What to do on July Fourth in Maine when there is no more parade in West Athens?*

Check out Father Sébastien Rasle.
Who?
At a pit stop a few days earlier, on our drive north, I picked up a brochure about Somerset Country. All the other brochures were gone, and amazingly, coincidentally, Somerset Country is where are. In that brochure I learned of the existence of Father Rasle, who is named as one of the four (4) famous people of the county. The other three are Benedict Arnold, Margaret Chase Smith, and George Walter Hinckley of the Good Will-Hinckley School, so you can see he is in good company. The brochure, when it isn’t misspelling his name, tells us that Father Rasle was a Jesuit of the early 1700’s, at the time of the French and Indian Wars. The Abenaki Indians – in what was not yet known as Somerset County - were allied with the French against the English. Fr. Rasle worked to convert the Indians, and to that end he created the first French-Abenaki dictionary, the first Abenaki dictionary of any kind.

This is where I became quite excited, because I am interested in early saints and missionaries who, in the course of trying to convert native peoples - an enterprise I am not in favor of - often compiled dictionaries and wrote down languages - enterprises I think are entirely brilliant and worthwhile. (Another of these lexicological priests was Jean de Brebeuf, who compiled the French-Huron dictionary, and famously named the Huron’s favorite sport Lacrosse, because the stick they used reminded him of a bishop’s crozier.)
I also learned that Fr. Rasle’s grave is in Madison, on the other side of the Old Canada Highway from West Athens, and not so far from us. What else could we possibly hope to do on the anniversary of independence? CSB, whose interest in Jesuit philologists could not fill a thimble, was wonderfully agreeable about heading over to Madison, a town we generally note only for its frequent appearance in the Morning Sentinel’s Police Blotter.
So without even stopping for a quick drink at the Solon Hotel (ever-tempting)
we went to Madison and found the cemetery where Father Rasle was buried. Here is CSB looking really happy to pose. The cemetery was full of French Canadian names, and some wonderful gravestones. But this was my favorite. I am guessing that both Robert and Beverly love to play golf. CSB pointed out that they are not yet dead.
On our way home, via Skowhagen, we met up with the Grannies for Peace, marching back and forth across the Old Mill Bridge over the Kennebec, all day long. Being deprived of marching their annual plea for peace in West Athens, they brought their cause to the metropolis. They were delighted to have their picture taken, and of course we talked about our grandchildren.

Hall of Fame for Dames

The Head of Athletics at Beaver Country Day (formerly all-girls) School opened their first ever Athletic Hall of Fame induction ceremony by quoting Cicero: The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.
It was a nice classical touch and I wracked my brain to come up with the Latin for that familiar phrase. (Not successful. No more was I successful in learning when and where Cicero said those words, or even if he really did.) But then it dawned over Marble Head: Here is the classical source of No Gain, No Pain.
(While I cannot verify that Cicero said that pithy quote, I can tell you that his name comes from the Latin for chickpea, Cicer. According to Plutarch, this is because one of his ancestors had a ‘cleft in the tip of his nose resembling a chickpea’. I am having difficulty imagining such a cleft. More likely a skin tag or a wart, is what I think. I can also tell you that Cicero’s sister-in-law, Fabia, was a Vestal Virgin, which was a very honorable thing to be in ancient Rome. I mention this otherwise completely irrelevant fact because Lee and I were sisters-in-law for almost 25 years. I remain unsure what happens to one’s in-law-ships upon divorce. I seek advice in this matter.)

When I first met LeeLee I was dating her older brother, a poet and a pot-smoking Nietzsche-spouting hipster. I was a scrawny, wannabe-poet and LeeLee was an archetypal jock. (Except that she was not archetypal, as we shall see.)
At Beaver Country Day* she played varsity field hockey, basketball and lacrosse and tennis. She was the captain of all her teams; she excelled at sports that involved hurling a ball into a goal or across a net, all while eluding one’s opponent. She was an adept at wielding weapons such as field hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and tennis rackets. Had ice-hockey been played in girls’ schools back then, I feel confident she could have inflicted much pain with an ice hockey stick, or a puck, or both. She regularly broke records for goals, baskets, opponents pummeled, throws, whatever they were called.
When Lee entered a room, resplendently strong and sweaty in her brown pinny, I cowered. After all, my greatest, and only, claim to record-breaking in the gym department at my girls’ school was in the number and ingenuity of my excuses to avoid gym. Should they ever institute a Hall of Fame for Sports Evasion, I like to think I would be a contender.

Given my wimpiness and Lee’s manifestly superior athleticism, how did we end being such friends? You may well ask. The truth is that LeeLee read far more poetry than I ever played field hockey, and has even written some. I did in fact sail and ski (neither of which involve hurling balls) and I discovered a willingness to play Member-Guest tennis as Lee’s partner, just as she was willing to compete for the Consolation Prize rather than walk away with the Silver Cup.
We discovered we both thought was an excellent idea to end – or begin - a day with our kids at the beach a trip to DQ. It turns out you need a very special person to appreciate Dairy Queen as much as we did.
Basically though, we seem to find the same things funny. This has on occasion proved embarrassing, and possibly dangerous. We like to walk on the beach and solve the world’s problems, a pastime now sadly relegated to Personal Ads. We have spent more hours than is healthy counting the possible attendees at our respective funerals, and lamented their small number. The truth is, some things cannot be explained.

If my dearly-doted–on granddaughter ever sees fit to play field hockey, I hope that LeeLee will see fit to cheer her on. I will await them in the nearby coffee shop, reading about relics and fruitlessly seeking the patron saint of girls’ athletics.

*Fittingly enough, BCD was the sports rival of Milton Academy Girls Upper School (MAGUS), in my time. Not that I ever graced any team, in my time.