I've Got Moxie, Now Who's Got The Mouthwash?

I kept walking up the hill, past the ice cream shop and the bank as the sun sank lower over the Medomak River. The tide was coming in and the water was swelling in its bed, reflecting hints of pink and purple among the blue shimmers.

I was hot despite the chill in the evening air - us hefty girls, we get like that when we walk up hills and stuff - and I slowed down when I got to another little street with shops. They were all closed, and looked like they had been since the fall. Beyond the buildings, a house was for sale. The date on the lower left corner said, "1756". The house itself was a peach color with mauve trim. I wondered how much it was, but there was no number on the "For Sale" sign.
I gave up my pathetic aspirations of someday owning a home (with the market the way it is now, I may be able to buy the shed in my parent’s backyard when I’m 40) and crossed to the other side of the street to peer in the windows of the locked shops. Two men, one fifty-ish and one older, were chatting in the middle of the block. Fifty-Something Guy was cradled in the doorway of one of the shops, which had large pieces of paper and sheets hanging in the window, and was a bit higher in vantage than Older Than Fifty Guy, who was on the sidewalk. I walked past and they said hello, and Fifty Something asked, "Out for a stroll tonight?"

I backed up a few steps and stopped to chit-chat. Had I known that such nonchalant banter would result in making a friend for life, I may not have believed it if told. I answered the man’s question, saying, "Yeah, it’s nice out - and by the way, do either of you happen to know what the going rate on real estate is around here? Is it reasonable?" (Okay, so I didn’t give up my dream of home-ownership. At this point it may be silly, since buying a can of beans is a challenge, but my grandfather used to say, "Hold onto your dreams. Without your dreams, you’re dead.")

Fifty Something raised his eyebrows as he pointed a coffee mug-laden hand at Older Guy. "This is the one you want to talk to about real estate, he knows everything. I’ll see you later!" and he disappeared into the doorway, through which I could make out some paintings on the righthand wall before it closed. I think it was an art shop or a gallery of some sort.

I turned to Older Guy, the kind that one might think of as eldery if not for the lively twinkle in their eye, the one that belies their white hair, the kind my grandmother has, and asked him again what was average for property prices in those parts. He pointed to one of the storefronts down the block and said, "The guy that owns that one, he bought it for $130,000 about two years ago, and he just put it on the market now and it’s going for $430,000."

My jaw dropped and my heart sank. How could I compete with that? I had 67 cents and a button in my pocket. "Bear in mind, that’s including the business portion and the living area upstairs. Now, I have this one," he said, pointing to a shop closer to where we were standing. "I bought it for $31,000 in 1982." The storefront housed a cute little café called The Pine Cone and I had been admiring it before I started talking with the guys. I couldn’t believe he got such a deal on it!
"You’re kidding me! $31,000, that’s all?!"
"Yep! Do you want to see the upstairs? Come on inside!"

My initial reaction said hell, no, I don’t know you, but I figured at his age I could take him with no problems. I was about a head taller than he. And it would be nice to make a new friend.
So I wiped the suspicion off my face and transferred it to my fingers, which opened my purse as I accepted his invitation and sat holding my pepper spray at the ready in the bag as I waited for him to unlock the door. Inside was a small entrance to the café on the right, which was not open for the season, and a steep staircase directly in front, which we climbed to the second floor. The entrance to the room was also on the right, like the café, and as I came around the corner, I was astounded.

The apartment was almost all wood, gorgeous honey colors of pine and maple, and gave the whole place a cozy, rustic feel. To the left was a small kitchen, with large wooden shelves for dishes and glasses instead of cabinets. To the right was a wrap-around wooden bench built into the floor, over which were bookshelves, row upon row of bookshelves with leather-bound tomes stretching from end to end. Ahead to the left was a bright wooden bar, an extension of the kitchen in a way, and it was littered with interesting plants, even one beautiful flowering lily made entirely out of jade and crystal! Past the wooden bench and bookshelves I spied a bumper pool table, around which hung interesting flags I’d never seen and large paintings.
My new friend beckoned me further inside. "This used to be part of the café," he said. "This was the bar. We had a dance floor up here." As we curved around to the left, past the bar, I could see why. A huge room, the width of the whole building, opened up past the kitchen and bar area. The back wall was almost entirely windows, which were uncurtained and gave us a spectacular view of the Medomak and the setting sun.

