Among My Tribe
Dribble. Dribble. Dribble. Puh. Dribble. Dribble. Dribble. Puh.
These were the sounds that greeted me as I arose to meet the day, a drizzly and humid Tuesday morning, and the third of four days camped in Wells, Maine, the day itself America’s two hundred and forty-seventh birthday as well as my fortieth birthday. Upon scooching into bed with Sue and her coterie of nine stuffed animals—a before and after version of identical, fluffy (and no longer fluffy) stuffed rabbits fittingly named Felix and Oscar among them—we turned the single-player basketball game outside our door into comedic fodder.
Dribble. Dribble. Dribble. Puh.
One of us said it every few minutes. If the persistent man in question made any shots, they must have all been banked in off the backboard. A backrub for the birthday-less girl accompanied by reminiscences about the previous day’s trip to Bremen, a coastal town ninety miles northeast of Wells, eased us into our morning routines: Sue got ready, I watched Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the motel coffee pot had overflowed the preceding morning, necessitating a quick ride for caffeine since I refused to tempt fate a second time.
Bypassing the gas station made sense in the moment—“I’m going to a café for the good stuff!” I assured myself—until traffic began irking me. Forty years in, frustrating lines of cars are undefeated against testing yours truly’s lack of patience during automotive standstills. Doubling back to the gas station around the corner from the motel, an emptyhanded search for a newspaper led to the cashier saying the place merely stocked a weekly rag.
“That’s alright,” I said as I paid for a hot cup of hazelnut.
“Well, have a good day,” she replied.
“I will!” I said through a smile before uncharacteristically disclosing the unknown to a stranger. “It’s my fortieth birthday today.”
“Wow!” she said while smiling back. “Happy birthday to you!”
Upon re-entering the room, an emoji-covered gift bag leaned against my pillows. Inside it were forty pieces of spearmint gum, forty crisp single dollar bills that a kind credit union teller had retrieved from the vaults as a favor to Sue, and a silver and blue photo album comprised of pictures documenting the Maine essay from my book paragraph by paragraph, which led to my initial confusion until Sue proposed how it might be wise to read the informative preface she’d inserted. (Nothing more respectable than a writer who doesn’t read. Oops.) The album’s second half contained eighty photos of Sue and me taken by other people, meaning there were no awkwardly framed usies, although she did subtly include a snazzy photo of us captured at an angle in a mirror surrounded by kitschy junk shop memorabilia outside an antiques store. When we’d spent my birthday in Wells in 2018 and 2019, Sue had also gifted me cherished photo albums, the first one detailing our inaugural stay in Wells in September 2016, the second one a visual tour through our July 2018 stay. The current trip marked our twenty-fifth visit to Maine in seven years, as rewarding a reason as any to blame on my car requiring a new engine.
Her gift conveniently reminded me of a conversation Sue had relayed to me, one she’d had with her friend Amy during the time in 2020 when Amy, her husband, and two daughters undertook an exhausting move to Maine, about how Sue worried that I desired to live in Wells, a locale where she refused to even hypothesize about dwelling in colder months, hinting that it could function as our summer home after we wintered by the Pacific Ocean. Fearing this inescapable hejira, I imparted to her how moving to Maine would be ideal except the special feeling that planning a trip to Maine furnishes would vanish, as would the joy of arriving via the bridge from New Hampshire, of exploring as foreigners “from away,” and the concomitant sentimentality I rarely enjoyed except when the Pine Tree State was involved. There is nowhere on this planet I’ve yet to encounter where I feel more among my tribe than when in Maine, a feeling so primal and liberating that it demands the appropriate time and distance to afford its endless supply of treasures upon each new rendezvous.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pines lined the final five miles Sue and I drove to complete our ride the day prior to my birthday, a long-awaited meeting with Amy, one of Sue’s closest friends. In the fourteen years I dated Sue while Amy lived one town north, I never met her once. Drive two hundred and fifty miles to say hello in Maine instead? Deal. Her husband Brian’s annual childhood visits to a lake in Bremen produced his obsession with the state, their beautiful new home proof that moving to Maine may be worth it after all. Sue: If you’re reading this, pretend I didn’t type that sentence!
