The Construction Saints of Washington County

We have encountered some remarkable people in our efforts to recreate my grandmother's house in easternmost Maine.  There are still a few people around who remember her, and that is fun.  Then there are others who remember relatives I never knew, and that is also fun.

Then there are the people who think we are quite probably certifiable. First of all, there are the legal and civic issues that need attention and care. From the lawsuit by an abutting landowner against the town for issuing us a building permit to the tribal people who have dug clams on our beach for generations, some people are not as enthusiastic about our little venture as we might like.

The second issue that suggests we might not be playing with full decks is the water table.  It's high.  That means that we have had to do a lot of ditching and draining to keep water from seeping into the structure. People have commented. However, as a glass-half-full person, I am beginning to enjoy thinking about different water-loving plants we can put in the ditches.

The remarkable people, however, are the local contractors and experts who have jumped in to help with the project.  Although we are paying them, they also seem to take genuine pleasure in helping out the crazy folks from away.

The hero of the project is John the carpenter. John likes to do things the old fashioned way and is highly knowledgeable about historic New England building methods.  If he was not able to salvage building elements during deconstruction, he has recreated them. That includes window trim and baseboards, both of which fell apart when he tried to remove them from the old house.  No problem--he just remade them. He knows the best lumber yards in the area and is quite scornful of the big box building stores.

Under his supervision, we purchased quarter sawn white spruce clapboards from a mill in western Maine still making them as they were made in the 19th century.  I was thrilled when I was able to introduce him to a guy who makes cedar shingles in a one-man mill that is more than 100 years old. He is going back next week to pick up our order, which will grace the water side of the house.

The ever-thrifty Mainers of the past would put the fancy siding, i.e. the painted or stained clapboards, on the public face of the house, and put the lesser quality siding, cedar shingles, on the back, where no one would see them.  The fact that cedar is even more durable than white spruce, especially in sea-side structures, makes that strategy a good one.

Of course there is the couple who sold us the land; the man is also a site designer.  He is still trying to get the water away from the house, and does not charge us what he should.  That is fine with me, of course.

Then there is the heavy equipment guy, who has done a lot of work for us and is one of the people who remembers some of my relatives. He is an artist of the bulldozer and front loader, picking up boulders like someone picking up a piece of tofu with chopsticks. He built the road, the driveway, the septic system, the slab on which the house rests, and is still working on the ditches and drains.

Next up are the plumber and electrician, who both appear to live by the motto, "We'll get 'er done." Because they are good, they are in high demand and require periodic reminders that we exist.  Making excuses to email, call or visit results in the feeling that they were just thinking about our project and were on the verge of calling us.  That's a skill.

Then there is the general contractor who has saved our bacon several times. He has a big crew of incredibly handsome sons and relatives and is a great problem solver. He is also in demand; Our attorney once commented that he now understood why his front porch was not getting repaired--the contractor was working for us!

Then there is another heavy equipment operator who deconstructed the original house.  He was recommended to us as the right guy for the job because he "liked to knock things down." And he did, with attention to our need to salvage as much as possible from the structure.

There are many others--the aforementioned attorney and the woman who runs a nearby Air B & B and has put us up numerous times during construction.  She has provided invaluable contractor recommendations. There is the town clerk of Perry, always efficient and knowledgeable about what we need to do. The fact that she reminds me of my grandmother, from her tightly permed iron-gray hair to her beautiful Washington County accent, is an added bonus. Then there is Roy, who remembers my grandmother and cleaned out her house for the “Junkin' for Jesus” auction (really) at the town's Congregational church before we started disassembling the structure.

While we hope the results of our efforts will be lovely, the process has been remarkable, too.  It's not just a building project, it's a labor of love and a trip down memory lane, made memorable by the Washington County folks who have helped along the way.

The Little Red Book

One of the nice things about working part-time is that I have the ability to read. And I have been doing so, reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate.com, the Guardian, and anything else that comes in through my Facebook feed.  I have great FB friends who share things that speak to my interests and prejudices.  But I can’t keep doing this.  It feeds my anxiety and fears for my children, my country, and this beautiful world.  I am going to stop reading and start writing, at least for this afternoon.  We shall see about tomorrow.

Today’s topic is my mother. She died more than three years ago at age 93.  She was a quiet woman, always observing but rarely commenting. She was reserved and undemonstrative, but that’s not too unusual in a New England lady of her vintage. Underneath her unassuming manner, however, was a fierce love of family that showed itself in many ways.

