Author: Amy Wight Chapman

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There will never be another Bob Coolidge

With the passing of Bob Coolidge on December 20, our community lost one of its finest citizens. It was an honor to be asked by Bob’s daughters to give the eulogy at his funeral on Saturday, and I promised to share it here. So here it is:

A lot of you probably know me. I’m Amy Wight Chapman, and I was lucky enough to work at Bob’s Corner Store for more than 11 years. I’ve had a lot of jobs since then, but I’ve never had one that was more interesting, more fulfilling, or just more darn fun than that one. From behind that counter, I was able to go from being just a “summer person” (some people called us “summer complaint”) to being woven into the rich and varied fabric that is the community of Greenwood. It’s been almost 50 years since I first went to work for Bob, and I’m still here in town, with no plans to ever leave. I fell in love with Greenwood’s quirks and characters, and, most of all, with its identity as a place where people knew their neighbors and looked out for one another, and kindness and compassion were more important than money and status.

No one better represented those qualities than Bob, and it was a privilege to know him not only as an employer, but as a mentor, a father-figure, and a friend.

In the spring of 1978, near the end of my sophomore year in college, many of my classmates and I were filling out job applications and crossing our fingers, hoping to land the summer experiences of our dreams.

For some of my friends, that meant internships in their fields of study, or exotic volunteer opportunities that would give them valuable experience and impressive resumes.

My roommate, who had her own lobster boat, was returning to her regular fishing gig out of Cundy’s Harbor, and a free-spirited friend down the hall was heading for a summer of cooking and whitewater rafting at an outdoor recreation center in North Carolina.

As for me, there was nothing I wanted more that summer than to be hired to run the cash register, stock the beer cooler, and pump gas at Bob’s Corner Store in Locke’s Mills.

Previously known as Lee’s Variety, the store had been a mainstay of my summers for as long as I could remember, the place where we traveled by boat from our camp on North Pond to buy bread and milk and penny candy.

Bob Coolidge, too, had been at the store for as long as I could remember. I think he was just out of high school when he started working as a mechanic for the previous owner, Lee Mills, and although he was still a young man when he bought the place 17 years later, he had already been there for nearly half his life.

One summer evening at camp when I was five or six years old, for reasons I can’t remember, my older 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.

After I graduated from high school and started college in Maine, I spent two summers doing odd jobs for my brother Steve, who owned a small ski lodge, closed in the summer, that always had a deck that needed painting or a yard that needed mowing. Most of what he paid me went into the gas tank of the dump truck he let me drive all over the state.

It was a pretty great job, but I wasn’t saving any money. Since I had recently decided to ditch my liberal arts college to study culinary arts at a technical school instead, and since my mother was less than thrilled with my choices, I figured it might be time for me to start supporting myself.

Bob wasn’t sure he needed any extra summer help, but when I told him I’d take any hours he could give me, he agreed to let me run the cash register on weekends and a few evenings during the week. I would also be part of the all-hands-on-deck crew that took care of the weekly grocery order on Thursday mornings.

Unless I needed a day off for some particular reason, I usually worked some part of each day, seven days a week. On weekdays, except for Thursdays, I would come in at 5 p.m. and work until the store closed at 9, or at 10 on Fridays.

On Saturdays, I worked from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and every third Saturday I worked straight through until the store closed at 10 p.m. I came back in at noon on Sundays and worked until we closed at 6 p.m.

Saturday mornings were special, because Bob always went to Jordan’s Restaurant, at the top of the hill, and brought back coffee and inch-thick slabs of toast, made from Ma Jordan’s homemade bread, slathered with butter and jam and wrapped in waxed paper, for our weekly coffee break.

The cases of beer—and we sold a lot of beer—were kept in the dusty basement and carried, one or two or three at a time, up a set of narrow wooden stairs to fill the coolers. Because Bob never wanted “the girls” to be left alone at the store, he arranged the work schedule so that there was always one of “the guys” on duty to lug the beer upstairs and pump the gas.

Evenings were my favorite times at the store. Business was usually brisk, and there was always a steady stream of banter with our regular customers.

I got to know the rhythm of year-round life in a small town, and learned that the four seasons I knew were just the beginning. There was also mud season, when the loggers—and I confess that I had a bit of a thing for loggers, having, early on, declared my intention to marry one someday—spent less time in the woods and more time hanging around the store. There was “the smelts are running!” season, which I’d never even heard of before I worked at Bob’s, but which turned out to be one of the annual social high points of small-town life. In January and February, there was jump-start season, when the weather was, according to my part-time coworker Bob Hinkley, “colder than a witch’s tit” and Bob was kept on a dead run every morning, working his way through the list of people who had awoken to dead car batteries.

Maine’s minimum wage in 1978 was $2.30 per hour, and I think Bob paid me $2.40, which I thought was very generous of him. Except for the weeks when I worked a few hours of overtime, my take-home pay rarely amounted to more than $75, but the truth was that I was having so much fun that I probably would have done the job for free. 

I continued to work for Bob, either full-time or part-time, for the next 11 years. During that time, I watched Lee-ann and Beth grow up, and I think he came to think of me as a third daughter—one who needed frequent rescuing.

When I lived on Bird Hill, I was constantly sliding off my icy driveway in the winter, and Bob soon realized that if he wanted me to report for my shift, he was probably going to have to drive up and pull my car out of the ditch first—one memorably icy winter, it was 17 times.

He fixed up my 1970 Mercury Montego enough to pass inspection with body putty and steel wool, installed a replacement horn on the steering column when the original horn quit working, and kept track of its maintenance needs far better than I did—on an evening when we weren’t too busy, he’d drive it into the garage without a word and change the oil.