As we walked toward the garage, I spotted someone behind the wheel of the van in the rocky driveway, asking Sue if it was Amy. One garage door opened as the enigmatic lady herself appeared, sporting a pink tee shirt and jean shorts while smiling and full of cheer, offering us both hugs as her elder daughter, Ella, a clear inheritor of her mother’s friendliness, exited the van and provided anecdotes about recent bad luck working at two nearby restaurants, an upcoming trip to Maui to memorialize her high school graduation—a four-year stretch plagued by Covid and the onerous move—and her impending relocation to South Portland for her freshman year of college, the much ballyhooed rite of passage an evergreen source of fascination. Being thrust into familial conversation had the unintended effect of instantly belonging.
The only moving for the next hour or so took place in and around the property, the backyard home to a garden where (hopefully enormous) pumpkins were being competitively readied for an anticipated October festival in town. A garden snake slithered by, bonding Amy and I in our joint panic in the vicinity of the limbless demons, as Brian emerged with their white dog, aptly named Sugar, in tow. (Throughout the remainder of our visit, Sue and I would refer to Sugar as both Sucrose and Aspartame, but when occasionally calling her Sugar, her name was spoken much like Serj Tankian says the word in the same named System of a Down song: Shoogahh.)
As I admired the home’s windows, Brian conveyed that all sixteen of them facing west were designed to relish the lakeside views and maximize sunset appreciation. In the midst of his workday, he retired to the basement while Amy guided us through each room, her love of aesthetics, subtlety, feng shui, Andy Warhol, familial history, Disney World, repurposing art via furniture, and permitting free and open spaces to breathe all gloriously on display wherever my gaze drifted. Rare is the person who possesses the ability to extend such a prodigious gift for details without overwhelming the senses, a trait I simultaneously envied and couldn’t help but praise, my endearment with Amy’s interior decorating skills mentioned to excess. For some reason, a photo of her younger daughter dressed as a French baker, a phase she’d been openly encouraged to explore, the expensive byproduct being a trip to Gay Paree once she too received her high school diploma, lingered in my mind for its adorable absurdity, an emblematic snapshot of the family’s commitment to indulging one’s truest self.
When I re-emerged from the driveway with a seltzer bottle, I presented Amy the floral bouquet and loaf of raisin pecan bread we’d brought her, Amy in one of her many expert elements as she carefully trimmed the stems to varying lengths and housed the assemblage in four or five separate vases, one lending color to the kitchen sink, another freshening up toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the rest, one assumes, astutely tucked into welcoming crevasses dotting the sunlit living room. I’d initially persisted in wanting to visit Rockland, a town Sue and I had fancied five years prior, the same town she skillfully pretended to not quite remember in advance of gifting me the photo album, as if her lack of familiarity would deter me from guessing what her surprise might be.
However, our inbound drive through Damariscotta (the second a is silent, Amy finding it cute when I foolishly mispronounced it), home to a throwback soda fountain, endearingly quaint shops, and the gorgeous backdrop of the rapidly flowing Damariscotta River, led to me abruptly convincing myself that forcing a recreation of that spellbinding stretch in Rockland would yield diminishing returns, thrilled to instead be guided through a new area by a Mainer, a first for Sue and me. Amy spilled how Mainers, the born and bred locals, disdainfully regard families like hers as outlanders, a valid act of tribalism I understood even if it perturbed me that the natives would ungraciously bare their fangs. Talk about a dribble, dribble, dribble, puh.
Amy’s apprehension about parking in a forbidden space downtown further illuminated our behavioral similarities, anxiety about little issues Sue can’t be bothered to think, never mind worry about. We inspected Amy’s favorite bead shop where her rapport with the pair of softspoken women working was indisputably genuine, a trio of experts in a roomful of intriguingly foreign objects I banned myself from touching, some Egyptian-themed earrings inducing childlike allure. Sue and I were then treated to beverages at the neighboring bookstore and peered inside a closed country store, Amy lamenting how an abundance of businesses in town called it quits by mid-afternoon on Monday. Brandishing her palpable mindfulness, Amy recalled my commitment to eating a lobster roll, suggesting the converted auto garage across the bridge in Newcastle as an optimal spot for chatter and chewing.