I can only describe the furnishings in this house as "funky". Perhaps "bohemian" works too. So does "hodge-podge". Okay, there are lots of ways, but to try and list the amount of random, ecclectic stuff in this house is difficult. There were iron chandeliers, there were chairs and tables that looked older than the Louisiana Purchase, there was a china cabinet filled with old, old books, and my friend said some of them dated back to the 1700's. I was amazed they hadn’t disintegrated at this point. Kerosene lamps. Steins. Candle holders of all different shapes and sizes. It was incredible.

My friend led me out onto the back deck off of the used-to-be-dance-floor. "The place is a bit messy because I haven’t lived here for the last few years, I was going to grad school." I peeled my eyes off the sunset to look at him. He had to be in his sixties, I would guess, and the thought off anyone going for their master’s degree at his age was foreign to me. And disgustingly intriguing.
"Where did you go?" I asked.
"Harvard."
"WOW! That is so awesome! For what?"
"Human Ecology. The study of brains and the environment. I worked mainly with internal clocks and education."

I was confused, so he explained further. "Basically, I wrote my thesis on the effects of seasonal changes on the human brain, how we learn and our ability to retain information. The school system is inherently flawed because it doesn’t take these changes into effect. I introduced the idea of a continuing school calendar, and a continuing education program, that would be open to anyone, even as they got older. I believe that a lot of learning disabilities stem from these seasonal changes and the school calendar does nothing to accomodate them."

I was hanging on every word - it was fascinating to meet such an educated person in such a little town like Waldoboro, not to say that I think all people in small towns are country-dumb, but it is a nice surprise to find the literati living in places other than New York, DC and Boston. He went on to explain how the continuing school system and continuous school calendar could help homeless people be educated in order to find good jobs. It seemed a very ambitious, very complex plan - the exact kind of plan that can get one labeled "crazy". I know from experience.

After he explained all this, we looked at the sunset and then at each other and realized we didn’t know each other’s names. I don’t know about you but I think that is a sign of a very positive meeting, when you can be welcomed into someone’s house and talk about thesis papers, and then get around to the obligatory niceties, like names.

He went first. "What’s your name?"
"Jessica."
"Larry."
"Nice to meet you, Larry."

He pointed out another property he owned on the other side of the river, which was barely visible through the trees, and offered to take me there at some point to show me around. He said it had four buildings on it, two houses, one brokendown shack and one garage, where he kept his Harley. I giggled. My old friend Larry, the golden year Harvard graduate, had a Harley.
We went back inside to escape the chill that had swept over the town after the sun fell beneath the trees. I had a million questions - "What is this?" "How old is this?" "Where did you get this?" "Did you live here all your life?" "Who is that in that painting?" "Why did you close the bar?" He answered all of them with a patience I recognized, a patience that comes from people asking a million questions about why you are the way you are and why you do the things you do. It was the same kind of patience I used to field queries whenever I would mention this trip.

He brought me around, past the bar, past the bumper pool table and the wooden bench, and into another large storage room that looked out onto the street, with more and more books and bookshelves. Two huge paintings of men, the kind of portraits that hang in museums, hung opposite each other on the walls. They were his great-great-great-great-he-didn’t-even-know-maybe-uncles-or-something, but they were definitely related to Larry.

Beyond this room was a smaller room, a walk-in closet compared to the rest of the house, but it had a tall window just like those in the storage office. "This is my hovel," he said. A small Mac laptop sat on the only clear patch of desk in the room.

He asked if I wanted to see the third floor, so I followed him up the narrow staircase to another landing, underneath a green flag that was hanging as a sort of partition and around another righthand corner. The top floor of the building was just as wonderful, with a big bedroom and smaller guest room to the left and beautiful wooden walls and closets directly in front of the entranceway. He led me around another corner and down a hallway, saying, "And this is the loft."

