LATE JUNE IN BYRON: Town Celebrates First Visible Pavement on Roads Since September

1/20/2009

It was a long, emotionally arduous and frustrating night back in November of 2000 watching everything collapse before our eyes on television in our living room in Arcata, California. My roommates and I watched as the major networks and their anchor people botched the election coverage like a bunch of drunken clowns at some low budget mid-western carnival. It couldn’t seem to have unfolded any worse.

We went from jubilation to disbelief to anger to hopeless in a the span of about two hours. The Dub was our president. It was happening. It happened.

What transpired in the last eight years of Bush leadership has been thoroughly documented, hashed and rehashed. The implications of the previous administrations actions have begun to and will continue to will play out. No need to exhaust ourselves with more of that talk. That’s what historians are for.

Laying on the living room floor back in 2000 as the television spewed the news, frustrated and bewildered by our country’s ‘election’ of George W. Bush all we could do was wish and wait for 1/20/05 and hope things don’t go too far south before then.

Oh, but ‘things’ went south. Deep south. “Things’, as it were, happened to be south enough to be eating grits at a Wafflehouse watching a NASCAR race.

Once ‘things’ got to the southerly point of eating grits in a Mobile, Alabama Wafflehouse there was, we thought, no way that he could be re-elected. But, sure as Boss Hogg has a big bald head ol’ George was re-elected and in time three quarters of Americans and even higher percentage than that of the world came to view the administration in a disapproving light.

It was blatantly obvious that the country was starving for change and it is now going to get that, though it remains to be seen what kind of changes will occur. At any rate the 1/20/09 date has been looked upon with eager eyes and hearts and it is now here. Finally.

LOCAL MAINE TOWN MODERNIZES INFRASTRUCTURE

The small canyon-side village of Byron, Maine reveled with news of the addition of a sparkling new bathroom facility that the mayor explained , ‘will drastically improve the efficiency of the town’ and ‘revolutionize the way we conduct business here.”

NEW TRUCK: My Advancement Into True Mainerhood

With the exception of a four year hiatus in Colorado and California, I have lived my life in Maine. I always felt like a Mainer and upheld a sense of pride in being from Maine. The only native Maine tradition in which I do not participate is adding the letter ‘r’ on words that don’t have ‘r’s in them and omitting the ‘r’ in words that do have them: “I have a good idear, get in the cah and head downda the mahket and get some pizzer and soder...”

Other than that I feel quite at home in Maine–like I belong. Recently, I bought a 2004 Nissan Frontier with reasonably low mileage, 4-wheel drive and a cap for the back.  Now, with the arrival of the truck it’s evident that I was a bit naive in my comfort level being a Mainer.  Yes, I drove something (or in extreme Maine-speak “drave” something) that was all-wheel drive with the Subaru Outback, which is a common car in snowy Maine, but it is the truck that is the necessary fixture for ascent into true Mainerhood.

It is not my intention to boast too loudly because a 2004 Nissan Frontier doesn’t exactly emit a ball crushing sense of raw power and might.   It is not jacked up.  There is no HEMI.  You won’t see it hauling four snowmobiles and an ice fishing shack or being filled with old I-beams and concrete rubble by an excavator.  And there are some who will call me an unpatriotic liberal Communist (the truck is red) for driving something that was not built with pride (bailout, anyone?) in the United States of America.

I can deal with truck criticism artfully because this truck is ten times the truck I drove before, which was a Subaru Outback and not a truck at all.  I have always been a Mainer, the difference now is that I can prove it without words.  Just take a look out at the driveway.