Falling In Love With Maine

Falling In Love With Maine

by Ralph Larsen as told to Burndett Andres

September, 2003

In the autumn of 1946, I was fifteen years old, about five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds.   I had lived in foster homes under the aegis of Catholic Charities for more than a decade and got into a lot of scrapes because I was a “home kid.”  I also got into scrapes with bullies.  They didn’t pick on me because I was a home kid; like all bullies, they picked on me because I was small and not so good at defending myself.  I was little for my age; I was really cute, with black curls and the girls loved me, but I was a shrimp. 

 

I had picked up a slim volume, probably in the candy shop or the drug store, about a number of sports figures.  One of them was Jack Dempsey.  When his trainer, Doc Kearns, had wanted to toughen up Dempsey’s hands he had taken him to a lumber camp; he said there was no better place to toughen up.  I wanted to get tough fast, so I decided to take a page out of this book, so to speak.

My brother Johnny and I were living with the McAllisters on Long Island at the time, in Howard Beach, on a canal that went out to Jamaica Bay.  Our house was built on pilings right at the water’s edge; at high tide we could dive out the second story windows into the water.  We were dirt poor, but so was everyone around us, so we didn’t really know it.  My foster mother had just died and there was no one else around who cared if I stayed in school or not, so one day I just packed up an old cardboard satchel I’d found in the house, said good-bye to my brother and left.   I was heading to Maine to be a lumberjack.

I don’t remember what I took with me.  A shirt perhaps.  Some underwear, I guess.  Everything I owned would have fit in that satchel.  I had my hunting knife for protection.  Mr. McAllister was a truck driver and managed to get our clothes from the U.S. Army at Fort Hamilton by one means or another, so I imagine I was wearing my olive drab Eisenhower jacket and I surely would have had on my paratrooper boots with high tops and laces.  I was very proud of those boots; they were very macho and considered to be quite a trophy at a time when I had precious few trophies of any kind.

I had a little money from caddying at the North Hills and the Glen Oaks Country Clubs and from doing odd jobs, raking leaves and such, and I believe I must have taken a Greyhound bus to Bangor, or perhaps to Portland and then hitchhiked the rest of the way to Bangor.   I really don’t remember how I got there; it was fifty-seven years ago.  I do remember inquiring around about where to apply for work and being told to go home, that the only work available for kids in a lumber camp was sweeping out shacks and such.  Well, I hadn’t come up here to clean house, so I started hitchhiking south. 

I remember walking along country roads and getting rides for a few miles off and on.  They were all country roads; I didn’t have a map, so I don’t know exactly where I was.  I know I was out of money; I had expected to get a job so hadn’t allowed money for getting home.  I subsisted entirely on apples for a couple of days.  The trees where I walked were laden with them.  They were so crisp; I remember the snap when I bit into them and the juice running down my chin.  I often think of that experience at harvest time as they spoiled me for apples forever; store bought apples are unbearable by comparison and the farther removed in time the experience becomes, the greater the difference seems to grow. 

A few times I stopped at farmhouses.  “I’m hungry,” I would say and the woman of the house would take pity on me and give me some cookies and a glass of milk.  Like I said, I was a cute kid.  I don’t remember getting a meal although I might have done.   I slept in the fields in the grass; the air was so cool and fresh.  One sunny afternoon, I remember just lying down in a field by the roadside and taking a nap.  You could do that then.

I remember sitting on a hill somewhere along the coast, under some pine trees, just gazing in awe at the crashing surf and the jagged shoreline covered with evergreens right down to the water’s edge.  That sight is etched in my mind till this day, even though I don’t know exactly where it was.

By the time I got to Portland, I was dead broke and very hungry.  I hung around, looked around and walked around, trying to nose out some sort of lumber jacking connection.  When the hunger got beyond bearing I would go to this little drugstore/luncheonette in Congress Square and order a hamburger.  After I ate, I’d go into the bathroom and crawl out the window.   Hamburgers were five cents then and I didn’t even have the five cents.  Some indication of how hungry I was can be gleaned from the fact that I had the nerve to go back there more than once.  Looking back, I think the waitress must have liked me because she never squealed and a few times she gave me pie and coffee, too. 