He opened a door unto a room that I swear to heaven would go for $3,000 a month in Manhattan. It was huge and open, all wood and brick walls, just like an artist’s studio from the movies. There were gazelle heads mounted on the wall - not deer. Gazelles! And resting on the floor in the corner, with its head in an arch as though looking up to God, was a water buffalo head. A water buffalo! I tried not to laugh as I noticed the similarity in this creature’s expression and angle of his head to that of The Virgin Mary that is clear in so many Renaissance paintings, that pleading look of despair. I also felt incredibly sorry that such a large, strong animal had been brought down by something as simple as a little bullet. I pet its nose as Larry told me that his father had hunted in Africa and brought it back in the fifties. I leaned down to hug the buffalo head, resting mine on his massive curved horn. "That’s really dusty, be careful," Larry said.

We went back downstairs to the bar, and by this point I sounded like a broken record. "This is AMAZING! I can’t believe what you paid for all this! I love it!" I kept saying. I wasted no time in offering my services as a housesitter. "And you haven’t even seen the bakery yet!" he said, with a gleam in his eye.

We went downstairs, through the restaurant, to a back door. The restaurant and kitchen themselves amazed me. The place has not been operational for two years, Larry said, but everything looks as though someone just left for the night. It was almost eerie. Cups and saucers are still neatly stacked next to the coffee pot, tongs and spoons and steel pots all hang from holders over the stove. Dishsoap and sponges still rest on the edge of the sink, waiting for someone to dirty something. The waitresses’ gingham aprons are still tossed into a cubbyhole under a prep table, as though they threw them there after their shift. Cans of non-stick cooking spray and bottles of McCormick spices still sit on the shelves, waiting to be shaken. It was odd. And a little sad.

"Come on through here," Larry urged me as I walked slowly through the kitchen, trying to catch every little detail of the still-life snapshot of the room, as though the kitchen was a 3-D replica of someplace frozen in time. I felt I should be reverent, in mourning for this place.
"The bakery is in the basement. Watch your step."

We plodded down a brick staircase and through a doorway that led into a dark hallway. I recognized a keg refrigerator and a walk-in freezer. The bakery opened up at the end of the hall - it was a brick oven style, like a pizza oven. Larry explained the inner workings of it to me as I accidentally focused my attention on a tiny fake bird, a robin, laying on the sill of the oven. It was the kind that I can only describe as fitting in perfectly on Minnie Pearl’s hat, a small plastic being clothed in thin painted feathers, with black beads for eyes. It made no sense being there, and yet it made perfect sense. Robins represent renewal, hope for a new spring and new life. Larry had mentioned off and on in our conversation that he was trying to get the bakery and restaurant running again. I wondered if he had put the robin on the oven for good luck.
While we were in the basement, Larry discovered a leak over one of the sinks. It was obvious that it upset him - I know, I hate when things break in my house. Or, when I had a house, I did.
We went back upstairs and Larry offered me a beer. I declined, saying I had to start walking back to the firehall before it got too late. "Well, are you hungry? I haven’t eaten yet and I was going to go to Moody’s, you’re welcome to join me. Then I could give you a ride back to the fire station," he said. That sounded okay, and I vowed to myself I would exercise the next day since I would miss out on the walk back to the car. I wasn’t hungry at all, but I liked Moody’s and I liked talking to Larry.

We hopped into Larry’s minivan, the one he converted to a work truck by taking out all the seats and fixtures in the back. Driving over to Moody’s, I saw even more of Waldoboro that I hadn’t yet, like the Waldo Theatre, which was a grand old building that offered opera shows in the summer season. It looked just like the Roman-style monstrosities that house the University of Maryland, brick with large white columns. It was gorgeous. We also passed a few bed-and-breakfasts, and my heart felt a little tug as Mitch Hedberg’s line about chair-lunch-dinners ran through my mind. He died not too long ago. Funny, funny guy.

We got to Moody’s and I ordered coffee. I was so full from eating all day - breakfast at Helen’s, fish and chips and ale in Portland, turkey and mashed potatoes and carrots and biscuits and coffee and pie and ice cream at Moody’s just a few hours beforehand that I ordered a coffee and barely touched it. Larry had shrimp chowder, which I’d never heard of, and the biscuits. Man, those biscuits are awesome!

