Honeymoon secret location revealed

Many of you have asked where we went for a honeymoon, and while we considered keeping our location a secret requiring Grade 12 Classification, we opted for transparency. And here we are.
Why Bingham?
Well, CSB wanted to go south and test his mettle with some Amazonian bees, while Christine wanted to go north to the pole because she didn’t get to eat enough raw seal meat last time she was there.
But as we know – or so we have been told – marriage is about compromise, and that is what we did. We went to Bingham, Maine (current plywood storefront capital of the state) halfway between the two.*

*If this picture looks photo-shopped, that is because it is. You try taking a time lapse photo when the only place to put the camera is dangling from a tree branch.

Bridesmaids in Fezzes

The dreaming mind is an amazing thing. Consider this pre-dawn conflation: a parade of francophone bridesmaids wearing fezzes.

Of the three weddings we’ve been to in the past months, only one featured bridesmaids, the traditional gaggle of pretty girls – but none so pretty as the bride - wearing matching unflattering gowns in colors named for fruits.



I would be lying if I said that the fate of the Odd Fellows Hall in Bingham, Maine has not been on my mind. It was last used by a genuine Odd Fellow 13 years ago, though its current owner and recent inhabitant (David Jones) says that he was made an honorary Odd Fellow when he lived there. It is 10,500 sq. ft., of post and beam construction, and in perfect condition. Mr. Jones was hoping to get $100,000, but says he will take $85,000. The sad part is: if he gets anything at all he will be lucky. The Odd Fellow plaque just doesn’t have the cachet it used to.


And then there was the obituary of Richard Hagan in the Morning Sentinel, listing his Masonic memberships and titles, a list that cries out to be set to music.
"He was also an active 32nd degree Mason, a lifetime member of the Riverside Lodge No. 135 of Jefferson, Ancient Brothers Lodge No. 178 of Auburn, Bradford Chapter No.9, Dunlap Chapter No.8, Pine Cone Council No.31, and Valley of Portland Consistory; Past Officers Association No.1, Lewiston Commandary No.6, Eusebius Conclave No.3, Red Cross of Constantine, Maine Lodge of Research, Pine Tree Priory No.65 York Knight Cross of Honor, Valley of the Androscoggin, Dirigo College No.103, Lake View Chapter No.179 Order of Eastern Star; High Twelve Mid Coast Masonic Club No. 738 – Rockport, and life member of the Keystone Royal Arch Lodge No.24 – Rockport, past district deputy for Masonic District No.7, member of the Scottish Rites in Auburn and past high priest of Scottish Rites.”

Neither the Odd Fellows nor the Masons wear fezzes, but the Shriners do, and the Shriners are an offshoot of the Masons, and they are all secret societies featuring elaborate rituals, initiation rites, mystical titles, hierarchies and yes, funny hats.
(Not being a Mason, or even of Masonic material, I don’t know what Scottish Rites are, but I hope and pray they involve bagpipes and flaming torches.)

Bon Papa, my Belgian grandfather used to wear a fez when they lived in Egypt, but only when he smoked a pipe. Only when seated in his special armchair. When he was settled in with his pipe and his fez, Ahmed would bring Bon Papa exactly 10 ounces of chilled Belgian ale, made by Trappist monks back in Wallonia and shipped regularly to Cairo, and he would pore over maps of the Upper Nile and Sudan. In all ways except the beer, my grandfather preferred his life in Egypt to life in Belgium.

Somewhere in my mother’s attic is my grandfather’s fez, wrapped in tissue paper and labeled: Fez of Arnold Brancart. My mother labels everything, in detail, in permanent markers, with dates & provenance; she is to Labeling what YoYo Ma is to the cello and what Meryl Streep is to acting and what Serena Williams is to tennis.

I am told Bon Papa spoke perfect English, but he forgot it in his later years, so I only spoke French with him.

One of the ‘floats’ in the West Athens Fourth of July Parade, was the perennial “Always a Bridesmaid.” I had o explain the joke to CSB, who oddly enough had never heard the old saw, Always a bridesmaid, Never a Bride. As you can see, he was not wearing a fez.