When I finally accepted the fact that I was not going to become a lumberjack, I decided to return to New York.  I started hitchhiking again and got a ride just south of Portland.  The driver dropped me off in a little coastal village.  It was late at night and only one street lamp eerily penetrated the fog.   I remember walking to the water’s edge and sleeping there that night huddled up against some building.  I’ve always called that place Wales by the Sea, but since there is no such town on the coast (or anywhere else for that matter), I have come to believe it must have been Wells Beach. 

The next day I got a ride with a trucker into Boston.  I remember being outside Fenway Park that night; the Red Sox were playing St. Louis in the 1946 World Series.  I eventually hitchhiked back to New York.  The truckers loved me because I helped keep them awake; I never shut up.  I grew another foot before all was said and done, got into weight lifting, personal training and even some professional boxing and ceased being a target for bullies. 

I have vacationed in the state many times over the years and finally moved to Cherryfield in 2002 at the age of seventy-one, because I fell in love with Maine in the autumn of ’46 and never did get over it. 

Originally Published in the Downeast Coastal Press of October 14-20, 2003

Reference Maine, At Last - Settling In (Vol. II) Page 197

Go to Maine, At Last - Settling In

      

New Lifetime Reading Plan - 2003 Book Review

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Paperback

by Clifton Fadiman & John S. Major

378 pp. New York

HarperCollins $14

Reviewed by Burndett Andres

One prominent online bookseller offers thirty-one million titles. An extraordinary bibliophage might expect to read ten thousand books in a lifetime.  Quot libros. Quam breve tempus!  How can the average person know which books are worthy of his valuable reading time? 

Allowing that each individual will discover what they prefer to read for pleasure and circumstances will conspire to indicate what reading must be done to acquire specific information, how does one select books for general erudition?  At a tender age and quite by chance, I discovered a way to improve the odds of reading the crème de la crème of western literature; I could seek the advice of experts.  The New Lifetime Reading Plan is the condensed wisdom of men whose lives have been devoted to reading and culling the best from the rest.  They know the territory and act as guides; their input demystifies the esoteric, illuminates the obscure, inspires the overwhelmed and instructs the bewildered.    

The first book list I ever saw was “One Hundred Best Books” given chronologically and included in a 1946 publication of the Personal Improvement Guild of New York, NY.  It had been compiled by Henry Seidel Canby, Hugh Walpole, Albert Shaw and Edwin Mims, all unknown to me, but all recognized as “authorities in literature” I was assured.  Since I greatly desired to improve personally, I took this matter of broadening my mind very seriously.  The first book on the list was The Bible with which, being the daughter of fundamentalist Christians, I was more than usually conversant.  Books two through thirty-three, roughly Homer through Shakespeare, were totally unknown quantities; Pilgrim’s Progress, number thirty-four, was familiar, having been bedtime reading in my extreme youth, but the balance was again a mystery.  Interesting note: George Eliot was the only female writer included on this list, unless we accept the possibility, lately advanced, that The Odyssey was written by a woman. 

I met some of the writers on this list during my school years.  It’s probably safe to say that most students learn something of Hawthorne, Melville, Dickens and Twain.  Surely every college student at least hears of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and some of the great Russians.  Much attention used to be paid to the poets Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, etc. as well.  Thus we all glean a little knowledge of “the classics,” and there the matter often remains for the balance of a lifetime.  We’re often comforted by the knowledge that they are there, but who reads them?

Circa 1970 I came into possession of another book list.  This one had been prepared “by the Editorial Advisory Board of the Easton Press for the 100 Greatest Books Ever Written...” Clearly their purpose was commercial, but I was interested to note what books this list had in common with my original one and how the advice of the experts might have changed in thirty years.  Only Virgil remained of the Romans; all the English poets except Keats and Robert Browning were now considered non-essential or at least unsalable; the great novelists roughly from Hawthorne through Twain, chronologically, remained; of the later novelists, only Stevenson, Kipling, Shaw and Conrad were again included.  The ladies were coming on strong; Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe joined Ms Eliot.  Times, they were a changing.