We talked some more about random stuff. I told him all about the triplets, my little bumblekins, and wanting to go to grad school for public administration or social work or foster care management. That’s the master’s program I need to find - Masters of Arts in Y’Know Public Administration Or Social Work Or Like Foster Care Management Or Something. Maybe they offer one at Los Plainos Locos Universidad in Havana, Cuba? Along with a Bachelor’s of Science in Religion. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Anyway, I watched some people come in and out of the place while we were sitting there. Every face had a story, an obviously amazing story. I wanted so badly to set up a time to come back and chat with the tall man with the Grizzly Adams beard in the overalls. Or the stocky lady with the lumberjack jacket. Or the short blonde waitress with the one eye that drooped. I would so so so much rather talk to them than read another article on Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise.

But it was not to be that night, so Larry and I left and he drove me back to the firestation. I swear my guardian angel is working overtime, because I had left the interior light on while I was gone, but Toby still started up like a dream. I was lucky. I had left it on while I searched for the stupid AC adapter that I bought that plugs into the cigarette lighter. It looked so complicated at first that I didn’t use it until my laptop was seriously running out of battery power and I couldn’t find a place to go. I finally figured out how to use it, but the warning labels all over the damn thing scared me so much that it took eight times longer than it should have because I was trying not to die. I could see the headline in my mind - "Girl’s Body Found In Wreckage Of Car Fire. Police Suspect Stupidity, Not Foul Play." Even after I turned it on it scared me, because it made all these weird beeps and clicks and then so did my laptop. When I turned it on to see what was the matter, it gave me a funky error screen and the adapter started to scream and vibrate on the dashboard, so I turned them off in a hurry. Then I tried to get as far away from the car as possible, so I took that walk that had led me to Larry, but forgotten to turn off the interior.

Larry waited until I made sure the car started, then he took off. He left his number in case it got too cold and said I could stay in his guest room. I thanked him and settled in for my night at the firehall, starting with heading inside to use the bathroom. And all the doors were locked. Every last one. Dammit.

So I called Larry and he said to come on over so I did and ended up staying over in his guest room. He went to bed long before I did and I stayed up working and writing. It was odd, though, being in such an old house with such old things, I kind of worried about it being haunted. I looked over my shoulder a lot as I went to the bathroom and back, checking for ghosts.
Before he went to bed, Larry told me about yet another house that he owned, this one on North Haven Island, about an hour east of the coast of Rockland by ferry. He offered to take me there if I had time and we set a date for Friday. I have to admit, I was a little nervous to go to a secluded island with someone I’d just met, don’t think I wasn’t, but I really liked Larry and didn’t feel any reason to fear him.

The next day I planned to go to Sebago Lake, where I had spent summers as a child at my grandparent’s summer cottage. I slept in a little after so much writing the night before, and when I went downstairs to Larry’s kitchen he offered me coffee. I gladly accepted and then burst out laughing - as I opened the fridge to find the milk, there was a 12-pack of Moxie Soda. I had heard tales of the stuff from friends of mine who had visited Maine, how awful it was and yet people still bought it. It is a Maine tradition. And here is was, a fridge-pack of it, bright orange with white letters and a blue man on the can giving a thumbs-up. It was so awesome.

"Take one! Take two!" Larry said, amused by my reaction. "Have you ever had Moxie?"
"No, but I’ve heard a lot about it!" I said, still giggling.
"Oh, yeah. It’s an aquired taste."
"Yeah, and it’s a word too! I remember my friend Hogan used it in a sentence one day and I almost gave him a dollar for using such a random word!"
"Yeah!" Larry said. "The word came from the soda. Supposedly it gives you energy, it means you have chutzpa! You’ve got moxie, y’know?" As he said this he did a wonderful little dance where he bobbed up and down and shuffled his arms side to side. Even now I smile thinking about it. We had so much fun!

So I took the Moxie, one to drink and one to keep. And I started on my way to Sebago Lake.
There is also a working colony of Shakers nearby, and I wanted to see if I could get taken in by them like I had with the Mennonites. Well, I couldn’t, because visiting hours were closed for the season. So instead, I drove around Sebago Lake, looking for our old house and couldn’t find it. At this point it was only 11:30 and I had about 2 and a half days before Larry and I were to go to North Haven. I stared at the map and decided, "Hey, why not go to Quebec?" So I started
heading in that direction.