For example, she was terrified of flying. She only flew to visit Wisconsin from Massachusetts when her grandchildren were born, otherwise taking the train, a strategy that resulted in much longer and equally frightening journeys.  Not surprisingly, she hated traveling in general, but drove with my father throughout New England and Atlantic Canada in hot pursuit of genealogical clues. She visited her hated stepmother in the nursing home every day because she had promised her father that she would. She was a woman who only left her comfort zone when it really mattered—for family.

Another angle into her psyche is her address book. She never created an online address book, but instead had a red leatherette 5 x 5 binder that must have dated from the 1970s.  I know this because it contained my 1976 New York City address, scratched out and replaced with subsequent locations that chronicled my travels from New York to Rochester to Poughkeepsie to Virginia to Wisconsin to Minnesota.  She treated her grandsons the same way.  She couldn’t keep up with one of them and sent his birthday checks to me instead for distribution.

Because she lived to the ripe old age of 93, many of her friends and family died before her. That created more cross-outs.  Sometimes she listed the death date, but usually the poor departed was simply excised from the land of the living by a big X in the red book.

What fascinates me most about the address book was her explanation for why a person was listed at all.  “George’s College Friend,” “George’s Best Man,” “George’s Secretary,”  “G’s Brown Univ Friend,” reflected her adoption of my father’s life when she married him in 1943.

She became even more descriptive when it came to her own extended family, which was vast—her father was one of 12 children, all of whom lived to adulthood.  I didn’t know very many of them but her notes in the address book explain their inclusion.  I seldom need to ask myself why she listed someone-- her notes tell all.

Take, for example, Jeff and Cindy Andrews of Cumberland, Maine. Mother describes them as members of the “Price fam. Via Strang desc. Of James³ Price.^”   There is the beautifully named Rev. Quentin and Carolyn Peacock of Rindge, New Hampshire, who, the notes tell me, was the “da. Of cousin Grace Moor.”  Robert and Jennifer Price of Lexington, Massachusetts, are simply identified as “3^rd cousin.”  How they were third cousins was not clear.  Did she not know, or was it so obvious to her that she did not feel the need to elaborate? However, most were like Jack and Alice Morelle of Moncton, New Brunswick, who were described as “Price cousin g.da. of D.S. Price’s oldest sister.” I think that means that one of them was a second cousin once removed.  She would have known.

There are a couple of references to unpleasant situations.  For example, Terry & Holly Sadler are described as “Alice’s grandniece Joan Price Erskine’s da.” What follows is the underlined word, “Divorced.”  The entry for Marion Chapman, listed as a “Simmons College friend,” has the ominous underlined note, “Christmas card returned.”

Then there was Mrs. Russell Bryant^.  The listing reveals much about mother’s Victorian mores.  It reads, “07 Mr. and Mrs. Russell Bryant (Mary)…Cape Porpoise, Maine. Mary (Zecchini) worked in Portland Public Lib. with me.” From this we can assume that Mr. Bryant died in 2007 and the friendship was of long standing—Mother worked in the Portland Public Lib. in 1944-45, when my father was serving in Italy and she lived with her parents. She clearly believed and operated by the notion that when a woman married, she became her husband, not only losing her family name but also exchanging her given name for “Mrs.” My mother made sure, however, that we did know Mary’s full name independent of Mr. Bryant—a radical step that she took in later years. Perhaps she was influenced by changing times and her daughter’s retention of her family name after marriage.  Who knows?

There are a few entries that require some guesswork. “Wishart, Burt & Bertha,” were probably cousins because they had a New Brunswick address. People listed as being in Worcester, Massachusetts, were most likely residents of the retirement community where my parents lived. But who was Margaret J. Parks of West Des Moines, Iowa? I have no idea.

Toward the end of her life, her beautiful handwriting deteriorated. One can see the effort it took for her to make sure that she (and I) understood the connections among the people she knew.  Was she anticipating a decline in her faculties that would require prompts that would allow her to remember why someone appeared in her little red book?   Who knows? As a proper New England lady, she wasn’t telling.

Travel: Good days and bad days

Sometimes everything goes as planned when travelling. Museums are open, parking spots magically appear and language barriers melt away. Other days are a lesson in what not to do when visiting new places.

Case in point: Leipzig was wonderful. Even though it was crowded, everything pretty much worked. The train from Munich was on time, even though our hotel was on a pedestrianized street it wasn't very far from the cab stand, and the hotel itself was pretty fancy and totally accessible.

