Local Color

A New Yorker friend of mine recently confessed that after a few weeks of reading my blog she fears that living in Maine without benefit of interesting museums, opera, theater, the ballet, fine restaurants and a variety of stimulating classes, seminars and lectures is turning me into a quivering agoraphobic.

Although I appreciate her concern, she's wrong, since agoraphobia is a disorder characterized by panic attacks and anxiety when one is in situations considered to be dangerous. That's certainly not my problem. Instead, living in Maine is possibly turning me into a Thoreau-like dullard who finds the inner workings of a flower more interesting than another opening of another show, or even the best corned beef on rye at Katz's Delicatessen.

I admit that life in Maine is a stretch for any New Yorker, but after five years here it's starting to grow on me. Last weekend we attended a birthday celebration at the local "yacht club" where several of our neighbors dock their boats, none of which are yachts. It was a charming affair where many of the attendees seemed to have materialized from an old Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Party attire included yellow slickers (this being May it was raining, and we were right on the water), fleece vests, plaid flannel shirts, denim jackets and of course a wide assortment of boots, duck and otherwise.

Besides the few people I knew there were lots of people I didn't, which always offers an opportunity for interesting conversations. One of the best was with Jerry, a ruddy-faced, jolly man who recounted the time one of his chickens was abducted by a neighbor's trio of normally harmless dogs out for an afternoon frolic. The neighbor phoned Jerry and tearfully explained that the chicken in question was now half-dead on her front lawn, and that she had gotten the dogs inside the house but did not know how to proceed. "The chicken is still alive!" she shouted, near hysteria. "What should I do?"

Jerry said he didn't care at all since to him a chicken is just a chicken, but his wife, surmising the situation, yelled from the other room, "Tell her to let the dogs out."

You just don't get that kind of local color in Manhattan.