Berry, berry, quite contrary

I don’t care what anyone says. Canned cranberry jelly is way better than the real stuff.

It’s got a consistency not found in nature, mostly because it’s not found in nature. It retains its can shape with an eerie fidelity, and when wild animals eat it, they get acid indigestion and have the squeaks for a week. Somehow, this all ends up in the positive column for this annual holiday staple, despite the fact that its acidity could liquify lead ball bearings.

If you’re one of the Thanksgiving revelers who slaved over their time-honored cranberry sauce recipe, then fear not. The real stuff is good, too. Really the only crime would be to pass a Thanksgiving meal without touching a teaspoon of this wonderful bounty; that would be like celebrating Christmas without a tree, or Independence Day without a hangover.

Somehow, though, the faceless corporate cranberry people got it right. I realize not everyone shares this view – most, in fact, would prefer ma’s home cookin’ to the jiggly, off-the-shelf fare found in supermarkets. Of course, most people prefer Sprite to Sierra Mist, and these unfortunate souls are insane.

Generally, homemade food is preferable. Better to eat an imperfect cake that’s been prepared lovingly than to rot your teeth on a generic, factory-fashioned concoction. Better still to sink your teeth into a burger that’s been cooked on your friend’s grill than the flaccid, gutless patties offered at countless fast food chains with cartoon mascots. There’s something about the home touch – the fresh ingredients, the time and effort – that makes food better. Usually.

But this isn’t always the case. As far back as I can remember, each of my Thanksgiving meals has been conjured from raw materials, whipped into shape by a host who didn’t mind a little elbow grease. I’ve been lucky that way. The perfectly imperfect mashed potatoes have all been moderately lumpy, the squash has been fresh, and the birds have been so recently dead you half expect a browned wing to slap your fork away, as if to say, “Watch it, jerk! That hurts!”

Then you look at the cranberry jelly and imagine you can still make out the serial number stamped onto the bottom. How the canned stuff became a family tradition is a mystery; I picture a sweating Lagasse in early 20th century Lewiston, flour and turkey guts caked high on her forearms, crying with relief when the first canned cranberry made its way into her hands. “At last!” she sobbed. “My life has been made easier by science!”

Over time, I got so used to the fake jelly that when I first tried the real stuff, I thought someone was playing a sick, cruel prank. Where was the weird residual coating on my palate? Where was the perfect symmetry, the subtle undulations on the side of each cookie-cutter slice, ribbed for my pleasure? Blasphemy!

Ordinarily I’d side with the little guy over the large company. Not that I'm inherently anti-corporation by nature; many are so evil they make Darth Vader look like an asexual dog groomer, but that's a generalization, and there are a few that break the mold. Rather, it's a David and Goliath kind of thing. When the two sides of a fight seem mismatched, it's a natural human impulse to root for the underdog, the little guy. In most spheres of life, this is what feels more comfortable. More just.

Not so when it comes to cranberries. Using the ever-trustworthy (cough) Internet as a resource, the history of the canned version is pretty easily explained. Originally, see, cranberries were “dry harvested,” meaning a hoard of sticky-fingered workers would scour the fields during dry weather and pick the berries from their vines, which is how fresh cranberries – and most fruits – are still made commercially available today. Except for pineapples, of course, which are delivered to supermarkets by demons fresh from the deep, dark depths of hell.

At some point, the companies growing the berries commercially started to “wet harvest” them. That sounds like a unit in a middle school sex education class, but wet harvesting is basically just a machine skimming loose cranberries from the surface of a flooded bog. You get a lot more bounty with a lot fewer people that way, but you also get a lot of crummy cranberries mixed in with the good ones. As early as 1912, companies like Ocean Spray figured out what to do with those leftover cranberries: can them, let them naturally congeal, and then sell them as mouse pads. When they realized the computer mouse hadn't been invented yet, they figured, “Aw, heck. Let people eat 'em. Can't be any worse than a fruitcake.”