Thomaskirche was right across the courtyard from the hotel, and we spent a lovely hour or so listening to a visiting choir rehearsing.  We admired the very well maintained old church, marvelled at the two organs, and gawked properly at the Bach stained glass window. After a short walk to look at the Mendelssohn statue, we adjourned to a nearby outdoor cafe and got a charge out of our table mates, who spoke no English but had some tourist Hungarian. After a little rest, we sat in the hotel bar, also outside, right across the street from the Bach statue, for a nightcap.

The next morning we had a nice breakfast in the hotel and then scurried across the street to attend Sunday service in Thomaskirche. We had missed the afternoon performance of the famed boys choir the previous afternoon and were hoping to hear them.  And we did, and it was lovely, even though the sound seemed to get a bit swallowed up in the nave. The sermon, which was unintelligible to us, went on for some time, and the service clocked in at 90 minutes.  Nice to hear to good old Lutheran hymns sung with gusto and played at proper speed.

After church we went to the Bach museum, right next to our hotel. It was really well done, with interactive exhibits and lots of opportunity to listen. Then we checked out of the hotel and went to get the rental car so we could go to Halle, a half hour drive, where Handel was born.

One strange thing about Leipzig:  Thousands of German lay Catholics were having a conference, all wearing green t-shirts, green scarves and green caps. At first I thought it was a bus tour, but seeing hundreds more of them suggested I needed to dig further. Leipzig, like most of the former East Germany, is pretty much post-Christian, but those who do claim religious affiliation are mostly Lutherans. I at first thought it odd that lay Catholics would want to congregate in the heart of Protestant Germany, but the more I thought about it, it seemed a lovely place to have a meeting.  And it embodied the spirit of ecumenicism to boot. And, it explained why hotel rooms were so expensive that weekend.

We had a little trouble finding the Handel Haus museum and a parking place, but were rewarded by some nice exhibits.  Since Handel really didn't work in Halle, the museum was a little thin, and one floor was taken up by period instruments that had nothing to do with Handel, but it was still nice.

Then we went off to Naumburg, a small city about an hour away from Leipzig.  We only had to circle the town twice before we found the hotel. At first I thought we had made a terrible mistake -- the doors were locked and there was clearly no one around.  But there was a buzzer, which we pressed, and a nice English-speaking woman told us how to retrieve our key from the Key Boy. After settling in, we ate in a nice cafe next to one of the old city gates at Marienplatz. The food was abundant and heavy, with gravy on the braised pork, hollandaise on the asparagus and butter dripping from the roasted potatoes.

The next day was not quite so successful. It began with breakfast, when the attendant asked us (I think) if we wanted coffee.  We already had coffee--instant from a jar on the table--so we said no, thinking that instant was all there was. The next day, of course, we figured out that it was decaf in the jar, and that there was indeed real coffee on offer. Maybe it was the lack of caffeine that jinxed the rest of the day.

We then started off to see the organ that Bach played. After not too much circling we found both St. Wenceslas church and a parking space. St. Wenceslas is a gothic structure that needs TLC.  It has a remarkable and ornate Baroque altarpiece, which is somewhat tarnished. The organ, which is gilded and highlighted with robbin's egg blue paint, doesn't quite fit with the rest of the church. There were some monuments to guys in armor, some shrines to local notables who had supported the church in centuries past, and a general air of decay. All the steps to the many entrances were covered with moss, suggesting that traffic is light.

We thought we had seen all there was to see and were leaving when the attendant said emphatically that there was a concert at 12 o'clock. Why we determined this makes no sense, because even our extremely limited German was good enough to read the signs that advertised concerts at 12 o'clock on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It was Monday.

I guess we heard what we wanted to hear, as when we returned at 11:50 (gotta get there early to get a good seat), there was no concert. So off we headed to Weimar.  Our goal was the Bauhaus Museum.

It literally took us at least an hour and maybe more to locate it--the city fathers and mothers have decided they don't want cars in the Centrum. It's a laudable idea, but finding not only the actual museum but also a walkable place to park proved almost impossible.  So when we finally miraculously found not one but three spaces nearby, we grabbed one.

However, OLGS was suspicious and he may have been right.  There was a sign that suggested the spaces were reserved for people visiting or working at the shops nearby. Who knows? But the thought of having the rental car towed was enough to make our trip to the Bauhaus Museum very short indeed--we walked down the pedestrianized mall, took a look, went inside to get some flyers, and then went back to the car. So much for Weimar, which looked like a lovely and bustling small city.

