illusion of one’s later years. It took going back to Harlow in the summer of 2013 for me to understand the truth: I was just another frog in a pot. The good news was that so far the temperature had only been turned up to medium. The bad was that the process wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon. The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?
• • •
On June 19th of 2013, two years to the day after Bree’s marriage to George Hughes and a year after the birth of their first child, I arrived home from a less-than-stellar recording session to find an envelope gaily decorated with balloons in my mailbox. The return address was familiar: RFD #2, Methodist Road, Harlow, Maine. I opened it and found myself looking at a photograph of my brother Terry’s family with this caption: TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE! PLEASE COME TO OUR PARTY!
I paused before opening it, noting Terry’s white hair, Annabelle’s expanding paunch, and the three young adults who were their children. The little girl who had once run giggling through the lawn sprinkler in nothing but a saggy pair of Smurfette underpants was now a good-looking young woman with a baby—my grand-niece, Cara Lynne—in her arms. One of my nephews, the skinny one, looked like Con. The husky one looked eerily like our father . . . and a little like me, poor guy.
I flipped the invitation open.
HELP US CELEBRATE TWO BIG DAYS
ON AUGUST 31, 2013!
THE 35TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY OF
TERENCE AND ANNABELLE!
THE 1ST BIRTHDAY OF CARA LYNNE!
TIME: 12 NOON to ?
PLACE: OUR HOUSE TO START, THEN EUREKA GRANGE
FOOD: PLENTY!
BAND: THE CASTLE ROCK ALL-STARS
BYOB: DON’T YOU DARE! BEER & WINE WILL FLOW!
Below this was a note from my brother. Although only months from his sixtieth birthday, Terry wrote in the same grade-school scrawl that had caused one of his teachers to send him home with a note reading Terence MUST improve his penmanship! paperclipped to his rank card.
Hey Jamie! Please come to the party, okay? No excuses accepted when you’ve got 2 mos to arrange your schedule. If Connie can come from Hawaii you can manage the trip from Colo! We miss you, little bro!
I dropped the invitation into the wicker basket on the back of the kitchen door. I called this the Sometime Basket, because it was full of correspondence that I vaguely believed I’d answer sometime . . . which actually meant never, as you probably know. I told myself I had no desire to go back to Harlow, and this may have been true, but the pull of family was still there. Springsteen might have had something when he wrote that line about nothing feeling better than blood on blood.
I had a cleaning lady named Darlene who came by once a week to vacuum and dust and change the bed (a chore I still felt guilty about delegating, having been taught to do myself, back in the day). She was a morose old thing, and I made it my business to be out when she was in. On one of Darlene’s days, I came back to find she had fished the invitation out of the Sometime Basket and propped it open on the kitchen table. She had never done such a thing before, and I took it as an omen. That night I sat down at my computer, sighed, and sent Terry a three-word email: Count me in.
• • •
That was quite a Labor Day weekend. I enjoyed the hell out of myself, and could hardly believe I’d come close to saying no . . . or saying nothing, which probably would have severed my already frayed family ties for good.
It was hot in New England, and the descent into Portland Jetport on Friday afternoon was unusually bumpy in the unstable air. The drive north to Castle County was slow, but not because of traffic. I had to look at every old landmark—the farms, the rock walls, Brownie’s Store, now closed and dark—and marvel over them. It was as if my childhood were still here, barely visible under a piece of plastic that had become scratched and dusty and semi-opaque with the passage of time.
It was past six in the evening when I got to the home place, where an addition had been built on, nearly doubling its original size. There was a red Mazda in the driveway that screamed airport rental (like my Mitsubishi Eclipse), and