want to leave it to find more, yet want to return always to a place that will always be home.”

During the years of Gilbert’s illness, his younger son, Chris, joined forces with Barbara to provide the caretaking that ensured that he would be able to remain at home, the only place he would have wanted to be. Over the course of those years, despite the challenges of caring for him as his Alzheimer’s disease advanced, stealing his memories, they spoke not of their exhaustion and frustration, but of their gratitude for the husband and father he had always been.

From Chris’s Father’s Day post last year: “My dad, Gilbert Elton Dunham. Taught me how to start a saw cut and straighten a nail. Let me keep all the nails I could straighten. Got us lost in the woods now and then, but never for so long my mom needed to know…Waited for years to buy his first new car, and it was a Ford Pinto. Taught me to drive a stick. Treated his clutch like a fourth child he maybe loved best. Told me all he knew of Greenwood and listened when I told him all I’d learned in quiet rooms he’d never entered. Hiked with me at the drop of a hat to find a cellar hole or a gravestone or a road not a road anymore. Modeled decency and hid his pride and love for his children poorly. His memories are mostly gone, but a good soul remains.”

I don’t believe there was ever a moment when Gilbert regretted his choice to stay in Greenwood, and our community has been far richer because he chose to make his living, and his life, here. In the words of one lifelong friend, upon hearing of his death, “All of Greenwood will feel this loss.”

Gilbert was kind, wise, funny, and philosophical. He was my dear friend; I will always miss him, but I will always be grateful for everything he meant to me.

Bob’s Corner Store: Part One
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Bob’s Corner Store: Part One

Last week’s story by Sam Wheeler in the Bethel Citizen, “Looking back at Bob’s,” brought on a wave of nostalgia, as I recalled my own eleven-plus years behind the counter at Bob’s Corner Store in Locke’s Mills.

I set out to write about those years, but quickly realized that my connection to Bob’s extends back much further than May of 1978, when I was 19 years old and had just landed my dream job—running the cash register, stocking the shelves and beer coolers, and pumping gas for Bob Coolidge.

So I’ll save my reminiscences about working there (and I have many!) for my next post, and, for now, write about my earlier memories of the store and its longtime proprietor.

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This photo was taken in 2011, when Bob was no longer the owner of the store, but except for the paint colors (it was always white, with green trim, when it was Bob’s), it didn’t look much different.

Like many “summer people” on North, South, and Round Ponds in Woodstock and Greenwood (I didn’t yet know that we were sometimes referred to as “summer complaint”), I traveled to the store by boat nearly every day in July and August from the time I was old enough to walk, talk, and demand penny candy.

My sister, Leslie, and I would take the family motorboat, a 1958 13-foot aluminum Duratech Runabout (my brothers will be sure to correct me if I’m wrong about those details), from our camp on the east shore of North Pond to the village of Locke’s Mills to pick up bread, milk, and the daily newspaper at Bob’s Corner Store (or, as it was known until the early 1970s, under the ownership of Lee Mills, Lee’s Variety).

My sister was nearly ten years older than I, and was therefore in charge of our mom’s list and, of course, the money.

She also always drove the boat. It was powered during those years by a cranky 18-horsepower maroon-and-white Johnson outboard, which was really far too much motor for it. We always carried a splintery old canoe paddle with us, and when the motor broke down, as it often did, we had to take turns paddling back to camp.

Quite often, there were visitors at camp—cousins, friends, or, later, nieces and nephews—and there would be five or six kids in the boat, all of us clad in bulky orange kapok life jackets. The weight of extra passengers came in handy when the water level of the lake was high, allowing us to sit low enough in the water to get through Johnny’s Bridge without scraping the steering wheel on the rough concrete overhead.

We still had to duck our heads to fit under the bridge, of course, or even lie down in the bottom of the boat, where spilled gas and oil mingled with remnants of the bacon rind and freshwater mussels we used for bait when we fished for white perch and sunfish.

Then it was on through “the channel,” where we tried to avoid letting the propeller hit any of the dozens of underwater stumps (we always carried extra shear pins just in case), past the picnic area, through the taller bridge under Route 26, and on to the store.

Damp and smelly, we jumped out onto the dock and clambered up the steep slope to the parking lot, dancing across the hot pavement in our bare feet. (There was never, that I can recall, a “No Bare Feet” sign on the door of Bob’s Corner Store.)