Finding our way back to Naumburg was also a challenge, due to construction and the lack of gas stations with bathrooms! However, we finally got there, slightly discouraged to the point where seeking out a different restaurant for dinner was just too much. We drove around the closed cathedral, which also had moss problems, went to the same outdoor cafe, and called it a day.

The next day dawned bright and clear, a good omen. We made it back to Leipzig within an hour, although we could have done it much more quickly if OLGS had felt able to drive at 150 kms.  We drove in the truck lane, which was fast enough by American standards.

Got to the Berlin train early, got on board, found our assigned seats, and relaxed because we were going to a place where we knew the landscape better and more people spoke our language.

The moral of the story: Serendipity when traveling is great if you are flexible. No parking space? Fine. Pedestrianized streets not listed on map? No problem--if time, language and mobility are not issues. When they are, it is best to plan ahead carefully.

Back in the day, OLGS and I had a policy that we would not travel to places where we didn't speak the language.  That limited us to France, the UK, Canada, Hungary and some Francophone African countries and Caribbean islands. We broadened this to include Italy, where French and high-school Latin allowed us to cope with the language barrier. However, we miscalculated the extent to which people in the former East Germany speak English.

Another moral: Go back to the original rule: Visit countries where you speak the language.  Or at least take a phrasebook.

Music Hath Charms

We went to the stunning Franz List Zeneakademia concert hall, the Grand Hall, for some Mozart piano concertos. The pianist was Vajron Denes, playing with Concerto Budapest. Where to begin?

He was terrific, relaxed but intense and powerful. And the concertos, one of which I had never heard before as far as I know, reminded me what a great pianist Mozart must have been and why students need to practice scales. I was also reminded that musical warhorses exist because the warhorses are usually good pieces of music.

The audience was almost exclusively old, more so than in the U.S. This is surprising in a country that prides itself on its classical music heritage. After all, it's the birthplace of Bartok, Liszt, Kodaly and Ligeti. There are six orchestras in Budapest, providing employment to graduates of the Franz Liszt Academy. Music is subsidized by the city of Budapest and by the state. Maybe the demographics were skewed because of the day--young people have to get up and go to work on weekday. A weekday concert is less attractive as a result.

Attending a concert in Budapest, which is almost always a wonderful musical experience, raises an issue that has nothing to do with the music. It's the clapping at the end of the concert. At first, the clapping sounds the same as clapping in New York or St. Paul. By the end of the second bow, the clapping has changed. It is rhythmic and all audience members clap at the same pace. At the third bow, not only do people clap in unison, but they become insistent, speeding up in concert, demanding an encore. Audience members not only clap together, but they clap faster and faster together.

This leads to unpleasant reflections about the nature of crowds and the development of a single voice in that crowd. Does the style of clapping at Budapest concerts mean that these elderly classical music lovers have fascist tendencies? Does it explain Viktor Orban, the country's right-wing prime minister? Nah. After all, people in the U.S. clap independently, yet look at our politics. So instead of digging too deeply, I am instead going to reflect on the sources of decoration of the amazing building, some of which are shown here. PS--acoustics are pretty good, too.

Adventures in Real Estate, Part 17

It's been some time since there was an update on our Maine adventure.  Let's see .. 

We have a builder.  He's a really nice guy, and he and his carpenter are the son and son-in-law of family friends, which makes things both easy and challenging.  We are quite sure they won't gouge us -- they are only doing the project as a great favor, not as a moneymaker.  However, we could become the clients from hell, and our friends would almost certainly hear about it. I think that overall this is a good arrangement that benefits both parties and encourages each side to keep its collective mouth shut and behave. I certainly will.

We have a design.  It replicates the exterior of great-great-grandmother's house pretty well.  The interior will be modern, although the bits and pieces salvaged from the house will add some historical patina to the rooms.  What's not to like about an 18th century door? 

We have a view.  It is remarkable. Campobello, Eastport and Lubec, as well as many small islands (one of which is ours), will all be visible from our deck.  A deck is not an 18th century design feature,  but my desire for 18th century authenticity only extends to the front facade. If my ancestors had had the view that we have, they would have built a deck, too. 

We have a road (or will have soon).  The drop dead date for road construction is the end of June.  Our road builder is a laconic downeaster who is highly recommended and much beloved.  However, he doesn't say much, except, Yes," "No," and "We'll see," so the proof will be in the road itself, if not the pudding. 

Our road guy, and several of the other sub-contractors we have identified, are from the same village where great-great-grandmother's house once stood.  Since we removed the house from the tax rolls by tearing it down, it seems only fair that we spread a little cash around to make amends. 