He rescued me from bad decisions, and his gentle advice kept me from making even more of them.

It wasn’t just me, of course; from watching him interact with his customers, I came to understand and appreciate the importance of the central role he played in the community.        

As Chris Dunham wrote on the “Greenwood As It Was” Facebook page, “Bob spent his adult life helping his community thrive through quiet acts of service and generosity. So many of life’s problems—automotive and otherwise—were solved by a visit to his store.”

In 2023, Greenwood’s annual Town Report was dedicated to Bob, an honor he richly deserved. I wrote the dedication that appeared at the front of the report, which read:

Although he worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, often seven days a week, at the store and garage, and was in constant motion, waiting on customers behind the counter, pumping their gas and washing their windshields, or performing car-repair magic in the garage, Bob was never too busy to stop what he was doing and chat for a few minutes.

Bob never made a distinction between “locals” and “summer people”—he greeted everyone with the same warmth and treated them all with the same kindness and generosity. If he knew someone was going through a hard time, he offered what was needed, whether it was a listening ear, reassurance that he’d get their car back on the road, or a few groceries on credit until payday. More often than not, people who came into the store carrying the weight of the world left with a lighter step and a smile.

He made the most of his precious little free time, becoming active in the Kora Shrine Funsters and appearing in costume as Pluto at countless parades and functions. In the winter, for as long as anyone can remember, he plowed the church parking lot and the driveway of the Greenwood Historical Society after every storm, never asking to be paid.

Service to his community has always been important to Bob, and because he has always gone about providing it in his typical quiet way, it’s likely that most of us have no idea of the full extent of his contributions to our town and its inhabitants. But if you ask around, you’ll find that nearly everyone who knows him has a story about a time that Bob made a difference in their lives.

One of Bob’s favorite sayings, to reassure people that things will turn out all right, has always been “A hundred years from now, nobody’ll know the difference.”

But, even a hundred years from now, our community will still be a better place because of the difference that Bob made.

In my own life, and the life of this town, there will never be another Bob Coolidge.

Godspeed, Bob, and thank you.

Bob in his store, c. 1981.

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Still grateful.

My assignment for this month’s writing group meeting was to write a post about gratitude. It’s a topic I would usually find easy to address. I try to live as mindfully as I can, and that means being mindful of all that I have to be grateful for, and taking a frequent inventory of my overall incredible good fortune. This has been a hard week for gratitude, though, making me realize that I should have written this essay Before, instead of waiting until After. But since we always give ourselves the option to write about something other than the assigned, or rather, suggested, topic, here goes.

November 6, 2024

I knew what I’d done the second I closed the door behind me, but I tried twisting the knob, just to be sure. It didn’t budge.

It was 6:30 a.m. I was standing on the cold concrete doorstep in a long-sleeved t-shirt, pajama pants, and Crocs, and I was locked out of the house.

I had stepped outside to get the paper, and to take a photo of the sun rising, because, honestly, I was kind of surprised that it did, after the events of the day before. It would have seemed more fitting if the heavenly bodies had all somehow been cast out of alignment, and I had awoken to unrelenting darkness, instead of familiar constellations overhead and a faint lightening in the east.

But no. I had been awake for more than an hour, and I had spent most of that time glued to my phone, doomscrolling through one blood-red chart of election returns after another, when I glanced up to see that the eastern sky was washed in the subtler, less angry reds of sunrise.

Apparently, then, life was going to go on.

The election hadn’t been the only drama unfolding the night before. Six or seven miles away, at the other end of the road on which we live, a man with a semi-automatic rifle crashed his truck into his neighbors’ house, fired shots at the people living there, and set the house on fire before running off. Police issued a shelter-in-place advisory, which I received on my phone, after already having been alerted by social media and texts from my kids.

Hence the locked door. Unless I’m home alone at night, our door is rarely locked. To be honest, I’m not sure I even know where the key is. But, in the midst of dual dramas, one national, the other close to home, anything that could make me feel safer had seemed like a good idea. Maybe a part of me believed that by locking the door, I could lock out the other awful thing that was happening that night, and keep the other terrible news at bay.

I had gone to bed hours before my husband, who had stayed up, watching election returns and clinging to a last shred of hope, until after 2 a.m. Although I sleep with my phone on my bedside table, a holdover from when I had college-age kids and needed, for my own peace of mind, to be on mom duty 24/7, I knew Tony’s phone was downstairs on the charger. He removes his hearing aids at night, naturally, and without them, nothing short of a dynamite blast is likely to wake him.

Even so, I gathered a handful of pebbles from the driveway and started pitching them in the general direction of our upstairs bedroom window. I’ve seen a lot of movies and television in which this is portrayed as an effective way to rouse someone, and the few pebbles that actually hit the glass did make what sounded to me like a fairly loud noise, but I wasn’t surprised when no light came on and Tony didn’t appear.

With all of the unusually warm weather we’ve had this fall, and all of the opening and closing of windows we’ve done, I hoped that at least one of the five large, low, easily accessible windows on the south side of the house might have been left unlocked. But after I unsuccessfully tried the only one that wasn’t covered by a screen, I was able to discern that all of the sash locks were pointed in the same direction, securely latched.

That left only the two much smaller windows on the east wall of Tony’s office, each several feet above the ground, too high for me to climb through, even if I could get one of them open. But, by some miracle, Tony had been working on a project involving a stepladder the day before, and had left it conveniently outside, beside the door.

So I was able to fetch the stepladder, remove the screen from the outside without damaging it, and raise that rather tiny double-hung window to its full opening size, about 18 by 20 inches. All that was left was to climb through, and here is another way in which movies and television have misled me: crime dramas make this sort of thing look a lot easier than it is in actual practice. Suffice it to say that I now know that I do not have a bright future as a cat burglar.

