Summer Goal #3: Work on My Maine Accent

My first goal for the summer, of course, is to write. My second goal is to make it through my ten year high school reunion unscathed. My third goal is to practice and master the Maine accent.

I mean, seriously. Enough is enough already. I've been here almost two full years now, and I still cannot replicate the accent on command. And if you're wondering how many times I'm suddenly asked to do the Maine accent, you'd probably be surprised: it's a lot. A lot. And I can't.

I'd say it took me two years to get the Minnesotan accent to sit in the back of my throat, and now when I'm back in New York, I pop into that accent every now and again to get a laugh because--can we face it? Let's just face it--there is nothing sillier sounding than the Minnesota accent. Even a Cockney accent has more clout. Someone speaking in a Cockney accent sounds like he's got his mouth full of cotton balls--maybe because he was just in a bar fight and got slugged on the jaw and then slugged someone else on his jaw and then all out pandemonium ensued. That's at least a little badass. There is nothing badass about the Minnesota accent.

Of course, it's difficult to slide into that accent if you haven't been speaking it your whole life, and I've always found it helpful to start off with one word I know will strike some kind of chord in my memory, and then I can prattle off sounding like someone's sweet grandma from "up nordt." Usually those words are as follows: oh (ohhhhhhhhhh), yeah (yahhhhhhhhhh), for (fer), or Megan (Maygin). That last one is in honor of my old roommate, who can do the Minnesota accent like no one's business. If I channel her, I'm all set.

Sometimes I start off with a whole phrase--usually the one that horrified me the most after I first heard one of my office mates utter it in complete sincerity. That phrase is oh fer cute, and it means, I guess, Wow! That's super cute! (I'm not kidding you. People actually use that phrase.) It's usually a crowd pleaser. Once, one of my friends took me aside and said, "Come on. You're exaggerating. They don't really say that." And I had to tell that girl to stop living in a dream world.

Anyway, it's those things that can easily slip me back into my finely-honed accent. And that's what I need to kick start my Maine accent. I need to find a word or phrase that's going to clang in my ear and command: Start talking like this, and do it now!

For a while I thought it was going to be forty (fawty) or the classic Maine affirmation (ah-yup), but neither of those do it for me. Neither of those push me into an a-ha! moment, where suddenly I am dropping phrases and vowel sounds from my mouth in a way they'd never normally come out.

For those of you who don't know, the Maine accent is essentially Boston-ese but perhaps a bit crustier, a bit rougher, a bit more hick-ish, and then made even odder by Maine's insistence on bastardizing French words and sounds. Sometimes the things that fall out of people's mouths up here take my breath away.

But I think what I'm going to start practicing with this summer is the word "brother." The way guys from Boston say "brother" is "brutha," and that's the way some of my students--the students with thick Maine accents--say it, too. And I can do brother/brutha pretty good. I can say Whutcha doin' brutha and pull of a decent accent. So now I think I have to make careful note of more odd phrases and phrasing, more odd pronunciations to get it just right. But I'm betting that this time next year, if you asked me to spontaneously produce the Maine accent, I'll look at you, smile, and say, "Absolutely, brutha!" And then I'll be off with wicked-this and wicked-that and fawty mah days and ayup, that lobstah's got a pretty wicked pincha on him! And it will be spectacular.

And then Ben Affleck Asked Me If I Wanted to Take This Outside

Yesterday morning a few members of my department hopped a bus and rode the short trip down to Boston for a celebratory day trip--after all, there are only sixteen more days in the semester!--that had us eating dim sum in Chinatown for lunch, wandering the harbor walk, seeing the Shepard Fairey exhibit at the contemporary art museum, and then, finally, strolling through the North End on our way to Maurizio's, the department's favorite dinner place in all of Boston, and Lulu's for cupcakes.

Everything was exciting, but dinner was the best. Mostly because after I finished my wine and veal and homemade ravioli, I turned around to find the purse I'd set behind my chair, and when I turned around, I accidentally threw an elbow into a guy sitting at the table behind me.

When I turned around fully to apologize for what I'd done, I realized had thrown my elbow into Ben Affleck. There he was behind me, wearing a Bruins jersey and drinking a beer. I blinked. I blinked again. Then I realized it wasn't Ben Affleck but a boy who looked like he could be Ben Affleck's identical cousin --you know, if Ben Affleck's mother had a twin sister and his father had a twin brother and they all got married and had babies at the exact same time, which made the babies--who had simmered in the same genetic stew--look exactly alike, which is the plot of one of my favorite novels from childhood, but, I am sure it's possible.

So there I was staring at Ben Affleck's identical cousin, and he cracked a grin at me and opened his mouth. And when he spoke, he sounded EXACTLY LIKE THIS.

"Hey there," he said, which sounded more like Haay thaah. "You gotta rough me up? You tryin' to throw an elbow my way? I see how it is. You wanna take this outside?"

I wanted to say, "YOU ARE SO FREAKING AWESOME, AND I DON'T EVEN CARE IF YOU AREN'T RELATED TO BEN AFFLECK--EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE TO BE--AND WOULD YOU LIKE TO KEEP TALKING TO ME BECAUSE YOUR VOICE IS FANTASTIC."

But I did not say that. Instead, I giggled. And giggled some more.

"I see! I see!" the guy said. "I switched sides on the table because I'm tall--" And here he raised himself halfway up from his chair to demonstrate just how tall he was. "--and you don't like that, you think I'm in your way, so you gotta try to start somethin'. That's tough!"

I giggled some more. "Is my purse in your way?" I asked. I pointed to my giant purse that had been too bulky to rest on the back my chair. I'd put it on the floor, and it was closer to his table than mine. If he had chosen that exact moment to reach into my purse, pluck out my credit cards, and tuck them into is own pockets, I would've been completely okay with that because then I'd have a story about how a famous person's identical cousin robbed me.