By 1998, Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major realized that a worldview was needed and they seriously revised Fadiman’s previous offering.  A lifetime reading plan directs the investment of a portion of our reading time so that at the end of the day we will have read, and hopefully absorbed for our betterment, the best of the available literature of our culture.  This has traditionally been regarded as being advantageous in creating well-rounded persons and thoughtful citizens.  The New Lifetime Reading Plan suggests that in today’s world, it is not enough to be conversant with the classics of western literature.  In our global neighborhood, they submit, it may be wise to incorporate the best of diverse cultures as well; after all, in today’s world, a reference to the Koran may be as likely to appear in your Sunday paper as any Biblical reference. 

To this end they recommend a multicultural lifetime reading plan and include works from the Oriental traditions, plus what they consider the best of African, Indian, South American and Latin American literature as well.  This presents many implications that could be considered at length.  For example, The Bible is absent from The New Lifetime Reading Plan with the explanation given that “we assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; and there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous.”  The Koran, on the other hand, is suggested.  It is very interesting to note how these plans evolve over time, how they change as certain ideas and authors go in and out of fashion. 

Although the new list replaces The Bible with The Epic of Gilgamesh, the early Greeks survive and the Romans, Virgil and M. Aurelius.  The Arabian Nights made all three lists and Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Cervantes and Shakespeare are still considered “required” reading.  Wordsworth is the only surviving English poet and now two Japanese ladies writing in the late tenth century, upstage Jane Austin as the first female writer included.  The great early Americans are all on the list - Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville and Twain – and the all time favorites, Flaubert, Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy as well.  The Russians Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and the German, Nietzsche, continue to be favored with Shaw and Conrad as the most modern of the writers still uneclipsed.  Harriet Beecher Stowe has given way to the now popular Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf.  In fact, nine of the one hundred thirty-three writers on the primary list are women.  The new view is western with a noticeably global flavor.

There are two additional features of this book that make it even more useful.  The first is the addition of a section called “Going Further” which presents and briefly annotates one hundred (fourteen are women) twentieth-century writers of interest.  The second, the bibliography, is hugely helpful as it presents preferred translations and editions and suggestions for further reading under each writer.

The American writer and theologian, Henry Van Dyke, said, “There are more than a hundred good books in the world.  The best hundred for you may not be the best hundred for me.  We ought to be satisfied if we get something thoroughly good, even though it be not absolutely and unquestionably the best in the world.  The habit of worrying about the books that we have not read destroys the pleasure and diminishes the profit of those that we are reading.  Be serious, earnest, sincere in your choice of books, and then put your trust in Providence and read with an easy mind.”  

The New Lifetime Reading Plan is your friend, a partner that will facilitate this effort.  It does not have a bossy or preachy tone, but rather encourages and stimulates.  It is a useful guide, a time-saving tool and great reading in its own right.         

2003 Book Review for Wolf Moon Press

Reference Maine, At Last - Settling In (Vol. II) Page 178
Go to Maine, At Last - Settling In

               

The Maine Woods Book Review

The Maine Woods

by Henry David Thoreau

1988 Penguin Nature Classics

442 pages

Thoreau’s eloquent description of the wilderness and his journeys through it still resonates one hundred fifty years later.  It was in September 1853 that he paddled down the West Branch Penobscot to Chesuncook Lake.  The Maine Woods is a posthumous creation made up of three essays, one for each of Thoreau’s excursions to Maine, “Ktaadn” in 1846, “Chesuncook” in 1853 and “Allegash and East Branch” in 1857.  

I read The Maine Woods for two reasons.  The first would be that I am recently transplanted to this state and am interested in all things “Maine.”  The second is that I am an inveterate armchair traveler and this sort of book is right up my alley.  I followed his progress with my DeLorme Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, and what a time I had.  