After picking up the items on our mom’s list, my sister doled out the change into our waiting palms. This was the moment we had been waiting for, and we swarmed the old wood-and-glass candy counter, filling tiny brown paper bags with penny candy for the trip home.

When Lee owned the store and presided over the cash register, he would dump each bag out and push our licorice sticks, Swedish fish, Mint Juleps, Tootsie Rolls, and Atomic Fireballs around on the wooden countertop with a thick, grubby finger as he carefully counted each piece. But after Bob took over, he just asked us how much we had in our bags and took our word for it. None of us wouldBob at store ever have dreamed of cheating him out of so much as a penny.

One evening at camp when I was five or six years old, for reasons I can’t remember, my sister took a red felt-tipped pen to my face, adding a sprinkling of bright-red freckles to my cheeks and nose, and I refused to wash them off. When Bob spotted them on our trip to the store the next morning, he began calling me “Chickenpox,” and he never really stopped.

Although I already knew that Maine was the only place for me, and that one day I’d come home and never leave, at the time, I was just a “summer person.” I always wondered if Bob would forget me during the long ten months of the year when I was exiled in Connecticut, but on my first trip to the store each summer, he’d call out, “Hi there, Chickenpox!” and I’d know I was back where I belonged.

Eventually, when I turned twelve, and the family rules permitted me to operate the boat by myself, my mother bought a new six-horsepower outboard motor that was slower, safer, and less prone to breakdowns.

Jen Will & Tide in boat 002

Oh, yes…we still have the 1958 Duratech boat!

By then, Leslie was out of college, grown up, and married, and it became my job to lead the daily expeditions to Bob’s. I became the keeper of the money and my mother’s list. After I’d paid for the groceries and the newspaper, I divided up the change and we’d each fill a bag with penny candy. Then I’d shepherd the younger kids back down to the boat, and make sure they were securely buckled into their life jackets before we pushed off from the dock.

We’d try to ration our candy to make it last until we could make the trip again the following day, but somehow most of it seemed to disappear in the boat on the way back to camp. Someone usually remembered to save a stick of black licorice and a fireball for my mom, although I have a feeling that an hour of peace and quiet back at camp was all the reward she really needed.

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“The dearest friend I never met”

Sandy

Last Sunday, I lost a dear friend. Sandra Martin Morgan made my world a brighter, better place with her sharp wit, her plainspoken wisdom, and her genuine kindness…and all without us ever having met in person.

Four years ago this month, I took over writing the Locke’s Mills column for our local weekly newspaper, the Bethel Citizen. In my first column, I included some bits of news about the municipal budget, wrote about attending Maine Maple Weekend at Brian and Suzanne Dunham’s farm, and added a link to this blog, with a note that “my latest entry includes some reflections on Locke’s Mills and why it means so much to me.”

Soon after that first column appeared, I received a comment on my blog from a new reader.

“Loved this!” Sandy wrote. “I mentally went on the journey with your descriptive walk through Locke’s Mills…I moved away 40 years ago and still miss my home town. I was born in Greenwood Center near the shores of Twitchell Pond and still write a blog about growing up there. Your blog was like a trip back home and oh, so well written. Thank you and I will be looking for more of your columns in the Citizen which I receive each week by mail!”

She signed up to follow my blog, I signed up to follow hers (pasturetopavement.wordpress.com), Sandy and I began corresponding via email and Facebook, and our mutual admiration society was born.

That’s how it began—as a mutual admiration society. It wasn’t exactly a friendship—not yet.

After all, Sandy and I had never met; she had moved away from her beloved hometown just about the same time I landed here, and we had just missed each other.

Before we could really be friends, we needed to learn more about each other. Facebook helped, and so did our respective blog posts, through which we learned about each other’s childhoods, families, and friends.

I learned that she was Brian Dunham’s mother. And Ethel Martin’s daughter. And Roland, Rex, and Curt Martin’s Sandy and Rexsister. And a cousin (first, second, third, or a few times removed) to just about everyone else I had come to know in my 40 years in and around Greenwood.

I came to Greenwood just a year or two too late to read her weekly columns in the Norway Advertiser-Democrat. For a decade, from the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s, she kept the world abreast of the happenings in her Rowe Hill neighborhood, and, in particular, at “Rocky Top,” the hillside farm where she raised her four children, chased after wayward livestock, and, whenever she could, found a few minutes’ peace to write.