"Nah, nah," he said. He grinned.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "I'll move it."

Ben Affleck's identical cousin reached over and put a hand on my arm. "It's okay," he said. "It's definitely not in my way."

That's about the time everyone else at my table got involved.

"Who won the game tonight?" someone asked. It was a big day for Boston sports. The Sox and Celtics and Bruins were all playing.

"Not the Celtics," the guy said and frowned into his beer.

"Are you going to the hockey game tonight?" someone else asked.

The guy beamed. He lifted his beer into the air. "Yeah," he said. "Me and my girlfriend and my little brother!" He slung an around around the guy sitting next to him. "Let me ask you a question," he said to us. "I want you to be honest. Very important question here."

"Okay," we said.

"Which of us is more attractive?" Ben Affleck's identical cousin gestured to himself and to his brother.

Everyone at our table was laughing.

"You're equally attractive," I said. Ben Affleck's identical cousin was cute, but his brother was way cuter. Still, the brother was grinning and blushing and keeping his mouth shut. There was a charm factor to add in, and Ben Affleck's identical cousin with his cartoony Boston accent oozed the type of charm that sweet, chatty, too-loud boys often do.

"Weak!" he said. He threw a light punch into his brother's side. "But I know you're just saying that because you don't want to hurt his feelings.

We talked a little bit more after that--we compared favorite hockey players (and, yes, I had enough sense to keep my eternal love for Ryan Miller and the Buffalo Sabres hidden while I was surrounded by drinking Bruins fans)--and then we were on our way out the door on the search for cupcakes for the bus ride back up the coast. And that--Ben Affleck's identical cousin--and the four cupcakes (vanilla with orange buttercream, vanilla with vanilla buttercream, chocolate with marshmallow buttercream, and chocolate with raspberry buttercream) the girl behind the counter at LuLu's had tucked into a box for me were pretty much the best way to kick off the countdown to the end of this spring semester.

Sprung

Amy left Wednesday night. She'd been here for a week, and that was a week full of loveliness. I don't know if there is a phrase I can turn to accurately capture how nice it was to have a girlfriend in town. When I came home from work, Amy was there watching What Not to Wear, and I would sit next to her and begin very important discussions like how we could get Clinton to make out with us if ever the situation presented itself to us. Do you know how nice that is? Do you know how nice it is to see someone else have to fan themselves off after Clinton has said something witty about Crocs or Mom Jeans or Shoulder Pads? It's just not as fun when you have to do that by yourself.

What Not to Wear wasn't the only thing that graced the television when Amy was in town. There was one night when we--tired, lazy--decided to pour wine and flick through the channels. We landed on an episode of The Dog Whisperer. And when that episode was over another was on. So we watched that. And we watched the next one, too. By the end we felt one with the animal kingdom. We were walking around the apartment (and, days later, around Maine and Massachusetts) hissing tsssst! at anyone or anything that looked at us wrong.

Of course, watching television wasn't all we did. We toured extensively. This was just the right time for Amy to visit. Maine is suddenly leaning toward lovely again. Everything is melted. It is warm. People are smiling. The number of curse words I utter each day have decreased substantially. Things are looking up all over the state, and so we took advantage of it. We went to Freeport, to Popham Beach, to Bath, to Portland. We even hopped The Downeaster and went to Boston for the day last weekend. We drank cosmos and margaritas. We drank wine. We mixed orange vodka with pomegranate pop and raspberry-lime ginger-ale and Loganberry (official name: The Cowboy Daddy). We posed, too. We posed by lighthouses and moose and historical statues and bronze ducks. We posed by Indians and boots. We posed in the rain, in the wind, in the sun. We hammed it up all over New England.

The whole trip felt just like spring should: kicky, free, happy. It felt the exact opposite of the last few months, which have been gloomy, painful, and sour.

When we were at lunch one afternoon, Amy and I overheard a bunch of gossipy old ladies tut-tutting over how awful, how wretched, how foul this winter had been. Amy spooned more soup into her mouth and raised her eyebrows. "Was it really that bad?" she asked me. What she wanted to know was this: was it as bad as Buffalo Winter?

Well, it wasn't. There weren't days when I couldn't see a foot out the window to the street beyond. There weren't days when I was convinced I had somehow woken up in some wintry ring of hell. But there was snow. And there was always drama. The weathermen would get on the TV and prepare us, warn us, caution us, and everyone would get worked up for what turned out to be nothing. And when it did snow--really snow--it came in big, consistent gobs. It would go away in a day or two, then it would come back again. It was a constant here-gone-here-gone-here-gone that drove me crazy. And living on a narrow road that arcs over a surprising hill in a quiet section of town is different than living on a well-traveled country road during the winter months. My road here was hell, there was no snow removal, the banks towered high and then spilled over into the road, making it even narrower, even harder to navigate. It was demoralizing. I longed for a driveway of my own, for the comforting rumble of the snowplows making their passes at the country road, for space for the snow to move, to fall, to not build toward the sky, blotting it out, making the dark winter sky even gloomier.

But all that is over for now. Now nothing matters. The sun is out, the breeze is blowing in the salty smell of ocean, and I had a good week that reminded me of what's important in life. And no matter how many times this semester I thought What the hell is happening? or Kill me now! or Are you for real? I know that it's all going to be okay now. I'm very close to a summer spent touring to Mexico, Canada, Buffalo, and Michigan. Just a few more weeks. Just a few, few more weeks.

And until then, here are pictures from Amy's visit and our mini-New England vacation.


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