I’ve long been more comfortable conversing with women, in part due to growing up an only child around a single mother, but also because I sense, whether it’s true every time or not, less competition or judgment. Aware that Sue had considered Amy akin to a sister for three decades, their trips to Florida and California long the subjects of unforgettable anecdotes, afforded two hours of disarming dialogue. There were the necessary tales of adjusting to life in a small, arguably miniscule, town, at least as far as inhabitants go (one thousand when vacationers weren’t in tow), existential concerns and quandaries, one Life Lesson for Amy that she unfurled while analyzing the painfully humbling situation’s fallout, and extrapolations of shared classics, whether Sue’s and mine or Sue’s and Amy’s, the afternoon’s flow as smooth and uninterrupted as the morning car ride imbued with Amy tales of yore. It took mere seconds to realize Amy was a member of the tribe, but savoring truffle fries at an umbrella-shaded picnic table with her and Sue cinched the sensation I’d waited sixteen years to grasp. When we discussed the possibility of reincarnation, I posited how reappearing as a tree that lived for hundreds of years would be my dream, the ability to hang out for centuries with birds and monkeys, among others, as liberating as any other option. Sue laughed because she’s high on the list of my finest audience members, but Amy did too, another sign that the goofy little imaginer I yearn for in the company I keep was innate to her too. The three of us might as well have rubbed paint on our faces to mark the occasion. Still, a fourth member, the man whose passion brought us together on the Maine coastline, needed to join the powwow.
After Amy got briefly sidetracked with the fleeting perils of motherhood, Brian drove the four of us to Waldo, as Amy, ever the refined Mainer, referred to Waldoboro, a town home to a borderline mythical diner Sue and I had patronized on our distant trek home from Rockland. Our salty old waitress may have scared off some tourists, but as a self-appointed honorary Mainer, I couldn’t resist sarcastically baiting her to lay her ornery shorthand on thicker. “Better decide before the kitchen closes,” she used to goad me as I settled the debate with myself by opting for a chef salad and cup of creamy haddock chowder.
I’d acknowledged at the onset of the trip how I didn’t feel like a grownup, or even a man, using the chain-smoking, neck tattooed maintenance guy in the motel parking lot to contrast with myself, his build, demeanor, and mannerisms more consistent with an adult than the guy inside the window who’d been sleeping with a stuffed pig for thirty-eight years. “He was a man by the time he was twelve,” Sue said partially in jest. Maybe my not wanting to be a capital m Man, or enduring hardships in my youth typically reserved for adulthood, had the opposite effect on me. I’d enacted a Dorian Gray on my emotions: my internal monologue was consistent with a retiree’s whereas my external behavior often vacillated toward that of a middle schooler, a high schooler when forced to try harder. It was likely about my never-ending battle with maturity as much as anything else.
Which is why hearing Brian speak candidly about his anxieties, specifically about the family’s looming flight to Hawaii, was as refreshing as the hypothetical reincarnation possibilities bandied about a couple hours beforehand. Our bond was clear. Brian exhibited distinct grownup attributes: he had a family for whom he built a home from dust to shelter on a prelapsarian plot, and he looked like a guy who you could trust if you asked him for directions or to act like detecting an innocuous snake at your feet was small potatoes. The stranger in a strange land who shakes your hand but never makes you fear the knife blade that could wind up lodged in your back. And yet, he worried too. It made him real, and for me, that earned my trust. A tribesman? No question.
When Amy, who left a copy of my book on the couch in her den, which I remarkably fought off the urge to point out, compared reading about my relationship with my mother to Brian’s caring for his sickly mom, it dawned on me that we shared a significant commonality. Learning that Brian was a lifelong Yankees fan, golf nut, and fond of cheeseburgers may not have been earthshattering as similarities go, but the little things began adding up. Hell, we both shaved our heads and felt an overpowering sense of inner peace in Maine. The man wouldn’t even let Sue give him a buck for the two postcards she selected while we waited for our table, which I guess was to be expected, but I got the sense that he would’ve contemplated picking up the tab if I attempted to purchase the diner itself.
Brian took photos outside, mainly of Sue and Amy, but his man-child clandestinely surfaced when he changed his phone setting, snapping a shot of the two us smiling widely while the girls mugged thinking he was still freezing them in time. Back at the homestead—we’d seen a car smashed into a tree a few miles from their property, Brian and Amy understandably fretting for their elder daughter’s safety as people responsible for littler people do—I was presented with a silly, oversized felt top hat to wear while Amy lit a candle in the shape of a number four (zero vacationing elsewhere) on the slice of walnut pie topped with homemade whipped cream Brian had gotten me at the diner. Gilmore Girls played on the television in the living room while I dispensed highlights from the Taylor Swift concert Sue and I attended to Amy’s FOMO-ridden younger daughter, Fauna, her eager for and overwhelmed by the spectacle as she ravenously ate a chocolate chip pancake with bacon.