The greatest challenge in reviewing this book is deciding what tack to take in order to navigate through it thoroughly but with some hope of brevity.  Timeless writing defies generalization and condensation; it is multi-layered and each word contributes.   The continued popularity and usefulness of Thoreau’s work one hundred fifty years after it was written, is a testimony to both his modern voice and the ageless appeal of his subject, the wilderness.  Such timelessness is not easily summed up in the proverbial nutshell; one is constantly in danger of being lured down some byway, which does not contribute to the terseness desirable in a review.  I will consider only several of many possible perspectives from which to explore The Maine Woods.  

The most obvious tack to take is to recommend it simply for the fun of reading Thoreau’s writing.  On a superficial level, it is an easy read, the most difficult part being the pronunciation of the Indian place names and Latin labels for fauna and flora sprinkled liberally throughout.  A reader looking for an adventure story can simply skim over these and follow in Thoreau’s steps as he and his companions paddle up and down (or down and up) streams and rivers, challenge rapids and falls or portage around them, climb mountains, slog through swamps, anguish over man’s incursions, sleep and eat outdoors, overcome adversity, slay a moose, absorb the lore of the wild, soak up the ambiance and generally enjoy a naturalist’s dream vacation.  For the erudite and the more attentive reader, there is also great pleasure here.  The Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 223, Fall 2000, offers a six-page analysis of two short sentences from “Chesuncook.”  (Check it out at www.calliope.org/thoreau/thoradv/woodplay)  Writing that offers such manifest opportunities for both the cursory reader and the accomplished wordsmith, and where story and message are so painlessly interwoven, is both sophisticated and enduring.  

Another obvious angle from which to analyze The Maine Woods is its power to inspire.  Within this area, let’s consider two possible calls to action.  The first is to the adventure traveler: “Such an excursion need not cost more than twenty-five dollars apiece, starting at the foot of Moosehead, if you already possess or can borrow a reasonable part of the outfit,” Thoreau says in “Appendix VI. Outfit for an Excursion.”  The second appeal calls everyone to promote and protect the wilderness, to “see its perfect success.”

Subsequent to reading The Maine Woods, and inspired to “go and do likewise” in response to the first of these calls, I was delighted to learn through Internet research that one can follow these same routes today and see much of what Thoreau saw one hundred and fifty years ago, and in much the same way, the only real difference being the increased cost of the kit and the guide.  Hundreds of hikers climb Katahdin each year, but there is no road to the top.  A modern traveler will find campsites along the rivers and lakes, but Chesuncook Village is still only accessible by boat, and there are few roads along the shores of the Allegash or the banks of the East Branch.  Outfitters catering to the adventure traveler abound; the number of excursions into the wilds each year is expected to soar in the foreseeable future beyond what the wilderness can endure.  Parks are placing quotas on the number of persons allowed entrance at any one time.   Clearly the call of the wild, that Thoreau voiced so seductively, is still a siren song. 

It is harder to determine the success of his second appeal.  How many of the thousands of acres under protection in the Maine woods today owe their integrity to this work bearing their name?  Who can say?  It is enough for our purposes here to acknowledge that his work and words have been useful; generations of conservationists have found inspiration and information in these essays and much of the wilderness endures.  Just as Thoreau stood on the shoulders of John Evelyn and drew inspiration from Sylva, so have students of ecology drawn from Thoreau and his enduring legacy.

The one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Thoreau’s trip to Chesuncook presents a perfect excuse (as if one were needed) to visit, or revisit, The Maine Woods.  

This book review appeared in Wolf Moon Press Journal - A Maine Magazine of Art and Opinion
April, 2003
Ref. Maine, At Last - A Moving Memoir Vol. I Page 176
See Maine, At Last - A Moving Memoir

The Boston Post Cane Passes to Emeline Torrey

On September 10, the Boston Post Cane was awarded to Cherryfield’s most senior citizen, Emeline Torrey, 94 years old on September 19, 2011. The recipient of the Boston Post Cane must be the oldest registered voter in town and must have lived in Cherryfield for at least twenty years.

