My parents are coming in for a visit. I’ve known this for several weeks, but it’s only dawning on me as true now that the airline alerts they insisted I sign up for have begun with their pre-boarding updates. My phone will ding with every forward step of their eastward inertia. Mr. and Mrs. Donovan have checked their bags directly to their destination! Mr. Donovan has now passed through security! Mrs. Donovan has now procured her coffee and Oprah’s Book Club title that she will realize at 35,000 feet she has already read!
I should be used to their visits, given I’ve been hosting my parents for the last 15 years. Ever since I left their home at 18 years old with my only possession of importance — a combination TV/VCR — my parents have been coming to see me in the places I deemed home. It was an easy enough formula at first. I lived in Missouri, where absolutely no one wanted to visit me, followed by New York City, where everyone wanted to come to see me — or the Statue of Liberty, at least.
Missouri was a very easy place to host my relatives because they never came there. In four years, they never set foot in the state, no matter how many times I promised to take them to the restaurant where they throw dinner rolls across the dining room or to the St. Louis Arch, so long as we went to the restaurant where they throw dinner rolls across the dining room first.
While not quite as simple as Missouri, New York City held its own when it came to hosting my family. I had to put some thought into where they would sleep — atop the bookshelf or in the oven? But apart from that, I needed only to set out a stack of towels, then bat back a deluge of text messages about where to find bathrooms in Times Square from the comfort of my office. We would reconvene in the evening over a good meal and review every encounter they had with a vagrant, street performer or a probably vagrant street performer. Because there is magic in even the minutiae in New York, something like the sighting of a celebrity at the neighborhood bagel shop would leave them breathlessly awaiting the next time they could visit.
Maine, however, has been a different sort of destination. To start, it takes a lot to get here. I still have the outline of a memory of meeting a boy, who must have been around 10 years of age as I was in that moment, on a beach in California who said he had come from Maine. I can remember cocking my head and murmuring, “Wow,” like he had walked out of the sands of Afghanistan. Once you get past the planning to come here and actually arrive here, you aren’t yet here because so many of us live a sizable distance from the airport. Fear not, you will reach your final landing place shortly, and when you do the reasonable weather the state had been enjoying will decide to head wherever it is you just left.
Temperamental weather and endless sky miles aside, Maine represents a different kind of tourism for my family. The late-night dinners and marquee theater of the past, habits of a time uncolonized by children, have been edged out by early-morning breakfasts and community puppet shows. I stare at the glossy photographs stuffed within the magazines of Maine, sharp and saturated images of couples poking at lobsters on a deck while athletically clad friends dump a kayak into the steely ocean below. The tourism publications harp on about the unruffled wonders of Acadia and the sea-level quaintness of Bar Harbor, unflinching about the portrayal of a Maine that is not mine. These places, these pastimes are not my Maine and as such are not the Maine my parents see.
My Maine consists of three children, who are up at dawn and require many meals and even more refereeing throughout the day. My Maine is the schoolyard at not one but two campuses. My Maine is the YMCA where we do all the things the brochures champion — rock climbing, swimming, running and eating — but we do them indoors and via vending machines. My Maine is a worn path, not through fern-laden woodland but to Hannaford. My Maine consists of a small business that needs big attention.
As their plane draws nearer, I find myself stalled in that familiar mental toil. Will they like it here this time? Will they finally understand why I live here, so far from the life I remember and the future they counted on? These are the questions that torment those of us from away, those who have no tether to Maine’s past, no stake in its history. The last time my father came for a visit, only his second time to Maine, I followed at his heels like a cocker spaniel, waiting for a piece of praise to tumble out of his mouth. At one point he drew in a big sip of water from the glass he filled from the sink and he said, “You know what I like about this place?”
I trembled with anticipation.
“The tap water is really cold.”
I don’t know if this visit will rouse any deeper appreciation of Maine. I’ve got the towels ready and the sheets washed. There are swimming lessons, lacrosse practices, gymnastics classes and birthday parties to fill the hours. I even have a scenic hike or two planned, should the weather decide to cooperate. As I was thinking that I should get up to speed on the places that serve the best chowders and lobster rolls, my phone dinged again: Mr. and Mrs. Donovan have landed in Portland. And they’re dumb with hunger and about to rent a Ford Fiesta!
Ready or not, here they come.