Fezzes are named after the city of Fez in Morocco. Once my sister and I stood on a rooftop in the Medina and looked down on other rooftops covered with raw leather curing in vats of colored dyes, and then drying in the sun. The active ingredient – the fixative- in the dye, was pigeon guano. The vats were tended by young men whose skin became permanently colored to match the fezzes.
We spoke French in Morocco, did not wear fezzes, and did not encourage my mother to use her kitchen Arabic.

What to do when it is rain rain raining at Pleasant Pond for days on end?

• Wrack your brain for synonyms for rain & its attributes: deluge, precipitation, perilous precipitation, burst clouds & cloudbursts, torrential downpour, monsoon, cataract, pluvial unloading… swampy, malarial, foetid, muggy, miasmic, wet.
• Study the sky and look for cracks in the clouds that will reveal a leakage of blue; interpret every shift in light as “the sun coming out”.
• Get out the puzzles. Luckily for us – or not? - CSB’s grandmother, L.M., was very fond of puzzles and amassed a collection of wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring bucolic rural scenes. L.M. was born in Bingham, Maine, back when Bingham was a good place to be born. Now that the lumber mill has closed, “hoodlums” hang out on every corner and the Odd Fellows Hall is for sale, along with most every other building. She favored a brand of Wood Interlocking Jigsaw Puzzles made in England and sold at Glencraft, in South Windham, Maine.
• Read the local papers. CSB has turned me into a devoteé of the Morning Sentinel. He has taught me to appreciate obits written by family members: in central Maine every deceased was married to “the love of his/her life” and they are without fail “avid” hunters/fishermen/ outdoorsmen. Women are always “devoted” to their children and/or their husbands; absent those basic appendages it is their nieces, nephews and/or cats to whom the female in question was devoted. Given the state of the local economy, the obituaries are often the most cheerful section of the paper.
• Read about Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and Benjamin Constant (1767-1830). Whenever I see the name Benjamin Constant my ears/eyes perk up, and not on account of my encyclopedic knowledge of French literature. Many years ago I went to the Colombian Amazon. Colombia has a sliver of land that extends down to the Amazon, because of course they want a piece of the Amazonian shore, as any self-respecting country would, and at the tip of the sliver is a town called Leticia. That is where we went. Leticia was a muddy, swampy, humid (Sound familiar? Leticia was MUCH hotter.) dump populated by escaped convicts, three-headed tapirs and defrocked priests. If you walked across the border into Brazil you were in the town of Benjamin Constant*, also a fetid agglomeration of shabby decaying houses. We walked to Benjamin Constant and visited a lopsided church on stilts. Inside the church (Saô Lorenço I think) a tape recorder was plugged into a long extension cord running down the nave, and all day long it played a recording of a Mass, including the music, the sermon in Portuguese, and the mumbled responses. Someone had rigged the recorder to play continuously, though I don’t know how. I didn’t know then that Benjamin Constant had been a lover of Madame de Staël, and I certainly didn’t know that his novel Adolphe (1816) is considered to be, by some, the forerunner of the modern psychological novel. On the other side of Leticia was Peru.
• Play full contact Scrabble. This means we thumb or arm wrestle to determine the correctness of a challenged word. Does TRAVELLER have one or two L’s? I would like it to be 2, because then I also get CURL from CUR. I lost the wrestle.
• Make collages from newspaper and NYRB cuttings.
• Listen to messages on the home answering machine. Long lost friends visiting from afar; a neighbor heading for the beach; a recording of the county executive expressing his deep concern about identity theft and encouraging us to bring our papers to the county’s mobile shredder (little does he know how excited I get by the very thought of a mobile shredder); my dentist reminding me I am six months overdue for a cleaning; and CSB’s x-wife gratuitously casting aspersions on my looks and moral character.
• You know it has rained for too many days when Listening to the Answering Machine is considered an Activity.

* It seems that for all these years I have been mistaken, in error and very wrong about the eponymous Benjamin Constant. The town, according to Wikipedia, was named for a Brazilian military man (1836-1891), who, having been born 6 years after the death of THE Benjamin Constant, I have to assume was named for the French writer and lover.