So with a little ingenuity, the packaged product took its proud place beside Aunt Doris' homemade apricot-and-lizard-sphincter pie. It's a bit incongruous, this impeccably cylindrical treat, but Thanksgiving really wouldn't be the same without it. Which is what the holiday is all about, really. The fact that the banana bread and green bean casserole have all been made from scratch isn't the point; it's the fact that the same cherished foods grace our plates year after year. Repetition is what makes a tradition a tradition. If you ate nothing but day-old pizza and Twizzlers each Thanksgiving for 20 years, then doggone it, the holiday just wouldn't be the same without it. Someone would hand you a plate of fresh turkey and applesauce and you'd recoil in horror, whipping out your cell phone to order something that comes with blood-thick dipping sauce.

We enjoy Thanksgiving every year because it's familiar and comfortable. Canned cranberry jelly plays into that nicely, so bring it on. Mom's blueberry pie, cousin Sandy's chocolate pudding and Ocean Spray's congealed fruit.

Sounds about right to me.

And so I face the final curtain

It’s been a long time since I first stepped through the doors of the Journal Tribune. I was wide-eyed as a speckled hawk owl and twitchy with shot nerves; up to that point, the most pressure I’d felt professionally was meeting sales goals while peddling long-distance calling plans as a telemarketer. Now I was tasked with writing articles for the sports department of an honest-to-goodness publication, and I’ll admit, I was scared. My first assignment was covering a Thornton Academy lacrosse game, and I just about gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome jotting down every last detail, feverishly trying to get it right.

 

Eight years later I’m still trying to get it right. I’m better at it; you learn these kinds of things. But you also learn when it’s time to move on.

 

Today’s my last day at the Journal, and I have to say, it feels a little anticlimactic. Almost a decade of my life has gone by – a blurry, unending train of effort and struggle, of pouring myself into my work – and then, poof. See you later, guys. Thanks for the memories. It’s weird.

 

In a few days I move onto the next effort, the next struggle, and while there’s a part of me that’s excited about the opportunity, I’ve got this built-in mechanism whose sole purpose is nostalgia: clinging to the bittersweet aggregate of my life’s experiences and wringing from it every last sentimental drop. This is by turns rewarding and painful – rewarding because it gives me a long memory, and a deep well from which to draw, and painful because I get attached to old times. I recognize this, and so I hate it when an era of my life becomes appropriated by the past. To take on something new you often have to ditch some ballast, but I like my ballast. It makes me, for better or for worse, who I am.

 

So while I look to the future, I have to knowledge the Journal’s role in making that future possible.

 

You don’t get rich doing this kind of thing. I’ve become rich in experiences, though. I’ve photographed several American presidents, a gaggle of senators and state representatives, and the odd sex criminal or two. I’ve sped from one side of the Saco River to the other in a makeshift ferry boat the size of a porcelain bathtub. I’ve toured hollowed-out husks of mill buildings transformed into three-dimensional, living art exhibitions, and I’ve been there when heartbroken dog owners were reunited with their wandering K-9 companions. Maple syrup producers have felt my lingering presence as I shadowed their efforts to collect sap from tree taps. Children’s librarians across the county once knew me on a first-name basis. The level of my penetration into the community has been deep and varied, and yet I was a wraith, barely registering in peoples’ minds before blowing out the door on a breeze and carrying stories and photos, images and words, to readers of the news. Talk about squeezing a lot of living into a short amount of time.

 

One of my more treasured memories came when I was still a green, tentative sportswriter. The first editor I ever worked for, John Nash, decided to send me to Fenway Park to interview a former Sanford High School baseball player; the SHS alum was taking part in a collegiate all-star game at the venerable Major League venue, and my assignment was to turn his experience into a story, maybe grab a photo or two. I arrived at Fenway on the train, camera bag slung over one shoulder, and entered the stadium where legions of childhood heroes had left cleat marks in the dust.

