Songwriter Paul Williams
once wrote, “You can get back to the place but not the time.” I learned the true meaning of those words one
weekend back in 1999.
It all began about two
weeks beforehand when my husband decided that because our wedding anniversary
(October 16) fell on a Saturday that year – the same day of the week as our
actual wedding had taken place back in 1971 – it might be fun to return to Colonial Gables
Inn in Belfast, Maine where we’d spent the first two days of our honeymoon.
“We can get the same room at the inn,” he said, smiling. “And we can revisit all of the same places we did back in 1971 – the Colonial Theater, Perry’s Nut House, and even that restaurant where we ate. What was the name of it?”
“Jed’s,” I said. “But for all we know, those
places could be condos and shopping malls by now.”
Not wanting to
sound pessimistic, however, I did some checking online to see what, if anything, still was around after all those years. To my surprise, the inn, the restaurant, the nut house and
the movie theater all supposedly were still in business.
“Want me to call the inn
and make a reservation?” I asked my husband. “And I’ll also have to call the
kennel to board the dogs.”
“Don’t call just yet,” he
said. “I want to wait till we know what the weather’s going to be like. I want to
take Route 1 all the way up the coast for the scenery, and if it’s going to
rain, it will ruin the trip.”
So I waited until the
weather forecaster predicted a beautiful weekend, then again asked my husband
if I should call the inn and the kennel.
“No, not yet,” he said.
“I’ve had this toothache all day, and I don’t want to plan anything definite
until I know if it’s going to get better or worse.”
So I waited a bit longer. Two
days before our anniversary, aware that I was beginning to sound like a nag, I once again broached the subject of calling the inn and the kennel.
My husband shook his head.
“I’ve been coughing all day. I might be coming down with a cold. I wouldn’t want
to make reservations and then have to cancel them because I’m sick.”
Sighing, I decided to give up. Visions of spending our anniversary making chicken soup for
my hacking, runny-nosed spouse replaced all previous images of the two of us
sharing a romantic candlelight dinner while enjoying a view of Penobscot Bay.
Friday night, the night
before our anniversary, however, my husband said, “We’d better get to bed early
tonight. We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”
I just stared at him.
“We’re going up to
Belfast,” he said in a tone that implied I already should have known this, possibly through ESP or the Vulcan mind-meld, I assumed.
“But I didn’t call the
kennel or the inn,” I protested. “And it’s too late to do it now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he
said. “We’re just going to take a day trip, not stay overnight.”
“But it’s nearly five
hours each way,” I said. “That’s a lot of driving for one day. Are you sure
you’re up to it?”
“No problem,” he said.
“It’ll be fun!”
"Sure," I said, figuring it might be wise not to remind him of his previously impending cold and possibly abscessing tooth.
Halfway through our ride
the next day, I was tempted to ask him to define his idea of fun.
“Ooh!” I said, pointing at
a shop that sold Native American jewelry. “Let’s stop!”
“Can’t,” he said as we
zoomed right past it. “We’ll never make it to Belfast before dark if we waste
time. We left the house much later than I'd hoped, unfortunately." He cast me a sideways glare.
That was due to the fact I couldn't decide whether to wear something nice for dinner or something comfortable for the ride...or to bring a change of clothes and switch outfits in some public restroom along the route. I opted for comfort in the form of stretch-pants, which were good for traveling...both before and after a big meal.
A few miles later, I spotted some stunning fall foliage I really wanted to capture on film. “Stop the car!” I said,
grabbing my camera. “I want to take a picture.”
“Sorry,” my husband said,
shaking his head. “We’re on the wrong side of the road, and we’ll lose valuable
time if I have to turn around.”
“Just pull the car over,
and I’ll WALK across the road!” I said. But by the time I even managed to utter the words,
the area I wanted to photograph already was about a mile behind us.
Four hours into our ride,
my backside and legs started to go numb. My stomach was growling, my bladder felt on the verge of bursting, and my throat
was hoarse from singing to so many songs on the radio – mainly to keep from
dozing off.
“Are we there yet?” I
jokingly asked my husband.
“We still have about
another hour or so,” he said. “I can’t wait to get there. I’m really tired of
driving.”
I frowned at him. “I hate
to bring this up, but this is a DAY trip, remember? We’re not staying overnight, so you still have
to drive all the way back home. If you hadn't insisted on buying a car with a standard transmission, and then hadn't given up so quickly on trying to teach me how to drive it, I could have shared some of the driving today.”
"Teaching you to drive a standard would have turned us both into bobblehead dolls," he said. "I honestly didn’t realize it would take this long to get there today. I don’t remember Route 1 having so many traffic lights. Maybe we should think about staying overnight after all.”
“Have you forgotten that at
this very moment we have two large dogs locked in our house? I’m sure they already ate all
of the food we left for them, so they’ll soon be trying to gnaw a hole through
the refrigerator.”
“Oh, that's right. Do you think we should just turn around and head back home then? They probably have to
go to the bathroom by now, too.”
I stared at him in
disbelief. “No, I’ll just mop up the floor when we get home! I didn’t just suffer
through 4 hours of sitting in a car until everything from my waist to my toes went numb, just to head back home when we’re this close to Belfast!”