The night concluded with—what else?—Amy’s photo albums from the trips she and Sue had taken in the ’90s to Orlando and Los Angeles. “You do know you’re dating the coolest chick ever from Enfield?” Amy asked me, a flattering rhetorical query she wasn’t obligated to posit; my knowledge of Sue’s reputation was constantly reinforced by fawning townies who recognized her on a weekly basis. Seeing a twenty-something brunette Sue, the same motivated woman who worked as on-air talent for two Connecticut news stations and produced her own interview show on a cable access channel, reminded me of the foxy girl I never knew but fell in love with whenever we teleported into her past. Sue had taken pictures throughout her life, occasionally bringing a camera to school and scrapbooking long before it was a cottage industry, the latter a respectful nod that Amy also verbalized. This is what true tribeswomen do, pick one another up higher when they’re already up. Witnessing Sue’s embarrassment about her short-lived phase wearing tube tops—“I’m sure it was because I thought I could get even tanner,” she semi-persuasively avowed—ended our stay on a giddy note, my fondness for seeing her vulnerability as brazen as always. Was I on the cusp of pleading with Amy and Brian to adopt us as I slid on my shoes? The clock said it was about time for Sue and me to metamorphose into pumpkins, which as far as they were concerned registered to our neophyte local pals as the archetypal way to cement their status as true residents, aspiring owners of Dam-hold-the-second-a-riscotta’s blue ribbon pumpkin patch. In truth, their status is undeniable. It’s up to the autochthons to achieve their inevitable clarity.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
For the last several years I’ve given Sue a “reverse birthday gift.” This year’s version would be a stop at the Episcopalian A-frame stone church in Kennebunkport, a tiny oceanside building coveted for wedding ceremonies that we’d been lucky enough to tour once previously. The morning’s rain, contrary to meteorological guesswork, had grown to near monsoon levels, the windshield wipers-on-cocaine speed necessary to navigate the roadside standing water and domesticated animals falling from the clouds. I set foot inside to verify the house of worship was open, Sue unwilling to exit the car and ruin her hair and makeup in the deluge without confirmation. The unpleasant nature of turning forty took hold immediately: I was seconds away from pissing myself. Due to the car parked beside us, I emptied a cannister of peanuts into a plastic bag but thought the fellow churchgoers would catch me in the act of refilling it. A frenzied walk around the property landed me back at the car where I stood next to the gas cap and became one with the precipitation. If you’re there, God, it’s pee, hard regret.
Sue and I treasured fifteen minutes alone, even taking photos by the pulpit until an older couple arrived. The friendly lady gladly took photos of us together framed by the doorway, a few stills fit for the opening slots in Sue’s next album. The church’s verger materialized in neon-colored rain gear, wiping off his face as his soaked hair kept dripping new obstructions in his eyes. He complimented my purple Yankees hat, an uncommon sighting deep in Red Sox country, and said how he’d been drilling holes in the floor of a basement, the rain continuing to enter the room faster than it departed. His hopefulness about the cloudburst subsiding seemed both for his own sanity and so the church, which allowed guests to visit during the evening’s fireworks display, could uphold a beloved local custom.
Having purposefully avoided eating anything but a ritualistic morning banana in the preceding twelve hours, we parked at the Maine Diner, my favorite church. The place is never far from mind—a white house with royal blue shutters on the main road near my own house reminds me of the building whenever I drive by, the Maine Diner Christmas ornament permanently hanging from my car’s rear-view mirror adding the necessary geographical ambience—but setting foot in the lot gives me goosebumps nonetheless. I purposely wore my Rolling Stones tee shirt, obtained at a concert nearly four years to the day prior, the same concert where I wore my Maine Diner tee shirt, had my photo taken, and submitted it to the Diner because they hang framed photos of regulars in Diner gear on the wall in their vestibule. My friend Josh’s daughter had uncovered my photo on the wall a few days earlier, and when I’d regaled Amy with the specificities, she was in disbelief. It was proof from a local that Sue and I had earned our honorary Mainer designations.
The front of house manager perked up at the sight of Sue, but soon thereafter showed us a message on her phone featuring a photo of the photo of me on the wall, questioning if we knew anything about it, leading to my wondering if Josh had made a down payment toward our tab with a note to be on the lookout. (He had not.) Hellbent on gorging myself, I ordered codfish cakes with baked beans and coleslaw plus a frankfurter with potato salad, pre-defending my gluttony to our server by informing him that it was my birthday. After he departed to retrieve coffee, tea, and water, Sue commented on how we’d never had a male server, eavesdropping when he took the order of the couple behind us and displayed bottomless knowledge in each answer for the inquisitive gluten-allergic lady hoping to taste the Diner’s legendary lobster pie. When the owner, Jim, dropped by our table to flash his mismatched socks, one red with stripes and the other blue with stars, he joked that he wasn’t on Sue’s level, but this was him trying. He told us that three men had been servers in the Diner’s forty-year history, and after we gushed about how likable the new kid was, Jim said, “I’ll have to tell my wife…she birthed him.”