We're going to have a big fire this summer.  When the house came down, it turned out that many of the beams were not useable -- full of carpenter ants.  They are just lying on the lot that we sold to the neighbors. So we are going to have a bonfire.  We will get a burn permit from the village fire chief, who just happens to be the son of the road guy, get some beer and marshmallows, and invite the town.

Our road now has a name -- Lois Lane.  I thought at first this was a joke, but no one seems to find it funny.  Turns out that the owner of the only house on what is now Lois Lane was given the chance to name it, which he did. Apparently his mother's name was Lois. 

We have a conditional building permit -- our application goes before the board of selectmen and the planning committee next week. It would be disappointing if our application were denied. However, it would be almost worth it, as the town clerk to whom we submitted our application not only spoke just like my grandmother, but had the same hairstyle, nearly 40 years later. Things change very slowly in eastern Maine. 

Dems: Pay Attention to North Carolina

Nate Silver crunches the numbers about American politics and elections. Back in December 2015, his website, 538.com, published a nifty piece with an interactive map.  It allows the viewer to shift demographics in five groups to see how the shifts would affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Based on the 2012 election, the map shows baselines for the following segments of the U.S. electorate:

• College-educated whites
• Non-college educated whites
• Blacks
• Hispanics
• Asians and others

After fiddling with the map for a bit, I was pleased to see that what I have suspected for some time is true, at least based on Nate's stats.  The country is primarily democratic and only gerrymandering and low voter turnouts have gotten us into our current mess. Although this is certainly an over-simplification, consider these nuggets gleaned from the map:

• If just a few more college-educated white voters -- maybe a couple of percentage points -- voted for democrats, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona could be in play and shift to the blue column. An increase in turnout, unless it was huge, would not affect the  outcome very much, since this demographic already casts the largest percentage of votes. 
• If just a few more whites without college educations voted for Dems, then the same states would be in play for the democrats -- North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. However, if more of this demographic voted as they had in the past, that would put Florida in play for the republicans. 
• If more blacks voted, that would put North Carolina in play for the Dems. Since very few blacks vote republican, an increase in the number of democratic votes cast by this group would not change things much. 
• If more Hispanics voted, that would put North Carolina more solidly in the democratic camp. And if more of them voted democratic, that would put Arizona in play.  And if a lot more Hispanics voted, that could put Texas in play.  Wow!
• If more Asians and other ethnic groups voted democratic, North Carolina would shift into democratic territory. However, an increase in the overall number of votes cast by Asian-Americans and others would not affect the outcome significantly.

The moral of this story is this:  Democrats need to focus on -- you guessed it -- North Carolina. Barbecue, anyone? 

Before and After

BEFORE

For those who are interested in our project to rebuild my great-great grandmother's house in a new, more desireable location (i.e., ocean front rather than a dying village on a tidal river), here's an update.

The house is gone. Having stood for 200+ years, the house succumbed to Charlie the demolition guy, his bulldozer and his picker.  Charlie does not have a phone, or if he has one, he doesn't answer it.  He also doesn't appear to have a mailing address.  However, he was described as someone who liked to knock things down, so he seemed ideal for the job. He was hired by a third party who knows him, since he doesn't answer his phone.  Wonder how he makes a living?

Floorboards, mouldings, tin ceiling, beams, doors, and miscellaneous lumber were saved, along with a field of massive granite blocks and lots of bricks, made in the local brickyard.  The town has two roads that give a hint about industries once found there: Brickyard Road and Shipyard Road.  We got the bricks but would be very surprised if there were any ships still left.

And, even though I knew that many of the beams in the house were hollowed out by carpenter ants and it was only a matter of time before the structure collapsed, I still feel a pang that it had to come down.

We have actually sold the land (or will by next Friday) where the house stood.  Embedded in the sales contract was permission to store all the stuff saved from the house on the property until we could move it.

We have purchased some spectacular waterfront land about eight miles away.

We have a designer and builder, Chris from Belfast, who thinks we are nuts and that it is his job to convince us to be sensible.  Classic words from Chris: "Of course you can do that, but it will cost more." We need his wisdom as we progress.

Bottom line: This is not an investment.

Boundary issues

Once upon a time there was a nice hardworking family living on a tidal river in darkest Maine.  The father was a blacksmith with several sons, one of whom abandoned blacksmithing and opened a village store.  After the blacksmith died, the storekeeper moved his mother down the hill so that she would be closer to the store where he could keep an eye on her -- a necessity, because by all accounts she was a formidable lady.  He not only moved her, but also moved her house. He owned quite a bit of land up the hill from the store, some of which became the house lot for his mother. Although by the end of the 19th century the land had been broken up into family parcels, it was still all in the family.