 

What struck me was the silence. It was mostly friends and family of the players who were in attendance, and while there were perhaps 1,000 people packed into the prime seats, the rest of the park was empty – usually a roar of activity and emotion, the only sounds in Fenway that evening were a handful of cheers and the occasional clink of a ball struck by an aluminum bat. I found my man, got my quotes, and then realized I had some time on my hands.

 

Photography was a burgeoning hobby then. I never thought I’d be able to do it for a living at that point; I just liked shooting. With a nearly empty park waiting to be explored, I grabbed my primitive little Kodak and toured the grounds. I found the lone red seat in the outfield stands, so painted to commemorate a long home run hit by legend Ted Williams in the 1940s, and sat there. I grabbed twilight-infused landscape shots of the park from the first- and third-base sides. And to cap things off, I worked my way up to the seats on top of the Green Monster in left field, looking down at the basepaths from a perspective I’d previously only seen in dreams. It was a stunning night for photos, an egg-yolk sunset painting streaks of crimson and purple across a dying sky, and standing there on top of the Monster, I closed my eyes and breathed in the smells of cut grass and deep history. Alone in near-silence, with a lit field below me, I thought, “This is what it’s all about. This is all right.”

 

At moments like that, it’s hard not to think you’re the luckiest son of a bitch on Earth.

 

Time ends all things. It won’t, however, be ending this column – at least not for the time being. I started this thing in August of 2012 and haven’t missed a week since. It’s a streak I’m proud of, but I didn’t consciously set out to monopolize Friday’s editorial page; I just like writing, and so I do it. Most of these musings have been nothing more than a dreamer’s whimsy, but I’d like to think I occasionally had something substantive to say, and that there’s more to say still. There are uncharted depths in the well, and if you’ll continue reading, I’ll continue exploring them. The Journal and I have arranged to keep this thing going, and I’m glad. It scratches an itch, and hopefully makes people smile. That’s all I ever wanted to accomplish.

 

A follower of my work once told me I was “a bit of a maverick.” I guess that’s true. It certainly was an unconventional route I took to get here. It’s probably pretentious to ponder any kind of a legacy, but if I’ve got one, I hope it’s that I brought a fresh and unique perspective to my work. Something with an original stamp on it. As Frank Sinatra might have said, I did it all my way.

 

Oh, but hell. I’ll let ol’ Blue Eyes say it himself.

 

For what is a man, what has he got

If not himself, then he has naught

To say the things he truly feels

And not the words of one who kneels

The record shows I took the blows

And did it my way.

 

Yes. It was my way.

 

Twit lit

Reading a Charles Dickens novel is like riding bumper cars. It’s fun at the time, but you’re a little sore afterward.

 

Somebody living in the 19th century, as Dickens did, would scoff at that assertion. “Pray, explain yourself!” they’d declare in a haughty English accent. “For ’tis no great exertion navigating the fineries of a proper tongue, lest you hail from the brutish class, uneducated and mired in an unseemly ignorance!” Then, while you’re decoding their sentence structure, they’d silently be wondering what the hell a bumper car was.

 

There’s a learning curve to that ornate version of the language, sure. But it’s worth the effort to read it. Dickens was a man of great imagination, with sharply drawn characters and a wry humor, understated in its uniquely British way. There’s a reason he’s lumped in with the “classics,” and it’s not because he’s been dead longer than bell bottoms.

 

If it wasn’t for school, though, would anybody bother with him anymore? It’s hard to imagine a milennial – growing up amidst Twitter, Instagram and the like – having the patience for that sort of thing.

 

Consider Twitter for a second. This social media/messaging application imposes a 140-character limit on its users, which is barely enough space to describe a sparrow fart. And if you follow most Twitter users for any length of time, that’s pretty much the standard subject matter. Brevity has its place, but being bound by such limiting shackles means its participants can’t expound on a subject, fleshing out their thoughts with this wonderful thing called language, with all of its nuance and shading. Everything gets whittled down to an easily digestible nugget. So instead of practicing the art of reading and writing, Tweeters practice the art of stripping down, of removing anything that isn’t the gooey chocolate center. How many licks does it take? None, apparently.