There’s a table against the wall directly beneath the window. In spite of the fact that it was covered with piles of random crap, and in spite of bad knees that don’t bend the way they’re supposed to, I managed to slither headfirst through the window, ending up on my belly, amidst whatever boxes and books and papers didn’t get pushed to the floor.

I was back inside, and all that was needed was a couple of moves harking back to those days when I faithfully practiced yoga. Still on top of the table, I went from Awkward Cobra to Geriatric Puppy to Confounded Cobbler’s pose—or whatever that position is called when you’re finally sitting upright but not sure what to do next—before I was finally able to slide off the table and stand.

Maybe this essay is, in a way, about gratitude after all. Reading it over, I realize how much I have to be grateful for, and how many people throughout the world don’t share these privileges. Kids who care enough to tell me to lock my doors. The ability to feel safe in my own home. Stiff old knees that still work well enough to let me climb a ladder and squeeze through a window when necessary. A warm house to climb back into, and a good breakfast. A sun that still rises every morning, over a country I still believe in.

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Maybe that’s enough.

I know I say this every year, but it’s been a busy summer. It’s been too busy, which is also something I say every year at this time, when the sun starts dipping behind the hill across the lake before we’ve finished supper, and we need a fire to take the chill off in the mornings, and I wake up in the middle of a windy night because acorns are landing on the metal roof and rattling all the way down.

This is when I realize that I haven’t gotten around to so many of the things that made summer summer when I was a child and free of responsibilities. I haven’t spent enough time on the deck, or on the screened porch, or in a canoe. I haven’t had even one afternoon of lying in the hammock for hours with a book, dozing between chapters, pulling lazily on a rope tied to a nearby tree to set myself rocking, but not too fast.

And it’s not just the hallmarks of a lazy summer that I regret not having gotten around to. There’s that list, titled “2024 Camp Projects” and optimistically jotted down in the spring—that magical time when the world seems new and the energy boundless and all things possible. As we’ve tidied up for company, it has moved from the table to the bookcase to the desk more times than I can count. Very few of the items on the list have even been started, and even fewer have been completed and crossed off—not “Trim bushes in boat beach,” nor “Weave new seats for canoe,” nor even “Figure out why pump runs so much—new pressure tank needed?”

Next spring, in my annual surge of optimism, I’ll draw a line through “2024,” retitle the list “2025 Camp Projects,” and add a few more tasks. One or two may even get done, although probably not that one about the pressure tank; that’s been on the list for a few summers already now.

I brought my new electric chainsaw from home to camp to trim the bushes. I ordered a roll of webbing to replace the canoe seats. I am a great beginner of projects, but not much of a finisher.

In my desk drawers and the files on my computer, I have what probably amounts to about a hundred unfinished writing projects, everything from notes scribbled down in a fit of inspiration to about 75 percent of a novel and maybe half of a short story collection. Every once in a while, I pull something out, reread it, and am pleasantly surprised to find that it’s not half bad, but that’s about as far as I usually get.

Sixteen years ago, in the early spring—season of perpetual optimism—I emailed my siblings:

“I’m working on a new writing project, and I’m going to need lots of help from all of you. I’ve started writing a kind of memoir, written in two voices, mine and Mom’s…”

There were several other email exchanges, in 2013, 2015, 2021, and, finally, on March 25, 2024:

“I’m on vacation this week! It’s the first time in five years that I’ve taken a whole week off at once, and I’m determined to use it to make some real progress on wrapping up the first draft of Just Like Glass. Twenty years since Mom died seems like long enough to get this thing done!”

It is to my siblings’ credit that, each time I emailed them with more questions and renewed enthusiasm for the project, they responded with thoughtful answers, rather than eye-rolls. None of them pointed out that they had heard that tired story before.

Maybe it was that week-long kick-start in March that did it. Maybe it was the 20-year anniversary of my mom’s death in April. Maybe it was remembering my sister-in-law Peggy’s admonition, only a few months before her own passing, that I really needed to get that book finished while they were all still here to read it.

Whatever the motivation was, it got me up early every morning to spend a couple of hours writing in a quiet house. By the time we moved to camp in late May, I was down to just two short chapters to finish.

I might have gotten stalled again. I might have opted for more time on the deck or the porch with a book, or in the hammock or the canoe. But much of early June was chilly and damp, and when I was fortunate enough to have an entire unscheduled weekend to myself at camp, I planted my butt in a chair and I got it done. Finished.

Sure, we’ve had some chilly nights, and the days are noticeably shorter, but summer isn’t quite over yet. We’ll put the hammock away before the next rain, and it may be too cool for the screened porch, but there will still be some afternoons when I’ll find a spot of sun on the deck and sit with my thoughts.

I’ll think about all the things I didn’t do enough of this summer, and vow to do more of them next year. I’ll hear the water pump cycle on and off and fret a bit about getting a new pressure tank. I’ll start to feel that old September, end-of-summer melancholy creeping in. Then I’ll remember that this summer I finished something I started more than sixteen years ago. Something that is really important to me: my first book. Maybe that’s enough.

Shameless self-promotion: Just Like Glass will be published on November 21 by the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society, and is available to preorder now.

Click here to pre-order Just Like Glass.

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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.

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Writing is the only thing…

Sometime during the first year after my mom’s death in 2004, I conceived the idea for Just Like Glass, a book about what was undoubtedly the hardest, most momentous year of her life. Sixteen years ago, I actually started writing it.

In those sixteen years, I have written about my mom many times, in emails to my siblings, in essays and blog posts, and, when I could find the time and solitude and motivation, in Just Like Glass, which has grown, slowly, into a book-length, rewarding, but still unfinished project.