Fast forward 75 years and several generations.  The store closed in the early 1950s. The mother's house had been empty or nearly empty for some years, occasionally used as a summer house by visiting family members. The family members who had inherited the various bits of property began to sell them off, in some cases to other family members or friends, but in other cases to strangers from away.  These family members were not stupid and had little wish to live in a town with a population in decline since the 1910 census.

The house of the storekeeper's mother left the family in 1961 and was owned by several people from away who used it as a summer house.  At some point, one of the owners bought some of the land up the hill so that the lot attached to the house, originally very small, would expand to about two acres.  However, the boundaries of the land were not entirely clear, and were described as being 75 yards from an elm tree no longer present, or bounded by a woodshed, also no longer present.  Town tax maps did not even associate this new purchase with the house.  

Fast forward a few more years. Along came the great-great granddaughter of the formidable lady, who decided that she wanted this house.  And, not all that strangely, it was for sale.  An offer was made and accepted and all was good to go when the lawyer helping the great-great granddaughter and her husband mentioned that he couldn't figure out the boundaries, didn't know what was actually being sold, and was not yet ready to issue a title opinion.  This delayed the closing by several weeks while the helpful lawyer tried to get title insurance,  

Title insurance was finally secured, with so many exclusions that it really didn't protect anyone from anything.  However, with that issue settled, the helpful lawyer decided that he could issue a title opinion and set a closing date.  

It's about time that another formidable lady owned that house. 

Christmas Letter 2014

The year that is ending was full of excitement, with a few challenges thrown in to keep us honest.  As always, the highlights involved travel, with trips to Hungary, Switzerland, Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon, Montana and Chicago.  The theme of this year’s travels seemed to be family.  We conducted genealogical research, attended reunions and visited relatives, and journeyed to remote places where our ancestors once lived. Our offspring have inherited the travel gene, with one going to Mexico and another visiting Munich and other places in Germany. We always enjoy hearing about their adventures.

When not exploring places near and far, we enjoy the visits of friends and family, experience the sports, music and theater delights of the Twin Cities, and appreciate the diversity that characterizes the city we have called home for almost 20 years. When we think about retirement, something we do quite often these days, we plan to spend the winters in Minneapolis and the summers in Maine and Budapest.  People tell us we have it wrong, but we are not going to stop being contrary now.

Sons William and Nicholas continue to live in Minneapolis, and it is wonderful to have them visit for Sunday dinner.  Peter lives in Portland, Oregon, and it equally wonderful to have an excuse to get to know a lovely and interesting part of the country.  We are very fortunate parents.

We wish you all the best and hope that the year to come brings you delight and wonder.

Louise and Jim

We accepted all the seller's conditions -- except price. She accepted our price.  I am beginning to get cold feet.  What have we done?  (For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm being melodramatic).

Anyway, we emailed the carpenter, asking him to fix the hole in the roof.  We call the insurance company so that our little sentimental investment can be insured -- the owner did not insure the place.  The insurance company informs us that if the inspector sees a tarp on the roof, the structure is uninsurable except through Lloyds of London.  Can't wait to see how much that might cost.

Then, we send the attorney in Eastport all the info. he will need to do a title search.  Normally he operates on Maine time, i.e., not in much of a hurry to do anything.  In this instance, however, he emails back right away:  "I thought you were only buying one parcel, but there are two parcels on this deed."   Huh?

So we get out the schematic of the property map for the town.  There is indeed a large parcel of land behind the house, probably around 10 acres.  However, it appears connected to another house, not (soon-to-be) ours. Of course, the schematic could be many years old and not reflective of the current situation.

Is the owner retaining the other parcel?  Does she even know that she owns it?  Does someone else own it? What do we do?  We don't really want another 10 acres -- we didn't even want the two that we just bought. We just want the house.

We have a call in to the town offices (open from 4-6 pm on Tuesday and Thursday). However, the staff there definitely operates on Maine time.  There was no one in the office when we called at 5 pm Eastern time. So we wait.

Adventures in Real Estate: Context is Everything

How did we get to the point of putting our little all into a pipe dream based on sentiment?  It's a long story that starts when yours truly was 10 years old, helping Dad clean out his mother's house in darkest Washington County, Maine.  The house was part of a family compound that seemed like a lot of fun at the time, with three houses so close to each other that shouting really did work. At the bottom of the lane where these three houses were located was a country store that supported the families in the three houses. There was horsehair furniture, a soapstone sink, gleaming wide board floors, a pump in the kitchen, and an outhouse.  I was told that it was an upscale outhouse because it was in the shed -- poor people had to go outside. There were blackberries and a brook that gurgled as it wound down to the tidal river below. There was a barn with a swing, just like Charlotte's Web.  It was magical.