The 102-year-old cane “to keep for the day” and a framed certificate “to keep forever” were presented to Ms Torrey on Saturday by Kathy Upton, President of the Cherryfield-Narraguagus Historical Society, at a reception organized by the family and held at the Narraguagus Snowmobile Clubhouse near Torrey’s home. Friends, neighbors, and family members from around the state and country joined in celebrating the event that she is reported to have been “looking forward to” with great anticipation.

Ms Torrey was born in Machiasport, ME, in that “populated place” known as Starboard and began school there. When she was nine years old, her family was lured to Minnesota by a relative and job prospects. “They were both carpenters,” Emeline says, “and Uncle Frank kept at him until he went out there.” There she grew up, married Sylvester Northrop in 1937, had three children, and remained until 1949 when the family of seven – Emeline, her husband and three children, and her parents Raymond & Rosie Sprague – returned to Maine and settled in Lubec where her husband died just months later.

While the family was still in mourning, a neighbor had a baby girl, but was too sick to care for her. Emeline stepped up and welcomed the newborn into her home. “Shelley Rae Boo Northrop Sheehan Cleaves” was “a bright spot” in their lives and became the family’s fourth child. She grew up with her “adopted” family and lived with them off and on for years. “When I think of a mother, I think of Emeline, and her family as my family, her home as my home,” says Cleaves. “The house was filled with smells of everything you could imagine cooking. She is just a wonderful person. I can’t say enough good things about her. She is a fountain of energy and an amazingly hard worker.”

Emeline has always worked at something. To supplement her widow’s pension, she did housework and cobbled together a living doing whatever work was available. She would come to Cherryfield and stay with her cousin Laura Tenan while working at the Stewart’s blueberry factory in the summer. After the children were grown, she provided live-in cooking and housekeeping services to Senator and Mrs. Hollis Wyman in Milbridge for ten years, retiring from that position in 1977. Tenan also “recommended” her to Ward Torrey, who worked for the Wymans. They married in 1980 and had seven years together before his death in 1987.

In the 1980s she worked on the inspection line at Cherryfield Foods with Kathy Upton who says, “Hers were the last eyes to see the berries before they went into the can. She was like a mother to us all.” She retired from there in 1993, but she’s still working – washing and ironing linens the old-fashioned way for her friends, Frank and Ada Graham of Milbridge. When I met with her at her home, she had just put up fifty pints of green beans that she had picked from her son’s garden.

Her family has grown to include 12 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, and 6 great-great-grandchildren. Her daughter Alice Reid now lives in Florida, her son Bud lives in Lubec, and Emeline lives with her daughter Bonnie Wallace in Cherryfield. It’s a very close-knit family who share the attitude, “she took care of us, now we’ll take care of her.”

Her grands and great-grands call her “a homemade Grammie” and she is famous for her cooking and handicrafts including, but not limited to, crocheting, sewing, embroidery, needlepoint and quilting. “I got the last baby blanket she made,” her great-grandson Samuel (16) boasted.

At the reception, praise for her Shredded Wheat Muffins and Blueberry Cake were on many lips and her cooking skills still in evidence. “There’s a cheese ball I made right over there,” she said, referring to the centerpiece of the reception buffet and she is always willing to share her recipes. “She’s never cooked from a box,” claims her granddaughter Mary Northrop.

“She still loves to pick cranberries and blueberries and help in the garden,” says her granddaughter, Roberta Willey. “She taught me how to drive when she was 71. At Whiting Corner, she just got out and said, ‘here you go.’” Emeline was driving until she was over ninety and still drives within a twenty-five mile radius of home on a restricted license - “no night driving.”

