On Maine's coast, a bit of peace

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PROUT'S NECK, Maine - I will not carry it home with me this time. It cannot be carried or stored or deposited for some later date. Not any more. I wish it could. These days all I take is the memory.

And so I write down the color of the sky - pink, this morning, with swaths of blue - and the roaring, glubbing, flapping sounds of the sea. I memorize the shape of gulls, study them in flight, listen to their squeals and squawks, notice how they return to the ground soundlessly, like paper planes.

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Let's get organized _ not!

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I bought the book - a small book stuffed with 19th century wisdom on ways to economize - at Sturbridge Village, because when I opened it, there was a suggestion on using ear wax as lip balm and I thought: This is disgusting.

There's got to be a column in it.

And there is, I know. The book would make a great column. But guess what? I can't find it. The book has disappeared.

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Mother, daughter gap wide

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"All we do is argue," the woman tells me over a cup of coffee. Her 16-year-old daughter has just stormed out the front door ("I'm going for a walk.") because her mother suggested in front of "company" that she might want to shut off the TV and go upstairs and clean her room.

"I didn't yell at her," the mother says. "I was simply making a suggestion.

"My daughter and I are like oil and water these days. I tell myself to be calm and patient and understanding. I try to remember how I felt when I was her age. I know I was a slob, too. But it isn't just her room we fight about. It's everything. She looks at me like I'm a fly on her dinner plate. She sighs every time I try to talk to her. She shuts herself in her room and talks on the phone for hours, and I can hear her up there laughing and giggling and having a great time. Then she hangs up and comes downstairs and thumps around here like she's in prison and I'm the guard.

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Letting go: The toughest job

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I embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.

I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.

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Another change, a memory lost

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I don't get sentimental over the closing of stores anymore. Things change. Things change so often and so fast that change itself isn't as dramatic as it used to be. One store pulls down its shades, and a few weeks later another opens its doors, and for the most part, I hardly notice. But I used to. I used to mourn the passing of the places I frequented as a child. I carried a mental picture of the way things were, the way I thought they always would be, and I expected life to honor that picture. I wanted the places I loved to stay just as I remembered, untouched like the room of someone on a vacation, who at any moment may return.

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So if you were on an island...

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When she was little she clung to me and said, "You're my best friend in the whole wide world." She used to cry when I went away, for a night, for a weekend. "Why can't you take me?" she would ask. And I would explain, "Because this party is for grown-ups. Because this is a business trip. Because you'd be bored." "No I wouldn't, Mommy. I'd never be bored around you."

Such absolute, unconditional love.

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