Once I’d finished cleaning both plates and secured a slice of raspberry pie to be consumed ice cold minutes before midnight—Sue noshed on her customary vegan burger with home fries—Jim alerted us to hang tight for a minute because his wife, Karen, was en route. Karen runs the Diner’s Instagram page (among a plethora of other tasks), a sacred digital space where I’m fond of liking literally everything they post, and I had messaged her in advance of the trip to confirm they’d be open for the holiday. She’d been generous enough to buy a dozen copies of my book to sell in the gift shop next door, but somehow, we’d yet to cross paths in person. While patiently biding our time, I observed the staff largely milling about, a rare occurrence since they ordinarily filled dull junctures with minuscule tasks, their collective attention to details one of many reasons why they’re revered by locals and vacationers alike. Then it happened suddenly: four servers walked toward the table in harmony singing “Happy Birthday!” to me along with Jim echoing them from behind the counter, an immeasurably thoughtful shocker that left me grinning through tears, the happiest guy in the world making a recurring wish and blowing out a candle on a piece of carrot cake. One gal hesitantly warbled Alan rather than Adam, a mirthful mistake in use since the days of Al and Eve. I’d gotten misty while waiting for our food—telling Sue how happy I was to be at the Diner with her commemorating the milestone—and found myself overwhelmed by the purest love and joy imaginable, setting aside my long-held disdain for public birthday singalongs. Sue, who had requested they sing to me on our first birthday lunch only to be told they simply don’t sing to anyone, was equally dumbstruck. She said she “had no idea” about the impromptu quartet, voicing an “OH MY GOD!” for good measure. It’s plausible that asking for a serenade is a surefire way to be denied, but if the moment strikes, those who’ve earned it reap the reward, or so I postulate. If ever there was a time when Sue and I temporarily became Mainers, that was it. This was our tribe. I tipped all forty singles to our server.
The remains of the day were bountiful: Sue dug through the discounted book bin at a store we haunt on each trip, unearthing Tim Sample’s humor classic named in honor of Moody’s Diner, where we’d eaten with Amy and Brian, and surprised me with it in the car. Old Orchard Beach endowed us with not just the crinkle cut fries Sue longs for year-round, but her indefatigably patient yearslong hunt for a Maine-themed tie-dye zip-up hooded sweatshirt ended in the final gift shop we patronized as she inspected the discount rack on the exit ramp to the door. We used to slowly shake our heads and say, “Maine…” in tribute to these alchemical flashes, but the slogan had been supplanted with the obvious, anointing each occurrence as a sprinkling of Maine Magic (with a heaping side of Birthday Magic on this trip).
Adorning long sleeves and pants as mosquito repellant, we shvitzed on a half-mile walk to witness fireworks at the beach. Unlike our hometown, Maine’s dedication to airborne explosions on the holiday itself is impressive as each town in the state blasts off in shortly staggered intervals. From our perch in Wells during bygone Independence Day trips we’d seen them in four distant towns along with Wells’s own arsenal, which was again the plan despite the hazy smoke from the endless sparklers being lit by distracted beachgoers around us. Patiently awaiting the cacophony in the night sky, a half hour or so of subdued, passive pops generated considerable disinterest as several people folded their chairs and walked toward the road. Others followed minutes later. Sue had been joking about clichés endemic to teen sitcoms, all characters but the clueless victim receiving simultaneous text messages being an unending gag she mockingly discussed, before ironically asking why Wells’s fireworks had not begun as the residual herd departed without a trace of enmity about the unpatriotic silence. “Did we miss the fireworks?!” Sue finally whispered to me in awe. We did. Or did they miss us? Cloud cover perhaps? Forever children at heart, we laughed off the letdown while the morning’s echoes comically haunted us.