She has lived through nearly a century of amazing change and suggests that perhaps electricity and automobiles have had the greatest impact on the way we live. “We got our first TV in 1957 and it was great entertainment in the old days. I haven’t been watching much lately because my eyes aren’t so good,” but she still enjoys watching the “The Price Is Right,” “Jeopardy,” “Wheel Of Fortune,” and especially “The Young and The Restless.”

Her “daughter” Shelley Cleaves sums up everyone’s feelings perfectly, saying of her surrogate mom, “She’s just a dear woman.”

As A Man Thinketh

"All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thought."

So begins my favorite James Allen's essay, "The Thought-Factor in Achievement," one of seven essays that make up his most successful publication, As A Man Thinketh. Regardless of the clarity and practical value of this collection of essays, it and its author remain obscure. Considering the fact that in our modern world  "success" by any of its myriad definitions is sought with such passion and that communication is instantaneous and ubiqutious, it's hard to understand why his name and words are not on more lips.

Over thirty years ago, my then husband and I, wanting very badly to succeed as Amway Distributors, purchased a self-help leadership development series called "Lead the Field" by Earl Nightingale. As a bonus, we also received two tapes of Earl Nightingale reading As A Man Thinketh that served as our introduction to this late 19th century writer. I can't tell you what ever happened to all that "Lead the Field" material, but I wore out those two bonus tapes and have kept a copy of As A Man Thinketh at my bedside all the years since. It has influenced my thinking more than any other thing - animal, vegetable, or mineral. I would gladly give any taker all the books that fill the six-plus foot self-improvement section in our library, but I wouldn't sell my copy of As A Man Thinketh.

And I know what you thinketh right about now, too.  Surely it's something like, well if that book is so wonderful, why isn't MsMOMA the richest, most famous, most accomplished, all round most everything person in the world if she's been reading it over and over every year for thirty-plus years? I can tell you why. Reading it, even over and over, isn't enough. Believing it, even deeply and completely, isn't enough. The truths he illuminates must be applied, practised consistently.

The answer is in the first line of the essay "Thought and Purpose." "Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment. With the majority the bark of thought is allowed to "drift" upon the ocean of life. Aimlessness is a vice..." She who has no purpose, gets no where. That's the message and the answer to the question and describes me pretty perfectly. My only purpose in life has been to enjoy it and be happy. In this I have succeeded. Now I am confronted by the question, is this enough?

The most important thing I learned from James Allen, and have internalized like I thought of it myself, is that we choose our thoughts and thereby our circumstances. If my thoughts produce congenial circumstances, I just keep thinking the same thoughts. If I want to change my circumstances, I change my thinking. The passion behind my thoughts determines the speed with which my thoughts out-picture in my environment. It is very empowering to know that I can, to a great extent, control my circumstances. While there may be other forces at work in the universe that contribute to my destiny, and there are many theories on this point, at the very least perhaps I should control the things I can control, and that would be what thoughts I encourage.

Like everything else, this is easier said than done. I seem to need constant reminding that I must focus on some goal if I want to avoid drifting about on the sea of life and never arrive at any destination. Continuing the nautical metaphor, I must be comfortable drifting because no particular port of call has ever beckoned persuasively enough that I'm willing to break out the oars and put my back into rowing hard enough to get there.

About this aimlessness James says, "Those who are not prepared for the apprehension of a great purpose, should fix the thoughts upon the faultless performance of their duty, no matter how insignificant their task may appear. Only in this way can the thoughts be gathered and focused, and resolution and energy be developed, which being done, there is nothing which may not be accomplished."

I find this, like everything else in the world, very interesting indeed. And therein lies the dilemma.

Cobbling an Education

Since it doesn't appear that I'm ever going to go anywhere in the flesh in this lifetime, I've been getting my thrills vicariously. Since starting my travels with Rita Golden Gelman, I have lived in Canada with Marsha Boulton, on an olive farm in the south of France with Carole Drinkwater, and explored Africa with Mary Kingsley. Frances Mayes took me to Tuscany and I went with Elizabeth Gilbert to Italy, India and Indonesia. I've been to the Siberian Arctic and Nazi-occupied Poland. I've walked across America, twice, and been Around the World on the QE2. I recently traveled through the early 20th-century Middle East with Freya Stark. She and I have many more trips planned, but for the moment, I'm traveling with Alice Steinbach.