My mother had convinced my father that he should not own the house.  It's a long way from Massachusetts, she said.  Whether he really agreed I will never know, but the house was sold.  Fast forward a few years to another house in the compound, for sale by an uncle.  Tempting, but the town had just been accidentally sprayed with pesticide by the paper company that owned most of northern Maine.  With small children around and more on the way, we thought that relocating to this part of the world, if only for the summer, wasn't the most sensible idea.

Many more years elapsed, and we went to look at the house in the pouring rain, just for fun while on a very damp vacation for which we rented a nice, brand new house about 40 miles away. We walked around in the wet grass that had not seen a lawn mower all summer, but I got the bug even though the house was not for sale.  This past Labor Day weekend, OLGS spirited me away to look again, because it was for sale.

We got to the house at the appointed time and waited for the real estate agent to show up. After almost an hour, he arrived, angry because the owner no longer had a key. After climbing on the roof, trying to jimmy the shed lock and open the cellar door, we broke a window.  OLGS crawled in, opened the door, and there we were.

It was heartbreaking.  There was a hole in the roof and there was no electricity because Bangor Hydro had cut the wires due to non-payment, according to a neighbor.  There was white mold on the massive beams in the cellar.  "At least it's not black mold," said the helpful agent. The pocket doors had been replaced by some truly ugly see-through plastic.  The soapstone sink was long gone. The porch was falling off the main house, the shed was listing to one side, and there was paint splattered all over, a sign that the owner had been trying to spruce things up.

I left very discouraged. But I've been obsessing about it for 50 years, and am not going to be deterred, although I am also not willing to pay very much for my obsession. We made an offer on it today.

What we learned about the house between our visit and the offer will be the subject of the next blog post.

Something Big, or Adventures in Real Estate

OLGS and I are going to do SOMETHING BIG!  Here's the plan:  we are going to buy this house, deconstruct it, and rebuild it on the water somewhere in Washington County, Maine.   Since we have more money than sense (and not much of that), this should be quite an adventure.  Did I say the house belonged to my great, great grandmother? Did I say it's a dump?   And if the owner does not accept our lowball offer, we will walk -- sentiment goes only so far.


How we do this while working many jobs, taking care of adult children with "issues", schlepping undergraduates to Zentral Europa, playing church lady and feeding Mitzi the cat I do not know.  All I know is that the time is now.

Stay tuned for developments.

Adventures in Hungarian medicine

Before I start the story, let me say that the point of this post is how nearly impossible it is to do anything complicated when you don't speak the language. Case in point: A trip to the emergency room.

I really thought I had appendicitis. I gutted it out (so to speak) for most of the day, and then finally called the clinic recommended by the State Department and the Fullbright folks. The English-speaking doctor on call said I should go to the hospital, and recommended one that he thought would be best. So off we went in a taxi. So far so good.

We get to the entrance to the hospital, and it is totally unclear where the ER is. When we think we've found it, there's a gate with a guard in a booth. So OLGS finally persuades the driver to go ask at the booth to be let in. Amazingly, we are and we drive off to the entrance, or what we think is the entrance.

We are right about the entrance, so we enter the ER waiting area and go to registration. We are waved off to somewhere else, but when we get to the somewhere else, it is totally unclear where we are. OLGS goes back to the registration area, and the clerk, showing only a little scorn for the stupid Americans, finally walks him back to where she had sent us in the first place. Apparently, this is triage, although whether it said anything about that I don't know.

After a short wait, a young woman in a polo shirt, jeans and a stethoscope pops her head out of a door, and indicates that we are next. In I go, along with OLGS as my translator. Then the problems really begin.

In addition to the young woman with the stethoscope, there is an older woman with what looks very suspiciously like a ledger. After showing our State Department-issued health insurance card, we are told that it is no good and that we will need to pay in advance. How much, we ask? 100 euros, we are told.

OLGS yanks out his credit card, brought along for exactly this eventuality. We don't take credit cards, he is told. Cash? We have exactly enough in Hungarian money (not Euros) to pay the cab back and the $15 co-pay that the insurance card says we will need to pay at an ER visit. Of course, the card is in English, and I suspect the concept of co-pay is foreign to them.