 

This is troubling. Because the candy coating is where the good stuff is.

 

I’m going to take a chance on something possibly pretentious and cite a study. It’s not very often that I do this kind of thing, because studies are usually boring, and most people – myself included – would rather be engaged in an activity with greater entertainment value, like shoeing horses, or pasting glitter to posterboard. (I have no idea what people do nowadays.) This study is kind of cool, though. It’s about what reading different kinds of fiction does to the brain.

 

In 2013, psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York found that literary fiction “enhances the ability to detect and understand other peoples’ emotions,” according to an article in The Guardian. This better prepared people to navigate complex social relationships.

 

In other words, people functioned better in their lives because they read “Great Expectations,” say, instead of Kanye West’s live tweets from the MTV Video Music Awards.

 

The idea goes something like this: A work of literary fiction delivers characters who are, in some sense, incomplete. The content of their character is found between the lines, not necessarily on them – which means the reader is left to fill in the gaps, becoming an active participant in the storytelling.

 

Transferring that reading experience into real-world situations is a natural leap, argue the study authors, because the same psychological processes are used in real-life relationships. It’s an interesting theory, indicating that a heavy reader is better equipped to handle a job interview or business meeting than someone who spends the majority of their time making papier-mâché masks of fat Elvis. These psychological benefits manifest themselves when the reading material at hand skews to the literary, as opposed to young-adult novels about hunky, misunderstood teenage vampires. “Twilight” on the john doesn’t count, which is bad news for e-book poopers everywhere.

 

Bottom line: Reading is a better use of one’s time than, for instance, ripping your way through a 30-rack of Miller High Life and watching old reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

 

To be clear, the prescription here isn’t, “Drop all your hobbies and read the classics, dip.” That would be absurd, because not only does it amount to a homework assignment, but some hobbies are just too great to pass up. Photography. Glass blowing. Streaking naked across a football field with lit sparklers stuck in various bodily orifices. These are all fantastic hobbies, and it’s unrealistic to think that someone would drop them in favor of reading 19th century English literature. People have lives, and occasionally those lives involve more than just a dusty old tome and a creaky armchair pockmarked with mustard stains.

 

But digital distractions are subpar alternatives, corroding attention spans like acid corrodes metal. The Internet is a wonderful communication tool, and it’s nice being able to see someone slam their crotch into the bars of a jungle gym on a whim. I just wonder what the younger generations will be like, knowing little else.

 

If we start tweeting out Dickens line by line, there may yet be some hope.

 

Going viral

Time slows down when you have a cold. The world shrinks in scale. You go from life’s medium-to-fast pace, and its broad scope, to staring at your microwave clock, counting down the minutes until the start of “The Price is Right.” And the contestants can never correctly guess the price of a toaster. Ever.

 

Sacked out on the couch – that’s me at present, glancing at my surroundings with the dopey wonder of a small child. There’s something about succumbing to a virus’ evil machinations that reverts me to boyhood and its small-time worries and fascinations. Right now there’s a particularly large dust mote twirling in the slanted light of a living room window, gyrating lazily like a hungover gymnast, and I can’t keep my eyes off it. Healthy, my brain might devote 0.0001 percent of whatever power it has to noticing this microscopic happenstance. Sick, it’s all I can think about. Being riveted to such a trivial matter is usually something that happens only after taking psychoactive drugs engineered in a government laboratory. Or so they tell me.

 

My suspicions tell me that Bermuda – or perhaps the ship that took me there – is responsible for this mushy-minded state. While I luckily enjoyed tip-top health for the duration of the trip, I awoke on the morning of my arrival back in the States to the kind of sneezing that makes it difficult to perform simple tasks. It’s hard to eat food or read a book when every 10-second interval heralds the kind of bodily convulsions typically reserved for NFL players and electroshock patients. These are often the same group, by the way.