Over the years I have found a thousand reasons to put off completing it, from laziness, distractibility, and writer’s block, to a sudden overpowering (and unusual) urge to do laundry or clean the refrigerator.  

Yesterday was Gloria Steinem’s 90th birthday, and when I saw this quote from her, it hit me hard. I am taking this week off from work, with the intention of making real, measurable, satisfying progress on Just Like Glass. If it goes well, I plan to take another week later in the spring, or maybe two, and try to actually finish it.

Today I’m rerunning this piece, which I wrote and posted on my previous blog platform back in 2010. Full disclosure: The novel I was writing when I made this post fourteen years ago isn’t finished either. But when I ran across this essay and reread it this morning for the first time in a long time, it reminded me of how much I can get done, if only I make up my mind to do it.

And this week, I’m making up my mind to do it.  

March 1, 2010

50,000 words in 30 days

Over the past 30 days, I wrote a 50,000-word novel. I’m not saying it’s a good novel, or a finished novel. I’m not even saying that it’s the sort of novel that a year of rewriting, revising, and redeeming could whip into any sort of presentable shape.

But the point is, it’s a novel, it’s 50,000 words, and I wrote it. In 30 days.

Writing a novel in 30 days was not, of course, an idea that originated with me. There’s a guy named Chris Baty out in California who came up with it. Back in 1999, he got together with 20 friends who had each decided, for no very sane reason, that they would like to write a novel in a month. Since then, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, has spiraled out of control: in 2009, there were upwards of 200,000 participants, with about one in five actually completing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

February is not National Novel Writing Month. (It’s too short, for one thing, which is why I had to borrow two days from January to get started.) The official National Novel Writing Month is November. I briefly considered signing up last fall and trying to write my novel then, but November is not a good month for me–too much pre-holiday stress, and then there’s Thanksgiving to deal with at the end of the month. (Obviously, Chris Baty does not have the weighty responsibility of producing six kinds of pie to interfere with his November noveling.)

February, on the other hand, was looking pretty good. If you’re not a cold-weather person, February in Maine doesn’t have a lot to recommend it, and I’m usually perfectly happy to seek indoor pursuits in the winter anyway. Will was headed back to school at the end of January after five weeks at home, meaning that I would be sharing the house with only one person who might become resentful if I gave up cooking, grocery shopping, and speaking in full sentences for a month. And I had a week of vacation smack in the middle of February, and no plans for it.

So, with equal measures of excitement and trepidation, I decided to plunge in. By starting on January 30th and finishing on February 28th, I figured I would get ten weekend days, plus five vacation days, so I wouldn’t be working at my real job on half of my allotted 30 days. That made the whole thing sound surprisingly doable. If I could just write 3,000 words a day on each of those 15 days, I’d barely have to write at all on work days. Piece of cake, right?

It turns out that writing 3,000 words a day can be far easier than you’d think. On the other hand, writing 3,000 words a day can be far harder than you’d think. It all depends on the day. In the beginning, I actually thought I might “put words in the bank” by writing in the evening after working all day, or by writing more than 3,000 words on some days.

I did write in the evenings, and I did write about 4,000 words on one of my early weekend days, which turned out to be a really good thing when I started to slow down toward the end of the month. (Or maybe the only reason I started to slow down toward the end of the month was that I had those extra words in the bank. Hmmm.) But one of the many things I discovered during my month of nearly non-stop noveling is that 3,000 words in a single day is just about my personal limit. After that, I start looking for excuses to take breaks. Wrote a page? Check Facebook. Wrote 100 words? Check my email for the tenth time in an hour. Wrote a paragraph? Make some hot cocoa. Wrote a sentence (or a fragment thereof)? Get a snack. You can see where this is going.

However, I did write nearly half of my 50,000 words during the nine-day period that included my vacation and its two book-end weekends. Having that vacation occur during Week 3 of the process turned out to be nearly perfect timing, since by then the story was well enough developed to allow me to (occasionally) reach my peak rate of about 900 words an hour. Most of the time, though, I slogged along at a much slower pace, more like 400-500 words per hour.

In the end, I estimate that I spent about 100 hours writing during that 30-day period, not including frequent breaks for stretching, snacking, and maintaining my sanity. One hundred hours to produce 50,000 words seems like a surprisingly tidy figure, but that’s about how it worked out.

Although I didn’t watch much TV, do a lot of cooking, or clean the house much during February, I did manage to catch all I wanted to see of the Olympics. I made mostly passable meals on a fairly regular basis. (I even baked a couple of times.) The Board of Health did not declare my home a health hazard, and we usually had clean clothes for work. Perhaps most amazing, besides writing a novel during February, I also found time to read two 500-page novels (The Cider House Rules and The Grapes of Wrath) during the same period.

What that tells me is that, in all of the other months, when I’m not writing a 50,000-word novel, I’m obviously somehow spending 100 hours of free time doing something else. One hundred hours is being frittered away each and every month! This is a revelation for someone like me, who constantly feels pressured, runs perpetually behind schedule, and frequently bemoans the lack of sufficient time to clean the house, read a magazine, connect with friends, and, of course, read and write as much as I would like.

I’m going to have to do some serious thinking about how to harness the wealth of free time I’ve obviously had all along, and put it to Really Good Use…right after I check Facebook, and email, and maybe fix a snack.

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Barred Owls

My sister-in-law Peggy had what Harry Potter fans (and she was one) would call a Patronus: a kindred spirit from the animal world that visited her in times of uncertainty or distress, providing comfort, reassurance, or guidance.

“Peggy was always sure that the presence or call of a barred owl told her that all would be well,” my brother Steve commented on a Facebook post I made last August, a photo of a barred owl that had flown across our camp road in front of my car and perched nearby.