I met Alice, a Pulitizer Prize winning feature writer/reporter for the Baltimore Sun, when she decided to take a hiatus from her job at the newpaper and spread her wings a bit. Without Reservations is the book that tells that tale. To make a long story short, she liked her new life so well she decided to make a career out of traveling about, seeing the sights, and learning all sorts of new things. She writes about this development in Educating Alice - Adventures of a  Curious Woman. She chose to learn cooking in Paris and dancing in Kyoto; she studied architecture in Florence, Italy, and Jane Austen in Winchester, England. An educational tour to Havana provided insights into the lives of modern Cubans. She saw "secret" gardens in Provence, took a writing course in Prague, and topped it all off by learning to train sheep dogs in Scotland. I found her "courses" very interesting, but given the world and all possible subjects to choose from, her choices would definitely not be my choices. "One man's meat...," etc. 

I've observed that many editions of modern books are designed to be used by "reading groups" and are equiped in the back with "Questions for Discussion." These are often illuminating and now that I've set the stage, I'll explain where I'm heading with all this. One of the questions in Educating Alice is: "After much deliberation, Steinbach chose the subjects she would study and the places where she would learn about them. If you had to make a comparable list of half a dozen subjects and locations for your journey, what would they be?"

I read this question and pondered it briefly and couldn't, at first, come up with anything I wanted to learn badly enough to uproot myself from my comfy nest and wander half-way around the world to study. There's also the nagging question of financing such ventures. However... the more I thought about it, the more I realized there are certain things I would like to know more about and one doesn't necessarily have to go to the ends of the earth to find knowledge. One can get a feel for this self-education business by exploring the possibilities in one's own backyard. Well, I am nothing if not an autodidact, and this idea really appeals to me. So, I started making a list of the subjects I might like to know more about and where this search might necessarily take me. I am now on Page 2. Once started, I had to consciously STOP! listing "interesting places to go and things to learn."

At the top of my list is quilting. Some of my best friends are quilters and I've been collecting fabric for eight years. Perhaps it's time to discipline myself by taking a course or going off on a weekend quilting retreat and actually making something; hell, a potholder would do for a start. My daughter, Solveig, did a retreat caper a few years back and came home with a quilt top. Of course, I could always spend the weekend with my friend, Claire, and get the same result. I'm sure I'd learn just as much and the food would probably be better. Or I could just stay at home and work out of one of the many instructional books already in my possession. But the idea is to organize an actual program around the learning experience and meet some new people while one is at it. By including a trip to Center Harbor, New Hampshire, to the Keepsake Quilting store, I could make it into the equivalent of a study course and round it out with some mind-broadening exposure. I once met a most interesting woman in Center Harbor, NH. It's just an idea that will have to incubate for a spell before it hatches into a plan.

Another subject I'm interested in learning more about is herbalism and holistic medicine. I'm sure there are courses of study available in these subjects that would meet my requirements. Then there is Feng Shui training. That would be fun. I'd like to renew my acquaintance with Washington D.C. at cherry blossom time, explore Cape May, NJ, and visit Savannah, GA. The redwoods of California are on my list of things to see before I croak, along with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I'd also like to visit Boy's Town and follow Route 66 from one end to the other.

We're planning to begin this educational quest by exploring Portland, ME, in early May. There we will learn all about the political party convention process, explore the Victoria Mansion and the country's first lighthouse, and ride a narrow gauge railroad train along Casco Bay. I'm also looking forward to exploring the bakeries and eateries for which Portland is becoming nationally known. In my view, a well-rounded excursion should always include something to do, something to see, and lots of good things to eat. 

What would really be fascinating to learn is what is on other people's lists and why. I think this is a brilliant discussion question.