 

Despite the difficulty in dragging my butt ashore, what awaited me was a parallel universe of diet soda and daytime television. I don’t experience these things at any other time. Call me crazy (it’s probably accurate), but I actually sort of enjoy it. While I’d gladly choose health over sickness any day of the week, there’s a kind of release in being surrounded by a waist-high fort made of tissue boxes and Alka-Seltzer. If there’s something in the human condition that occasionally yearns for laziness and vapidity, it’s realized in the hacking coughs of the common cold.

 

That languid little dust mote is a keyhole peeking backward toward youth. Cue dreamy flashback music.

 

The year was 1986. Or ’88. I was about five. Or eight. Or 11-and-a-half. Doesn’t matter. I mean, who opens up their diary and writes, “Today I made prolonged eye contact with my cat?” Never happens, outside of Woody Allen movies.

 

Yet there I was, a small boy, stretched out on my stomach on my parents’ living room floor and locked in a staring contest with our orange tabby cat, appropriately named Garfield. I was still at the age during which you take studious stock of the minor phenomena: the curlicue shag of the aging carpet, colored patterns hiding animal faces and rocket ships; the springs underneath Dad’s favorite recliner, dully reflecting whatever light managed to excavate its way to the chair’s cobwebby underbelly; and Garfield’s overlarge face, white whiskers rising from matted fur like trees towering above a grass meadow. Little things. Little moments.

 

Winning a staring contest with Garfield required concentration. It’s not that he was trying to win, of course; he was a dumb-as-nails cat who had no idea what in tarnation was going on. Dumb creatures, though – whether they be human or animal – are especially good at looking blankly at things for long periods of time. To hold your own in an imagined test of wills, you have to be equally dumb, or bored, or both. I was definitely bored. Jury’s out on the other thing.

 

He’d have this way of making you blink by being insanely, almost illegally cute. A pink sandpaper tongue would dart from between his lips and lick the tip of his button nose, and you’d be so overcome with love and affection you’d have to squinch your eyes shut just to keep from groaning at yourself. I was holding my own, keeping him locked in my crosshairs, when he broke concentration and glanced upward toward the ceiling, arching his neck back and revealing the wintry sheen of his snow-white neck.

 

Let the record show that I totally won. Let the record also show that, being curious, I glanced up to see what had caught his attention. It was a little dust mote. Blasted into relief by a pie-slice of sun, it rocked gingerly from side to side as gravity pulled it toward the carpet; Garfield and I watched as it sunk between our two faces, rapt as churchgoers on the Sabbath. 

 

Even at that age, I had the presence of mind to reflect on what an oddly wondrous occurrence this was. Think about it: The universe is billions of light years across. Throughout it, supernova explosions are pumping out light and energy that dwarves the output from entire galaxies. Stars so massive that they fuse hydrogen and helium in nuclear reactions are pulling planets and moons into an orbital dance. And on one of those planets, on a medium-sized chunk of rock and dirt, in a modest house, on a tiny section of carpet – there, miraculously, two living creatures of differing species both lie staring at a speck so minuscule it almost isn’t there at all.

 

That’s sort of beautiful.

 

Or maybe it’s fever-induced insanity, who knows. These are the kinds of thoughts you have when you’re either young or sick. They’re odd time machines, these viruses that fell our bodies, but they’re incredibly effective; our methods for coping with them never change, the TV-and-cough-syrup strategy unaltered from adolescence to old age. It’s a shame to squander our time on this celestial rock, and so rather than mark these sick days as lost causes, I’ll choose to let them carry me into whatever whimsy seems most appropriate. It’s kind of refreshing to cede control for a little while.

 

Oh, hey, my game show’s about to start. Let’s see if the contestants can guess the going price of a washing machine.