“Yeah, I suppose we can at least grab some dinner at Jed's before heading back home,” he said.
“Grab” wasn’t exactly a
word I would have used to describe my image of a romantic anniversary dinner,
but by then I was too hungry to care. Passersby could have tossed food at me as if I were a trained seal and I'd have tried to catch it in my teeth at that point.
Finally, after the longest
five-hour ride of my life, I spotted a “Welcome to Belfast” sign. If I hadn’t
been so stiff, I would have jumped out of the car done a dance of joy.
By then it was nearly 3 p.m.,
leaving us very little time to try to recapture the magic of our previous visit on our honeymoon or do much sightseeing.
The first place we came to on our list of “must sees” in Belfast was Perry’s Nut House. The last time we’d visited Perry’s, it had housed taxidermied animals, a nut museum with every form of nut oddity imaginable, nuts and candy for sale by the pound, and loads of “nutty” jokes, souvenirs and novelties. It had taken us hours to see everything in the building back then. But now, with the place closing in less than two hours, we knew we weren’t going to have the luxury of any leisurely browsing.
We entered Perry’s and were greeted by a talking moose-head hanging on the wall. The moose spoke with an exaggerated Down-East accent, such as “hee-yah” and “they-ah” for “here” and “there.” I paused to listen, but my husband rushed right past it and quickly disappeared into the next room. He returned within seconds, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” I asked
him.
“The nut museum isn’t here
anymore,” he said. “I’m really disappointed. I was hoping to see the world’s
biggest nut again.”
I opened my mouth to
comment about the world’s biggest nut, but he cut me off.
“Don’t say it!” he said.
“I know what you’re thinking…that it's standing right
here in front of you, right?”
The man knew me too well.
After our dash through Perry’s, we headed toward Colonial Gables Inn where we’d spent our honeymoon night. It still was there, looking exactly the way it had all of those years before.
“Run into the office and grab some new
brochures,” my husband said.
“Why?” I just had to ask.
“To prove we were here
again,” he said.
I was going to tell him I could just snap a photo of the place if he needed to prove anything, seeing I had my camera with me, but then
decided if he wanted brochures, I’d make him happy.
When I entered the office,
a smiling woman greeted me from behind the desk.
“I’d like a few
brochures,” I told her. “Today is my 28th wedding anniversary. My
husband and I spent our honeymoon night here...in room 7!”
“That’s a non-smoking room
now,” she said, making me wonder if she thought all honeymooners lit up cigarettes
after a night of romance, the way they usually did in movies.
“This place hasn’t changed
a bit,” I said, scanning the small lobby.
The woman’s smile faded
and her chin rose. “We’ve spent thousands of dollars on renovations.”
I took some brochures,
thanked her and headed back to the car.
“Now all we have to do is
find the restaurant where we ate our first romantic dinner together as husband and
wife, have a bite to eat and head home,” my husband said, stomping on the accelerator and jerking the car forward. “I sure hope the place isn’t too crowded or they’re
slow at serving food tonight. We still have a long drive ahead of us...in the dark.”
Just the thought of the
drive made me want to hurl myself from the moving vehicle, run back to inn and
rent a room. But I just smiled and nodded. After only a short drive, we spotted
Jed’s restaurant, with its statue of a chubby, smiling fisherman in a yellow
rain slicker out front. To our delight, it looked as if it hadn’t changed at
all in 28 years.
We entered the restaurant
and immediately were transported back to 1971. The tables, the decor, the
atmosphere, still seemed the same, as far as we could tell. Only the staff and
the prices on the menu had changed.
Our waitress, a hairnet-wearing woman who said very little but giggled a lot, for some reason, took our orders. For nostalgia’s sake, I chose the same meal I’d ordered back in 1971 – a thick steak and a baked potato. My husband, the gourmet, ordered two cheeseburgers and fries.
All I can say is that never in my life had I met a steak that tough. I sawed and sawed until my wrists started to ache, then finally managed to cut off a sliver. I chewed that one piece of meat until my jaw locked up in protest.
“How’s yours?” I asked my husband.
He lifted the top portion
of the enormous bulky roll to reveal a silver-dollar-sized blackened burger.
"It kind of looks like an Oreo cookie," I said, laughing. I then gave him a bite of my steak to try.
“Are my teeth getting old, or is this as tough as cow hide?” I asked him.
He took the piece of steak and chewed it, and then chewed it some more. Finally, he just gave up and swallowed it.
“I'm pretty sure that steak is the reason why Heimlich invented his maneuver,” he muttered.
A half-hour later, my
husband, his miniscule burgers long gone, sat impatiently staring at me and glancing
at his watch as I continued to struggle to chew my food.
“OK, I give up!” I finally said, sighing and pushing my plate away. Should I bring the rest of this steak home for the dogs?”
“Not if you love them,” he
said.
By the time we arrived
home, it was nearly midnight. My husband, his back and legs stiff from all of the
driving, limped into the house, plunked down in his recliner and immediately
dozed off. Window-rattling snoring filled the room.
I guess some things never change.
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