I got about 10 minutes up the road when I stopped, pulled over, pulled down the visor, flipped open the mirror and yelled "What are you thinking?! Are you crazy!?" into my reflection. Quebec was not a good idea, I decided then, because nowadays you need a passport and you have to go through customs. With my car as full as it was they were sure to find something I couldn’t take - something stupid, like an apple - and with no passport in hand it would have been a long, frustrating trip indeed.

The thought of passing through customs reminded me of the time I had crossed the Arizona-California border and the border patrol confiscated my broccoli. I understand why they do it - to keep the crops protected from foreign pests - but the sound of it is just hilarious. "Ma’am, step out of the car and put your hands on the wall and spread your legs. Bubba, you search her while we search the car for illegal legumes."

So I turned around and drove back towards Waldoboro, thinking maybe I would go to Bar Harbor (Bah Hahbah!) or something. I knew the first place I wanted to go with my free time - the Maine Wildlife Park I had passed on the way to Sebago. I was determined to see a moose while I was in Maine and if it had to be in a zoo then it had to be in a zoo but I was determined.
There were all sorts of moms their with their children, all sensibly dressed and sunscreened. I looked out of place without a baby on my hip but I didn’t want to stay very long - I just wanted to see the moose and bears and bobcats and be on my way. There were all kinds of animals found in Maine there! There were two albino porqupines and one black one. I laughed because the way they moved reminded me of elderly people, they were so cute.

There was a lynx and a bobcat and a mountain lion, and two black bears. The bears were beautiful. And then, sure enough, there were my moose. There was a male and a female and they were huge; the female was sitting up against the fence and dozing, the male was further back in the wooded paddock eating. His horns weren’t very impressive, they were just brown stubs on his head. I was a little disappointed, thinking maybe that the zookeepers had cut them so he wouldn’t harm himself or anyone else while in captivity. I was mulling that over when I walked past a sign that read, "A moose sheds his horns every spring and grows new ones." Then I felt like an ass.

Well, I went, I saw, I conquered my ignorance of moose horns, so it was time to mosey. I was feeling sluggish on the way out of the park, so I popped open a can of Moxie and took a sip. What passed through my lips didn’t taste so bad. At first. Then I got blindsided by this aftertaste that would make a dung beetle cry! But I was determined to drink every last drop, and I did. Because, as Ron Burgundy says, "When in Rome!" But seriously, the stuff was acrid. It was so bad I was dying laughing as I was driving down the road because I couldn’t believe where my travels had taken me - drinking soda so putrid it was good while driving up Rt. 1 in Maine! (Sometimes it still hits me at random that I’m actually living my dream....)

I think it’s called Moxie because you need moxie to choke it down. But it did put a pep in my step, that’s for sure. Larry said it was made with some sort of ginseng-like thing. And it worked!

I wanted to go antiquing for some reason, just this urge I had to spend money I shouldn’t spend on stuff I won’t use. So I found a good shop and poked around the mounds of stuff. The grandmother at the counter was so sweet, and she noticed that I lingered over the kitchen oddities the longest. "Do you have a pie lifter?" she asked. She showed me what it did; she had a slow, smooth way of talking that almost put me right to sleep. "This slides into the oven to grab the pie pan and lift it out. All of the things on this wall are just funny things. Just funny things." You could tell she loved each item like a baby, and I wanted to patronize the store but I don’t really need a pie lifter so I picked up some cookie cutters instead. It was a set of 12 and one was shaped like an ax. An ax! What the hell? I had to have the whole set, if only for the ax. I’m going to make bloody ax Halloween cookies this year, I can feel it.

The next place I stopped was the Salvation Army Thrift Store, the same one I forbade myself from entering the day before. I didn’t find anything I liked, which was great because I didn’t have any cash on me and I wasn’t going to charge a dollar for a shirt.

Then I headed further up the road to my town, Wiscasset. I decided to spend the rest of the day there, checking out houses and working on the laptop. What a beautiful day, what a beautiful town.