Sandy and Alan before concert 1981I arrived too late to hear her perform, often with other members of her musically talented family, at talent shows and other events at the Locke’s Mills Town Hall.

And I was too late to sit down with her in person, perhaps over a cup of tea and one of her Gram Martin’s toffee squares, and hear her stories of growing up in Greenwood Center, or of skiing over the pastures of Rowe Hill, or of bravely making a new life for herself in middle age.

But, through our lively correspondence, we soon learned how much we had in common, not only our love of Greenwood, but also our affinity for—among other things—cats, cookies, quirky characters, Kris Kristofferson, and the poetry of Robert Service.

Now and then, we exchanged small gifts through the mail. I sent her Christmas cookies and homemade granola, and she sent me a copy of her book, Just…Thinking, a collection of her newspaper columns, which her four kids had surprised her by publishing in 2010.

One day last summer I tore open a package from Sandy to find two volumes of Robert Service’s poetry, and a note in which she chided herself for not being able to locate the third volume, which contained some of our favorite poems.

A couple of months later another package arrived, and another note—unable to find her own copy to pass along to me, she had scoured eBay for a copy of The Spell of the Yukon for me, to complete the set.Sandy_RS books

Some of our most satisfying online conversations were about our shared passion for writing, and what it has meant to us both.

“Writing has saved my life several times,” she once wrote to me. “If that is too dramatic, it has helped me climb out of dark holes a number of times. It has kept me on an even keel and keeps me from feeling sorry for myself.”

After her success as a local columnist for the Advertiser-Democrat, Sandy went on to cover human interest stories, take photos, and write a regular feature for the paper’s monthly supplement, “The Western Mainer,” in which she interviewed local entertainers.

She also covered local stories for the Lewiston Sun and wrote occasional features for the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press Herald.

She freelanced for regional magazines, as well as for Grit, Farm Journal, and Yankee, and published several volumes of her poetry.

Sandy_house

Although Sandy left Greenwood more than 40 years ago to live in Albany, New York, she never lost her love for the characters and special places of her hometown.

Just a year ago, with the help of her son Gary, she published her memoir, Salt Pork and Dandelion Greens: Growing Up Greenwood, a collection of essays she originally wrote for her blog. Poignant, evocative, and often hilarious, it immediately struck a chord with her many friends and relatives back home.

Sandy and I jokingly called each other “the dearest friend I’ve never met.”

“You have become such a good friend without our ever having met and I feel as though I have known you forever,” she told me recently. “One of these days I am coming up and taking you up on using your house for a few days…that is such a sweet offer.”

How I wish we could have shared that cup of tea at my kitchen table, and a couple of Gram Martin’s toffee squares. Sandy, I’ll miss you so much.

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I Heart Locke’s Mills…and I have a column!

I have a new writing gig! I am (at least for now) the weekly correspondent to The Bethel Citizen for Locke’s Mills, the village where I live.

Note: Just to clear up any confusion, it’s true that I am a resident of the town of Greenwood, but I also live in the village of Locke’s Mills, just as people who live in the village of Bryant Pond are also residents of the town of Woodstock. It’s a Maine thing, I guess. Wikipedia says: “The village of Locke Mills, on State Route 26 in the northern part of Greenwood, is the town’s urban center and largest settlement.” To further muddle things, most modern mentions of the village call it “Locke Mills,” but our local historian, Blaine Mills, points out that all historical references from the 19th century call it “Locke’s Mills,” so that’s what we put on the signs that welcome visitors to the village, and that’s what I try to remember to call it.2015-03-23 001 2015-03-23 001

For writers, the weekly column is often considered to be a sort of holy grail—the most sought-after outlet for their writing. After all, as Peter Cole wrote for The Guardian, columns “are defined by ownership; the column ‘belongs’ to its author who has that ultimate journalistic luxury, a slot, guaranteed space over which he or she presides and has, in some cases, near total control over content.”

Wow, heady stuff! The “ultimate journalistic luxury”!

I’m taking over the Locke’s Mills column because my friend Betsey, who has written it for the past few years, has given it up. A couple of weeks ago, she wrote in her column that it would be her last one, and encouraged anyone who wanted to take it over to contact the editor.