The night before my niece Sara and her husband, Michael, got married, in August of 1999, they left their dog, Kismet, in Steve and Peggy’s care at the Red House. When Peggy let Kismet out before bed, she uncharacteristically wandered off in the dark (Kismet, not Peggy!) and couldn’t be found. No amount of searching and calling brought her back, and finally, worried and hoarse, Steve and Peggy went to bed and slept fitfully, fearing the worst—that Kismet would not return, and Sara’s wedding day would be ruined.

The next morning, Peggy awoke to the call of a barred owl. She knew then, she said, that “everything was going to be all right.” Sure enough, when she hurried downstairs and opened the back door, Kismet was there, asleep on the porch and none the worse for her night of adventure.

It wasn’t the first time a barred owl had appeared and provided Peggy with solace and reassurance. Several years earlier, on an icy winter day, her car had slid off the road on her way home. It happened on the notoriously slippery and slanted stretch of the Sunday River Road in an area known to locals as “the Alps,” which each winter sent at least a few vehicles slithering into the ditch. (That section of road has since been rebuilt to accommodate the heavy and hasty ski traffic; I don’t think it claims many victims these days, and I doubt anyone even calls it the Alps anymore, but IYKYK.)

“When Dad and I went down to get her, there was a barred owl on a branch right above her car,” Sara says.

For the rest of her life, Peggy was often visited by a barred owl at times when she most needed reassurance that things were going to work out all right.

Charlotte Kirsten, a trauma psychotherapist and astrologer, believes that “owls are true messengers of the spiritual realm.” Just as Peggy discovered, they can appear as a guide during challenging times. “Unlike any other animal symbol, they relay truth, understanding, patience, and wisdom to us when we need it most. This is especially true during or after times of upheaval and distress.”

I have always loved barred owls, and counted myself lucky whenever I saw or heard one, which wasn’t all that often, until last summer, our first summer without Peggy. We moved to camp in May, and suddenly, barred owls were everywhere.

A couple of times I saw them in the daytime, gliding soundlessly from tree to tree along a trail I was hiking, but mostly they visited me after dark. Nearly every night, all summer long, they were outside my window, conversing with their usual “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?” call, but also sometimes performing what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology aptly describes as “a riotous duet of cackles, hoots, caws, and gurgles.”

One night, after falling asleep to the calls of the owls, I dreamed I had a tattoo of a barred owl with Peggy’s name, in her own handwriting, below it. When I woke up, I looked at my arm, half expecting to see it there.

I am not a tattoo person. In fact, I have never, ever thought I’d get one myself. So many people have them nowadays, including two of my own kids, that I no longer roll my eyes when I see them and wonder what possesses someone to think permanently marking their body is a good idea, but it’s not something I ever intended to do myself.

But the oddly specific nature of my dream, and then a similar, less detailed dream I had a few weeks later, made me unable to stop thinking about it.

The barred owls hung around all summer; I think they must have nested nearby, because on some nights I heard what sounded like a whole family calling, chuckling, and caterwauling in the trees around the camp.

Peggy’s birthday was November 7th. In September, the day after we moved home from camp, I made an

appointment with a local tattoo artist, and last Tuesday, the day that Peggy would have turned 81, I got the tattoo from my dream: a detailed black and gray barred owl, with her signature, including the “xxoo” with which she always signed notes to family and friends.

I got tattooed on my right inner forearm. That was where the tattoo from my dream was located, and I never considered putting it anywhere else. But it wasn’t until after it was done that I realized why: when I cross my arm across my chest, I can hold my owl close to my heart.

The same place where I will always hold Peggy.

Close to perfect: Saying goodbye to the Best Big Sister Ever
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Close to perfect: Saying goodbye to the Best Big Sister Ever

Peggy_Amy

These are the words I wrote last week to read at the memorial service for my beloved sister-in-law Peggy. There is so much more I could have said. Peggy was warm and welcoming, conscientious and kind, never critical or dismissive. She gave so much to so many, and among the greatest gifts that she gave us were her smile, her full attention, and her complete, nonjudgmental support of all of our endeavors. To those of us who knew and loved her, she really was “close to perfect,” and our world will never be quite the same…but we will always know that we were so, so lucky.

Just in case anyone here doesn’t already know, I’m Amy. I’m the baby of the Wight family. And even though I may be counting the months until I’m eligible for Medicare, that is not a position I ever intend to relinquish.

As I told Steve last week, I’ve been so, so lucky. All of my life, I’ve been surrounded by competent, loving, responsible adults, so I’ve managed to never really have to grow up and become responsible myself, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Many of you know that I love words—reading them, writing them, and, often, using way too many of them to tell a story. But this week, as I’ve tried about a hundred times to write the words to say what Peggy means to me, words have repeatedly failed me.

My brother Andy suggested that I start with this prompt: “Peggy was an only child. We were a gang of 5.”

So: Peggy was an only child. We were a gang of 5. I was 3 years old the first time Steve brought Peggy to camp to meet the family. Our camp on North Pond, like Steve and Peggy’s camp just down the road, has always been the place where family and friends gathered, so I’m sure that on that first visit, it must have been filled to the rafters with noise—with laughter and arguments and Red Sox games on the crackly old radio, with Steve’s adolescent brothers and little sisters, with our mom in the kitchen, probably roasting a turkey or making a casserole or baking cookies.

I’m also pretty sure that Peggy, the only child, was completely unfazed by the chaotic family she was about to join. I’m sure she gathered me onto her lap and read to me, made an ally of 12-year-old Leslie, put on an apron and washed the dishes. I know that all of us loved her right from the start.

