The reason I have no religious education

From before I can remember until the age of 13, I attended the United Methodist Church with my grandmother and later my great grandmother and great aunt. We first attended the church that my parents got married in, at the corner of Mountain and Central Streets in Camden.

This was a classical New England church, made of wood and with a steeple. The following story took place here when I was barely old enough to remember, so some of this story is pieced together with third party observations.

I don't know who made the decision, but at one point it was decided that I should attend Sunday school, which was up a long flight of stairs from the main congregation hall. The first few weeks went without incident. My grandmother walked me to the classroom, I watched bigger boys eat paste, and I tried to interact with the older girls. From what I can remember, I was one of the younger children. I don't remember much going on during these "classes," all I remember is it being what I would imagine daycare was like. 

In my last week in Sunday school, I believe we made Jesus on a stick in a cup puppets. I think they are called peek-a-boo puppets. This is the only lesson I remember from Sunday school.

At the end of this class, for some reason, I was at the end of the kids trudging down the stairs to meet up with their families. I was walking with two girls and there was some sort of closet half way down the stairs. It is perhaps important to note here that when I was small, I was deathly afraid of the dark and of confined spaces. Perhaps the three of us had volunteered to put the puppet supplies away in this closet, I'm really not sure the circumstances. We all entered the closet, and the two girls shut off the lights and closed me in the closet.

As my grandmother told it, I screamed so loudly that the entire congregation assumed that I'd fallen down the staircase and had been badly injured. From here, things get blurry, it seemed like I was locked in the closet for hours, but I assume I was found merely seconds after I started screaming bloody murder. I was crying so hard that I'm not even sure who rescued me from the closet. I never saw those girls or climbed those stairs ever again. The experience was so traumatic that from that point on, I sat in the pews with my grandmother and great grandmother and listened to the weekly sermon.

Just a few short years later, the church was sold and converted to condos and the congregation consolidated with another church, first in their old building (which was not as nice as the one we came from) and then to a new state of the art modern facility that my great uncle helped build.

To this day, more than twenty five years later, that incident haunts and embarrasses me.

The War on Squirrels or Why Maine is the Deep South of the Far North

When I was very young, my grandmother and great grandmother sold their houses in town and built a new home at the family complex in an area of farmland and woods so that they could look after each other in old age. My great grandmother loved birds and had no less than a dozen bird feeders hanging off of her deck.


The problem with bird feeders is squirrels (and raccoon, but that's a story for another day). Squirrels are murder on bird feeders. Not only do they scare away the birds, but they also spill all of the feed on the ground and break the feeders. There are a lot of squirrels in Maine.


So what's a octogenarian with a squirrel problem to do? Call in the guns. Literally.


My great grandmother enlisted the help of my cousins and uncles and their hunting equipment to take care of her little problem. On occasion, she would pick up the (always loaded) shotgun by the door and take aim herself. Then there was the method of reward. 


Squirrel Stew.


Yes, my great grandmother dressed the squirrels in her kitchen and then created "food" out of them. 


Because of this, I know what squirrels make "good" stew and what squirrels won't do. So in Maine, we have two varieties of squirrels, there are the red squirrels which more closely resemble chipmunks and then there are the bigger gray squirrels. Both of these varieties can be used for stew, but the red squirrels can only be used if they are killed with a clean shot to the head. The gray squirrels, which are bigger and yield more meat, could be shot by a less accurate marksman. It also takes several more red squirrels to make a meaty stew, so it either has to be a really good day for the hunters, or the stew is really thin. It only takes a few gray squirrels to make it worth making stew.


I drew the line at squirrel stew and would never even try it. Which may come as a surprise when you read about what else I would eat in later entries.

Inaugural Story

I've wanted to create this blog for a very long time and I've struggled with how to begin. I am not a professional writer, nor do I claim to be. I was last published with a byline in 2005 in T.H.E. Journal and have written little of substance since then. My sincere hope is that someone may read this blog and have a laugh or a giggle or maybe identify with some of the stories contained within. These stories are a big part of what makes me who I am today and I feel fortunate to have most of these stories to tell.


Following is my first story, please be kind.


Wanting to be Something Special


The part of Maine where I grew up is inhabited largely by people with indeterminate ethnicity beyond Western European. Most families have been in the area since it was part of Massachusetts. Modern immigration patterns left our part of the state untouched, there was and is still today, very little industry that would attract immigration on large scale. As a result, most people don't have that connection to a unique heritage, my family included. Sure, there were the people from northern Europe, those blonde haired blue eyed people with umlauts and double vowels  in their names, but those were their only distinguishing characteristics. Those and their meetings at the Finnish American Society.


I craved some sort of uniqueness and individuality, and I wanted that to come through ethnicity. I thought having a strong ethnic background would make me more special then my generic European classmates. 


My mom was "from away." Meaning she was not born and raised in the county that I was born and raised. This was the source of constant teasing from my father and his family, despite that fact that my mother's mother grew up three houses from my father's childhood home. My mother also possessed one other unique characteristic, she was half Polish and first generation American. 


I clung to this, I reasoned that I could fudge the truth, that I could say I was half-Polish. It was only a half-lie. I was a quarter Polish. I ignored the facts that my remaining three quarters were rooted in three hundred years of New England obscurity. I also ignored the reputation of the Poles and that we were blonde haired, blue eyed Catholic Poles, we could have passed for Germans back in the day. My great grandparents also left Europe during WWI, after my uncle had been born and shortly before my grandfather entered this world.


I immersed myself in reading about the Holocaust and I aligned myself with the plight of the Poles and the Jews. Little did I know back then that I could identify with another persecuted group in that time. I proudly announced to anyone who would listen (outside of the earshot of my parents) that I was Polish, and I relished in any questions they asked me. I cursed my grandfather for not being proud of being Polish and never teaching my mother the language or anything about her heritage. I felt it unfair that when we visited him in Connecticut that he would sneak off to the Polish American club and never brought me. 


As I grew older, I adopted a second ethnicity after my father's grandmother returned from a trip to Scotland with her family crest in hand. I now knew that she was a Scot and that I could now claim that I was half Polish and half Scottish, and that made me very unique and very special. I did a report at school on my family history and focused on this new-found Scottish history, ignoring all other family lines. 


It wasn't until after attending college in the big city that I started to care less about having a strong ethnic background and accepted that my multi-ethnic makeup is what truly makes me special. While it seems everyone in Boston is Italian or Irish or a mix of the two, I am special, my families have been in New England for hundreds of years, we were a part of the creation of this land. I am proud of being from Maine and of Maine. I can milk a cow and a goat, I have "gone hayin'," I swim in lakes, I love to hike, and I can decipher heavy Maine, Maritime, and Acadian dialects. These are the things that make me who I am, and for that I am eternally grateful.