Remarkably, no one has (so far) expressed interest in the fame and fortune that go along with being a correspondent for the local weekly. Since I already write features and cover school board meetings for the paper, and since I hated to see my own town village, where I’ve lived for over 25 years now, go without a local column (and since someone asked me if I would do it, and I’m very bad at saying no) I decided I would take it over.

When I was growing up in suburban Connecticut, my family subscribed to The Citizen by mail, to keep abreast of the news during the long ten months of the year when we couldn’t be in Maine. The local columns were always my favorite part of the paper.

Back then, there were correspondents from settlements like Middle Dam, Magalloway, and Greenwood City, and I used to like to read about whether the ice was out, where the smelts were running, and who had paid a visit to whom, and to imagine what life was like in those exotic places.

But Locke’s Mills has always been the village closest to my heart. It was the place my sister and I came to by motorboat every day in the summer from our camp on North Pond, leaving our aluminum Duratech Runabout tied to the rickety dock at  Bob’s Corner Store (and, before Bob bought the store, Lee’s Variety) while we walked barefoot along Route 26 to get our mail at the post office.

If it was a hot, sunny day, we would scamper as fast as we could across the burning pavement in front of the gas pumps, to get to the cool grass of the tiny town common where the war monument stands.

From there, we’d walk on the edges of Mellen Kimball’s and Willard Farwell’s lawns, beneath the maple tree near the dam, then along the edge of the mill’s gravel parking lot, where we’d often find wooden treasures to pick up—dowels or glue pins or a screwdriver handle with a bright red enameled finish—to add to our collection.

Back in those days—the 1960s and early 1970s—the mill was running two, or maybe even three, shifts a day, black smoke pouring almost continuously from the tall smokestack. Although there were often acrid whiffs of paint and glue in the air, there was also always the quite pleasant scent of burning hardwood sawdust. It was a smell I associated with summers in Maine, and one the year-round residents of Locke’s Mills probably associated with prosperity.

Before they were torn down, there were several big old houses along lower Main Street, and there would often be kids playing on the porches or steps. I was shy and tried not to look up as we passed, but if one of them called out hello, it gave me a little thrill, as if I were really part of the town, not just a summer visitor.

Since we were here for only two months, we didn’t have a post office box. Our mail came addressed simply “General Delivery, Locke’s Mills, Maine” and we had to go to the post office window, presided over at various times by Connie Blanchard, Mac Packard, or Joyce Hathaway, and ask for it.

If my mother had asked us to pick up hamburger or chicken for supper, we continued on to Hathaway’s Country Store, where Willy Hathaway ran a first-class butcher counter. Then we walked back to Bob’s, careful to watch out for broken glass or metal pop-tops along the road (although by the end of the summer our feet would be tough enough to step on almost anything with impunity).

At Bob’s, we picked up bread and milk and the Lewiston Sun that had been saved for us, our last name scrawled on the upper corner of the front page. Then we counted out our change to see how much we could spend on penny candy from the huge wood-and-glass case in front of the beer cooler.

Sliding doors on the back opened to give us access to red and black licorice twists and shoelaces, Tootsie Rolls, Atomic Fireballs, Mint Juleps, Bit o’ Honeys, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Smarties, and SweetTarts, with which we eagerly filled the tiny paper bags that were kept stacked on top.

When Lee owned the store, he would open our bags and dump the contents onto the dingy hardwood top of the checkout counter, sorting the pile with a grubby finger as he counted, but once Bob took over, he just asked us how much we had in our bags and took our word for it. We never would have dreamed of cheating him by so much as a penny.

Then we’d carry our purchases back to the boat, tuck them up under the deck, and head home. My sister, who drove the boat, always arrived back at camp with her bag of penny candy still full, while most of mine seemed to somehow disappear on the trip.

Now the Locke’s Mills column is mine, in which to write about nearly anything I want. Most of the local columns in The Bethel Citizen are short, tending to run between 200 and 500 words, and my editor suggests a “mix of news/activities and mild opinion.”

In my first column, for this week’s paper, I wrote that “I hope to continue Betsey’s tradition of making this column a mix of local items and town office news, with some of my own thoughts and opinions thrown in for good measure.”

Chances are there will be a good dose of sentimental reminiscing about my favorite village, too.