Because I was so young, I don’t remember a time before Peggy was a part of my life. I was 6 years old when she and Steve got married, and 8 when they made me an aunt.

I was 10 the year Steve was deployed to Vietnam, the year that Peggy and the boys lived with us in Connecticut. My best friend Donna and I took on the role of “mother’s helpers”—which mostly meant learning to change diapers, watching a lot of Sesame Street, which was brand new that year, and baking cookies for our charges.

That was also the year that Donna and I circulated a petition among our classmates and won the right for girls, for the first time, to wear pants—but not blue jeans—to school. For my birthday that year, Peggy sewed me a mix-and-match set of school-appropriate clothes: a blouse, a long vest with tan and turquoise stripes and gold buttons, and two pairs of pants, one tan, one turquoise. I wish I had a photo so you could all see how cool I was!

By the time Steve and Peggy bought the Sunday River Inn and moved to Maine in 1971, I was 12 years old. Having vowed, long about third grade, that I would be moving to Maine myself just as soon as I could, I had already been scheming for years for a way to get here for more than just a couple of months in the summer.

So Steve and Peggy’s purchase of the Inn was a dream come true for me. My mother and I started spending every school vacation, and occasional long weekends, in Maine, and it was heaven. Mom would help out with the cooking and the laundry at the Inn during the busy vacation weeks, and I would keep Keith and Eric out of the way and entertained at Steve and Peggy’s house next door during the often frantic hours between 4 and 6 p.m.—that mainly meant many hours of Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and The Electric Company, and many, many boxes of Nabisco snack crackers.

A lot of you knew and loved my mother, and you might be surprised to hear this, but for several years of my adolescence, my mom absolutely, positively did not understand me. I mean, she didn’t understand one single thing about what it was like to be a teenage girl.

But, lucky for me, Peggy always did.

I was about 15 when I decided it would be a good idea for me to move to Maine and live with Steve and Peggy—or, more accurately, I planned to live in the backyard of the Inn, in their new 8×10 garden shed. This was well before the tiny-house movement really got going, so I was ahead of my time.

Steve, champion of crazy notions and outlandish adventures, enthusiastically agreed, and Peggy never once voiced the slightest objection, even though my plan included the vague idea that I would be relying on her for food, transportation, and bathroom facilities.

It was my mother, with her oft-repeated mantra, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” who soundly rejected my scheme (I told you she didn’t understand me) and in the end, I had to wait two more years to get here.

Within a couple of months of starting college (in Maine, of course), I had declared my legal residency with Steve and Peggy and changed my driver’s license to Maine. When I turned 18, I registered to vote for the first time in Newry.

I came home to Steve and Peggy’s for vacations, worked in the ski shop, and slept on the floor of Sara’s room.

I celebrated my first wedding at the Inn, and it was Peggy I ran crying to when that marriage ended.

Just as I had, my kids grew up on the cross-country ski trails, and playing pool and ping-pong in the basement. Cait got her first lawn-mowing and landscaping experience there, and even though she would probably tell you it was mostly limited to picking up rocks—so many rocks!—she would also probably tell you that it started her on a path in that line of work that has lasted 25 years and counting.

From summer gatherings that spill over between the two Wight family camps on North Pond, to the countless family celebrations they’ve hosted, first at the Inn, and then, for the past quarter of a century, at their beloved Red House, Steve and Peggy have provided not just me, but the whole big, crazy Wight family with a home base for more than half a century.

When our mom died, almost 19 years ago, it was Peggy who helped each of us, in different ways, to navigate our grief. It was Peggy who sorted through our mom’s boxes of mixed-up photos and created special albums for each of us.

And it was Peggy who filled the role of matriarch. We called her our “BBSE”—the Best Big Sister Ever. She was our sister, our mother, our friend, our confidante.

For two nights in a row this week, I dreamed the same dream—Peggy came into my kitchen to return a pie plate, staying for only the briefest second. When she left, I turned to someone beside me and said, “Peggy is as close to perfect as any human being I have ever known.”

And all of us who knew her, and loved her, and shared the incredible light and love and spirit that she embodied—we all know how true that is.

And we are all so, so lucky.

 

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A Little Bit Extra

Cait birthday photo This kid. What can I say? Ever since she was born, shortly after a Red Sox win on Opening Day of the 1985 baseball season, my daughter Cait has been positively careening through life.

She is loud. She rarely sits still for more than two minutes. Her emotions are never far from the surface. She is impulsive, rambunctious, and unfailingly fun to be around. (And then you need a nap.)

She started preschool at age two (because she needed a LOT more social interaction than I was able to provide), was the only girl in a class with nine boys, and was more than able to hold her own.

“Cait is the one who leads the class in pounding on the table and chanting, ‘We want our snack!’” her preschool teacher, the long-suffering Mrs. Brown, told me, a bit wearily, at the end of her first week.

She is, well…A Little Bit Extra.

“When you’re so extra and it’s St. Patrick’s Day,” Cait posted last month, with a video that showed her stirring green food coloring into her coffee cup while listening to Irish jigs at 6:45 a.m. Because (despite my aspirations) I was never the Cool Mom, I had to look up the meaning of “extra” in that particular context.Extra

An online urban slang dictionary informed me that “extra” means “over the top, excessive, maybe a little dramatic. Doing more than what the situation calls for. Often a little inappropriate.”

It was an “Aha!” moment.

Cait has been A Little Bit Extra since the day she was born, weighing 9 pounds and 14 ounces, in the middle of a spring snowstorm—feisty, quirky, exuberant, and determined.

We didn’t always find this quality—this Extraness—endearing. There was, for instance, that time when she was in middle school and couldn’t resist adding her own spin to her role in a class play.

