80s House

Yesterday I had lunch at the Sea Dog with kids who grew up with my kids. One, David, moved away and then back to Maine. Sara was home visiting family. So odd how they will always be kids to me, even when 32 and trailing 8-and 10-year-olds from each hand.

Sara’s husband, a West Coast guy, was talking about a band—the name escapes me now—and I asked whether they were a new group, someone, I was thinking, I should put on my list to explore.

“No, no,” he says, “they’re a band from the ’80s.”

That explains it. I know absolutely nothing about the culture of the ’80s—movies, music, TV, art—an entire cultural decade pretty much obliterated by a life in northern Maine defined by falling stars, growing, harvesting, canning, or cooking food, and endless conversations with children.

We had no TV, and our only connection to music was a turntable with lots of old records and Maine Public Radio. But even though we weren’t connected to anything that could remotely be considered mainstream culture, our rough, unfinished, quirky house filled up with all kinds of kids from all kinds of families.

We get talking about the good ol’ days.

“That might be the first time I ever heard jazz,” says one.

“And honestly, had you ever seen bookshelves in a kitchen?”

We all laugh.

Words and phrases float around the table building whole stories from those years—I can see Nate pulling another Vonnegut off the bookshelf, asking questions about the last one he’d borrowed; Walter slipping a Coltrane record onto the old turntable, studying the jacket, reading the liner notes out loud; Amanda dancing around the living room, stopping abruptly mid-move to ask about some Judy Chicago painting she’d seen on a postcard I had thumb-tacked on the wall that afternoon; and all those hands scooping up popcorn coated with tamari and yeast, clutching heavy stoneware cups filled with one of the three beverages we always had: water, peppermint tea, or the apple cider we pressed each fall.

Sara’s husband has been listening intently. Suddenly he says to me, “I’ve been to Patten. So, really, what’s your story?”

I tell him: where I grew up (Boston, more specifically Dorchester), why I left (followed the man), how I ended up in Patten (the sign said Island Falls, a name I loved). I talk about college, my jobs (supervisor at the telephone company, dance instructor at a storefront arts center, community organizer). I’m not sure but I think I told him I’m a first generation immigrant: Ireland and Canada on one side, Greece and Armenia, via Turkey, on the other. First in the family to go to college, too.

The two Patten-grown kids are mesmerized.

“I never knew that,” one says. “Did you?”

“Not a clue,” says the other, turning to look at her friend, wondering, I think, what else they have missed. But they really haven’t missed anything. Whatever you need comes along as you need it.

Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Her work has been included in many collections, published in magazines and journals, and broadcast on radio. This year she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.