Dribble. Dribble. Dribble. Puh.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
There were other minor inconveniences—a dearth of doughnuts at Sue’s go-to joint paired with her nearly leaving emptyhanded from the Crocs outlet store; a rain-soaked stop at a prized seafood restaurant, one we had inexplicably not found time for in the past, as we waited behind a bearded, grumpy man in a tank top whose calm mother explained the seating policy to us when not withstanding more petty familial complaints—but they were brushed off, parts of life beyond our control celebrated solely because the shared experience of the imperfections was undeniably the best part. When leaving a candy store, a regional institution especially busy on inclement days, I held the door for an inbound lady and said, “They just sold the last piece of candy,” as she embraced the sarcasm and replied, “Oh no, my kids will be so upset!” A recent sitcom episode where one character told the protagonist to stop judging things for being fallible, a devastating sliver of wisdom, had knocked me sideways. There is a crack in everything, Leonard Cohen once sang. That’s how the light gets in.
Our bittersweet motel departure arrived as I returned the orange number five key, my lucky number, no revelation for a dedicated list maker, to the front desk. Sue and I took photos beside the towering pink dogwood tree near the entrance, a tradition enacted on a former stay. The motel was now noticeably run by a dark-skinned family with accents, a migratory tribe whose leader warmly thanked us for staying with them. Farewell usies were taken by the motel’s sign, another nod to the initial stay that birthed a Maine obsession within four days. Who could deny the kindness of Mainers or their pervasive sense of community and sincere local pride? And who could refute how life-affirming it would be each day if we lived in Wells? Yet being from away reigned as the quintessential form of incompletion and fulfilled Sue’s tried and true adage: “Everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen.”
A blisteringly sunny final day awaited us at the beach in Ogunquit as Sue stood in the water to perform a private ritual summoning her parents’ spirits while I sat on a shaded bench trying not to stare at a thin, pasty woman in a straw hat potentially tasked with a mission to set the state speed record for devouring a footlong sandwich. Sue and I retreated to the center of town to browse for souvenirs where a man complimented my Masters shirt, divulging that he’d played Augusta National. Embarrassed to expose that he shot an even one hundred, he confessed his pride about parring the twelfth hole. “You see these pros making double bogeys,” he said, “so I’m carrying that three with me forever.” I impulsively grabbed a faded green hat with the original Maine flag on it to match the bumper sticker I’d affixed on my car years ago, a subtle tribute to my home away from home that might now yield some questions since it’d be seen by those on foot, and complimented the cashier’s periwinkle nail polish as a heartfelt method of paying forward the cheer I’d inherited from my fleeting golf friend.
Not long afterward, Sue craved a quart of in-season strawberries, so I veered off Route One into a tiny lot home to a produce stand. The man working also expressed his fondness for my shirt, admitting how he fell in love with the tenth hole when attending a Masters practice round. “That’s my favorite golf hole in the world,” I told him, failing to mention how the two states I most loved visiting both contained an Augusta and copious pine trees. If only Mick and Keith were in the area to soundtrack my astounding run of good fortune. Parting panoramas remained to be glimpsed in Kennebunkport as we drove around the perimeter of a beach, gleefully did more window shopping, and took usies while sitting in Adirondack chairs perched on the second story patio of a thrift shop overlooking a lustrous pond. All the Maine Magic we needed, at least for the time being, had been conjured.
A few days after we got home, an important birthday gift awaited Sue. When she turned fifty in April 2020, a certain pandemic ruined my ability to stun her with a trip to Los Angeles, her favorite place. Initial strategizing to spend my fortieth birthday out west was postponed, but the outing would transpire in August, Sue accepting my desire to be in familiar environs instead. We’d attempted to symbolically book the flights on my birthday, the Internet connection and timing regrettably not in sync. “Dude, I know,” Sue said in characteristic fashion, responding to my self-loathing defense that I wasn’t bluffing. “You’re willing to wake up early so I can get more doughnuts tomorrow. I believe you.” When she revealed our plans to her, Amy was unmistakably elated that Sue would resurface in the city whose landscape she immersed herself in online daily because in her heart she’d never left. Anyone in Sue’s tribe could sense how vital the sentiment was, and in a sudden burst, the confluence of Birthday Magic, Maine Magic, and now Tribal Magic, would mark a fresh endeavor in our peripatetic quest to fill hallowed places with our happiness, and let their enchanting spells wash over us in return.
When I clicked the button to secure our plane tickets, I didn’t have a ball handy, but in my imagination I did. Stepping to the line outside the motel room door in Wells, I looked at the target. My confidence was unshakable. The arc would sail from Maine all the way to California.
Dribble. Dribble. Dribble. Swish.