It involved making a mildly obscene gesture onstage, after being unequivocally told, during rehearsals, that she was NOT TO DO THAT. It might have been done on a dare. She might not have believed there would actually be consequences. She might have been simply unable to resist playing for laughs.

Whatever the reason, it resulted in a three-day school suspension, a prohibition from participating in the end-of-the-year class trip, and a lot of tears.

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

It was nearly two decades before Mitch McConnell uttered those words about Elizabeth Warren, but we could have said the same thing about Cait…probably a few thousand times.

I have a theory that it’s the quirkiest, feistiest, most exuberant kids—the ones who ask the most questions, laugh and cry and scream and howl the loudest, and wear their parents down to a frazzle—who often turn into the most interesting, engaging, confident, and self-actualized adults.

Cait has more friends, and more fun, than anyone else I know. She channels her limitless vitality into working hard, and playing harder. She runs her own business, as well as works at physically demanding jobs, and still finds plenty of time and energy to hike, bike, run, or ski several times a week, usually with a like-minded posse.

Seven years ago, she piled all of her belongings into and onto her car and moved to Colorado, where she knew no one, with little more than the sketchy promise of a landscaping job and an apartment she’d found on Craig’s List. A couple of weeks later, on a call home, she mentioned that she was going to a wedding that weekend.

“How can you be invited to a wedding? You don’t even know anyone out there!” I said.

“Well, I do now,” she said. (Duh.)

Cait is A Little Bit Extra, and I’m so glad we never tried (well, not very hard, anyway) to squelch her spirit.

She is the best possible illustration that the parenting style with which I’ve always said I raised both my kids and my dogs—“hands off and hope for the best”—really can work out.

Cait celebrates every win, every holiday, every milestone, every success—both her own and her friends’—with boundless energy, unlimited generosity, and—always—the perfect outfit. She is honest, outspoken, passionate, and compassionate. She is loving and well-loved.

Happy birthday, Cait! You’ve always been A Little Bit Extra Just Exactly Enough.

Cait collage

Why is it so damn hard to be a “real Mainer,” anyway?
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Why is it so damn hard to be a “real Mainer,” anyway?

Maine5

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be “from Maine.” This has been prompted, in part, by some arguments (so many arguments!) on a local Facebook page, in which the most frequent response to people with ideas that seem new or different, or opinions that differ from those of the original poster, or (the biggest tipoff) political leanings that are anywhere left of center is…“Are you even from around here?”

Maine1(Because, obviously, if you aren’t, then nothing you have to say is worth listening to, right?)

I’ve watched as members of our community are derided as “flatlanders,” “transplants,” or worse. I’ve seenMaine4 suggestions that they should “go back to Massachusetts,” “try harder to fit in,” or simply “STFU.”

But what does it mean, exactly, to be “from around here”?

Well, for one thing, of course, you need to have been born here. That goes without saying. In fact, both of your parents really need to have been born here if you’re going to claim true “from around here” status—since, as they say, “A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ’em biscuits!”

And let’s go ahead and admit it, you aren’t really going to be as accepted as truly “from around here” unless, at minimum, three of your four grandparents were also born here.

If your parents were both Mainers, but they left the state after college because they heard the siren song of better jobs and better economic opportunities, and were misguided enough to settle in southern New England and have their first four children in Connecticut, those children are not, and can never be, “real Mainers.”

Even worse, if those same parents then moved, briefly, to New Jersey in pursuit of a better job, and their fifth and last child was born there—even if that child was brought to Maine for the first time—to this exact part of Maine, her father’s ancestral home—at the age of three and a half months (riding all the way in a death-defying “infant car bed” wedged into the backseat of the family car)—that child, obviously, can never be a “real Mainer.”

(Of course, that child, who never lived in New Jersey again—because at the end of that first summer the family returned to Connecticut, where she lived from the time she was six months old until she was 17—can’t really be from Connecticut, either, because she had the misfortune to have been born Outside of New England. Nope, nope…no “Nutmegger” status for her.)

My father’s family roots are pretty solidly entrenched in western Maine, going back several generations here, but my mother was born in Searsport and her family roots are from “down east.”

While there’s no question that she was a “real Mainer,” I’m pretty sure my mother’s coastal background made her credibility somewhat suspect here in western Maine. Because not only is it important, around here, to be a “real Mainer,” using the criteria previously described, but also, particularly if you’re going to be taken seriously when arguing on the local Facebook pages, you need to be “from around here.”

And the circle on the map that takes in “from around here” seems, sometimes, to be vanishingly small.

Maine roots aside, there’s a lot of skepticism about people from other parts of the state, particularly parts of the state that (it may be suspected) regard themselves as more cultivated, more sophisticated, more open-minded, etc.

Things could have been worse for me, I suppose; my mother could have been from Portland, epicenter of that “other Maine,” with its designer coffee, rampant liberal politics, and overpriced restaurants.

Maine7My husband, who looks and sounds for all the world like a “real Mainer,” who was born here in Oxford County—and who, for Chrissakes, has been an actual real live Maine logger for well over half a century—can’t really claim the title, because his mother was imported from Maryland. All the buffalo plaid, chainsaw grease, and wood chips in the world can’t make up for that glaring imperfection (although I was unaware of it when we started dating, and was pretty sure that marrying him would be one sure way to raise my own “real Mainer” credibility).

All of my children were born in Maine, but only one of their parents and between one quarter and three quarters of their grandparents (we’re a blended family, so it’s complicated) were born here, so I don’t think they can accurately claim the title, either…even the ones whose fifth great-grandfather, the Reverend Eliphaz Chapman, was responsible for naming the town of Bethel. (Seriously. You could look it up.)