Now the lady with the ledger picks up her phone. OLGS understands enough to know that she's saying that there are some Americans who cannot pay and what should I do? Fortunately, the woman with the polo shirt and stethoscope says, in broken English, "Why don't I examine you anyway. We'll deal with this later." I was quite ready to kiss her, as the pain was getting worse from the stress.

So she examines me, asks all the right questions, with OLGS helping. She says that she is pretty sure I don't have appendicitis but that I should go see a surgeon. Surgeon??? She fills out several forms, stamps them repeatedly, and sends us back to registration, where we deal with more skepticism about the insurance card, and ultimately fill out a form in English that I think committed us to giving them our firstborn child.

We were going to leave after that -- I decided that since I didn't have appendicitis, I could deal with it the following day at the English-language clinic where they understand the concept of the State Department. However, a woman in scrubs rushed out as we were ready to leave and marched us into an examining room.

She spoke no English, but did a great demo of vomiting. OLGS finally told her that we wanted to go, and she agreed, after telling me that I should see a surgeon. That made me even more anxious to leave, so OLGS called the cab company, which promised to be there in 10 minutes. It was, and we walked back to the gate, since the driver did not argue with the guard about driving to the entrance.

When we got back to our flat, I went to bed, and although it was hard to get comfortable, I finally fell asleep and felt somewhat better in the morning. During the day I continued to feel better, so I never called the English-language clinic.

Lessons learned: Stick with English speakers for medicine -- OLGS is not advanced enough to do this in Hungarian. The basic humanity of the woman in the polo shirt -- a PA or intern -- who was going to examine me whether or not the payment issues were resolved. We were a charity case. And the meaning of surgeon: Physician -- similar to the Brits calling a doctor's office a surgery. And I'm more or less back to normal two days later. Food poisoning? Indigestion? Who knows. We didn't understand.

Hungary's tax dollars at work

You can tell a lot about a country by what it subsidizes.  Hungary, for example, subsidizes the arts -- heavily.  It also subsidizes public transportation, at least in Budapest.  But that is for another post.

Today's visit to the Bartok Marathon was quite revealing.  For under $10 we attended two concerts, one a celebration of the folk dance tunes Bartok used as the inspiration for many of his piano works.  It was charming and professional, with two modern folk dancers performing against the backdrop of early 20th century peasants filmed while dancing.   The second was an  orchestral concert, again performed at a very high level. And expensive to put on -- two harpists, eight French horns, and a massive string section.  They were very good, and while not sold out, the hall looked full.

And the venue?  The Bela Bartok National Concert Hall is about 10 years old, and has amazing acoustics.  Unfortunately, it's in a unprepossessing neighborhood, surrounded by construction-related mud.  Inside is just fine. And maybe it looks better in the summer.  But that is my only quibble.

I feel almost guilty taking advantage of these offerings -- but not guilty enough to boycott.

Are you an advocate of English-only? Try to learn another language and then see how you feel.

Language class is over for now.  OLGS and I celebrated with a luncheon party, or buli, for his classmates and his and my teachers (no classmates for me -- I was in a class of one!) Charming people, all of whom spoke English.

In fact, they all spoke English amazingly well. I complain about Hungarian, but it is logical and is pronounced phonetically.  What you see is what you get -- kind of like Spanish.  There is no gender issue, like French.  There are very few irregular verbs.  In contrast, English is amazingly difficult, and the more I learn about other languages, the more impressed I am by people who manage to learn English.

It's full of irregular verbs, and the spelling and pronunciation seem to follow no rules that one can hang on to when trying to navigate the words that come from many different roots.  Then there are all those homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently, or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, depending on context. It's a mess.

I want to say that I can't understand how English became a world language, but I kind of know why.  It is infinitely flexible, and most English speakers -- the ones I know, at any rate -- are pretty forgiving.  If they get the meaning, they don't usually care whether you were "correct."

In contrast, everyone in Budapest is a Hungarian teacher, from the shopkeeper to to the ticket taker at the movihaz to the kind stranger who gives up her seat on the bus for a gimpy American.  Whenever you open your mouth, they correct the fine points of grammar that you have missed because you've only been speaking the language for three weeks.

So to those yahoos who want to restrict entry into the US to English speakers only, or keep citizenship away from people whose English doesn't measure up to some impossible standard, I say this: Go try to learn a new language yourself.  Especially if you are over 21, you'll find it amazingly difficult.  And bear in mind that English is one of the hardest.

I bet that the loudest English-only advocates don''t speak any other languages.  Just a guess ...