Month: August 2008

This afternoon, the whole summer’s worth of stress crashed down on me. I’m beat.

With very limited access to the Net, I’ve allowed myself to fall far behind in noting what’s been going on here. Saturday, Margaret and I spent the evening with friends from long ago at the former Alpha Rho Upsilon house (now named Helmreich House after Ernst Helmreich, beloved professor of history at Bowdoin and grandfather of two of our friends).
 

 
We saw more old friends than I can name here; it was a great joy to reunite with them and to meet the many who came to ARU after us. Add to them all the number of our friends who would have liked to celebrate with us, but for one reason or another could not, and the occasion touched very many of us. Late in the evening, JB recited “Gunga Din” in honor of Rich Herzog; we drank a toast in his honor, and dreamt of glad times with him.
 

 
Margaret and I were staying at a hotel out the Bath Road past this house, where Joe and I once lived. Back in our day, it was rather less polished, but it was home for a number of us. And at least it was in better condition than the Silver Palace, the house across the street.
 
We saw Pippa in The Three Musketeers again on Sunday. (The stark lighting and the lack of controls on my camera account for the washed-out faces.)
 

 
Monday we visited with Pat and Dick at Damariscotta Lake, which was so much excitement that Beatrice needed to relax and unwind.
 

 
And yesterday we resumed our slow odyssey to Durham. We left Maine in the morning, and paused for a visit to Margaret’s hometown, Rockport Massachusetts, and the church her dad served as rector, where Margaret and I were married.
 

 
From there, we motored south to Quincy, to check up on Project X. It’s not that we doubted that Steve and Sage were presiding over the birth and growth of a fascinating young woman — just, when you’re dealing with writers of fiction, it’s worth looking into the details for yourself. Margaret made some up-close observations, and we agree that Gretchen belongs to the category of those most wonderful young people who will change the world markedly for the better, if the rest of us don’t louse it up first.
 

 
After all of which, we hunkered down in our humble Red Roof and yielded to slumber’s irresistible importunity. The rest of today should be an easy-paced recuperation, then we’ll set off for Long Island tomorrow.

We stayed at a Day’s Inn outside Brunswick for the weekend, and over and above the small ways it departed from its advertised characteristics (no newspaper, no eggs at the breakfast) or fulfilled them in awkward ways (no pets in non-smoking rooms), the advertised wifi has been a dreadful pain. It evidently uses a proxy server that itself slows down connections, then it seems to drop the signal at frequent intervals — whether inadvertently, through weak engineering, or deliberately, to prevent guests from engaging in long, heavy sessions (such as downloading a movie or playing Warcraft).
 
What a headache! Broadband connectivity is not so complicated nor so expensive that even an economy hotel should need to make it hard to use. Allons enfants de Blogaria! La jour d’internet à haut débit serait bientôt arrivée!

The other day we drove through Bowdoinham and Topsham, and this summer we’ll be staying in Shoreham and living in Durham, all of which led me to wonder: whatever happened to the linguistic gesture of naming municipalities with the “-ham” suffix? “-Ville” and “-Ton/-Town” still do all right, but I don’t recall any civic entity recently naming itself a “-ham.” Where did they go?

We saw The Three Musketeers last night — we’ll see it again tomorrow — but we were knocked out once again by how terrific an actor our Pippa is.
 

 
Tonight we’re at a reunion with friends from college. It’s good.