As for me, well, I am my parents’ fifth child, the one unfortunate enough to have been born in New Jersey, of all places. I don’t know a soul in New Jersey, and never did. During my first 17 years, I spent about 20% of my time in Maine and the other 80% in Connecticut, trying to figure out how to get back to Maine as soon as I possibly could.

When I was in the fourth grade, I decided I’d change my middle name to Oxford, in honor of the county where I planned to live, just as soon as I could get here. (I had already changed my first name to Beth, after the tragic sister in Little Women, and since my original middle name was Elizabeth, I obviously needed a new one.) I signed my school papers “Beth Oxford Wight” for a couple of years. (My teachers were very patient with me.)

I’ve been telling people for about as long as I can remember that I’d be happy if I never had to leave Oxford County again (and the past couple of years have done a darn good job of testing that assertion, establishing it to be pretty much true).

It seems like that should count for something, right? And yet I know plenty of so-called “real Mainers”—who have met all the criteria and have never had to fight for the title—who pick up and leave the state at the drop of a hat, trotting off to vacation wherever they please, flitting across oceans, even spending half the year “somewhere warmer.”

Then they come back and settle back in, and not one person has the gall to suggest that they’re “not from around here.”

I mean, really. If you can confess to being anything less than thrilled with our annual five months or so of winter, bookended by Goddamned November (the longest and most tedious 30-day month in the calendar, if you’re not someone who gets irrationally excited about chasing deer with a gun, and especially if you’re someone who would prefer to be in the woods hiking and not getting shot at) and Goddamned Mud Season (which is followed closely by Goddamned Blackfly Season)…if you can actually confess to that, are you even a “real Mainer”? Really?Maine8

Where am I from? I have no idea. I will tell you, however, that when I got a job at Bob’s Corner Store at the age of 19, and people started asking me if I had graduated from Telstar, and if I had gone to school with their kids, I thought I had finally made it. I could pass.

Maine6

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It’s all about the heart: Living with intention

I was asked to give a five-minute talk about “living with intention” as part of today’s service at the UU church I attend in West Paris. I recorded it, transcribed it, and boom—easiest blog post I’ve ever written.

momanddad

I was supposed to give this talk a couple of weeks ago, when we didn’t have church because it snowed, but this is a way better time, because my talk is, pretty much, about hearts. February is American Heart Month, and today is the day before Valentine’s Day.

Also, today would be my mom’s 102nd birthday. My mom suffered through a lopsided, heart-shaped birthday cake pretty much every year of my life until she passed away; we always thought of our mom as our Valentine.

My mom used to go out every February when I was a little kid and collect for the American Heart Association. She would get this kit in the mail, and every February she would walk around the neighborhood collecting money for the American Heart Association, and sometimes she would take me with her. I never really knew why she did it; I never thought about why she did it; she just did it.

I knew that my dad had passed away suddenly, eight months before I was born, so I had never had the opportunity to know him, but everyone would say about my dad, “Oh, everyone loved your father! He was so good-hearted! He was the most good-hearted, the most generous man!”

Well, come to find out, my dad was really good-hearted…but he didn’t have a good heart. And six days before his 46th birthday, when they had four kids, and my mom, unbeknownst to her, was pregnant with me, he had a heart attack, and he died.

For my mom, I think the American Heart Association was her way of trying to give back, to help keep that from happening to other people.

So I grew up knowing, eventually, that my dad, as good-hearted as he was, had a bad heart. I like to think that I inherited his good-heartedness, but I might have also inherited his bad heart.

But I didn’t pay too much attention to that, because when you’re young, you think you’re going to live forever.

By the time I was the age that my dad was when he passed away—and my four older siblings had long since outlived that age—by the time I was about to turn 46, I was, oh, I’d say, about 50 pounds overweight and I’d been on a statin for high cholesterol for a few years. Things probably weren’t going in a good direction.

By the time I was about 50, or a little older than that, I was 70 pounds overweight. I was working for Community Concepts, and they decided to do a workplace health challenge, an exercise challenge. I realized they were just doing it because if a certain percentage of their employees participated, their insurance rates would probably go down, but on April 6, 2012, which happened to be my parents’ 70th anniversary, they passed out these calendars.

The information with the calendars said, “Try to get 30 minutes of exercise on each day for the next six weeks. If you just do it five days a week, that’s good enough. Thirty minutes, that’s good enough. It can be anything—it can be walking, it can be swimming, it can be yoga; you can do whatever you want.”

And I looked at that, and I thought, I think I’m gonna try to do it every single day for six weeks.

Now, this is someone who’s spent half a century avoiding exercise, at all costs. I was the last kid picked in gym class for my entire school career. My best friend and I discovered how to hide in the outfield and not have to come in between innings when we were playing baseball and softball, because we weren’t into exercise.

But I started this thing on April 7, 2012, the day after my parents’ 70th anniversary, and I got 30 minutes of exercise, one way or another, every day of the six-week challenge.

So that was good. I got a pat on the back for that. And I said, “I think I’ll keep this going, because I’m starting to feelBefore and after a little better.”

So, long story short, when I get to my parents’ anniversary this year, it will be their 80th anniversary, and, fingers crossed, I will have completed ten years without missing a day of getting at least 30 minutes of exercise, and most days I get 50 minutes or more.

I like hiking the best, but the thing that keeps me on track is knowing that I can do anything. I haven’t really been sick in ten years, but if I were sick, I could probably get through 30 minutes of yoga, and if I’m feeling good, I can get through a five-mile hike.

I wear this pendant, which is either the sun rising, or the sun setting, over the mountains, which my kids gave me a couple of years ago, to remind me that you just have to keep climbing. And you can change your life.

Thank you.

Pendant