Tilbury House (2009)
Paperback, 224 pages, $15
Local matters
In an opinion column that Edgar Allen Beem writes for the Forecaster newspaper called “The Universal Notebook” (which is the reporter’s spiral-bound notebook that fits into most pockets), Beem writes: “The combination of a recession in the economy and a revolution in information technology is conspiring to put me out of business. Or at the very least, out of print.”
Beem is a foe of technology, although he has succumbed to using a word processor. He wonders, as do many of us, what happens when he presses the “send” button, releasing his words into the unknown ether.
His column has appeared for six years. Does he make a list of ideas? Does her have trouble coming up with topics? “The biggest problem I have is writing just one a week,” said Beem. “I usually have something I’d like to say every day. I try to juggle four kinds of columns: one is usually a national issue; another topic could be statewide issues; the third, Greater Portland; and the fourth reflects personal matters. It is a collection of these that is gathered in this utterly delightful book, which includes some longer essays that appeared in the now-defunct Maine Times.
In the columns on national topics, his left-wing tendencies bring confrontation-not so much through reader mail, but at his everyday haunts-the supermarket, meetings, walks around town-where he meets all his neighbors, who often have vociferous responses to his views.
These confrontations, he tells me, are one of the pleasures of the column.
Beem also writes for several regional and national magazines on art, architecture and photography. He never experiences reverberations from those articles. It is the local stuff that excites his imaginative approach to the everyday world he lives in and ponders.
His book, sort of arbitrarily divided into the four seasons, begins in spring with “In Praise of Woman,” his wife and her upcoming birthday. It is the first of several short essays about Carolyn, his three daughters and his beloved dog, Ritz. He is tender on all scores and always insightful: “We’d be a hell of a lot better off these days if there was a woman in the White House,” he writes.
My heart skipped more than a beat reading the various thoughts about his elderly dog who looks, from the cover photo, amazingly like my 15-year-old guide dog, Smudge. Elderly dogs, like advanced-age humans, slow down perceptibly and have their physical problems. One never acclimates to the final, needed choice of taking a dog, a cat, or even a pet rat, to its final visit with the veterinarian.
Smudge is a big dog and needs help getting in our car. She coughs. She limps. She sleeps a lot. But so do I. One easily emphasizes with Beem as he puts off the inevitable. Still, we love his mix of gloom with the humorous.
There are poetic moments in this book. For instance, in “The Spirit of the Dragonfly,” he writes, “Sometimes they hover in my backyard and I am speechless before those winged beings with their huge eyes.”
Perhaps one of the exemplar charms of Beem’s writing is the way he makes us stop and wonder, to be aware of this remarkable world and its inhabitants surrounding us-a place we often forget is there for the taking, so immersed do we become in things like busyness, the Internet, and political and personal aggravations.
Who else would write an ode to a snow shovel? Sitting on his front steps, watching the world go by when nostalgia and memories of his boyhood cross his thinking. We can see him pull out his notebook and jot down things like make-believe, or thoughts about underwear and socks or ten ways we can help save the planet.
“Everyone has a story to tell,” he said. “I may blast Rush Limbaugh in my column, but I actually get along with local folks and neighbors who hold that opinion. That is one of the things that Maine has to tell the rest of the world-how to get along with everyone, everywhere. Here in Maine we seem to still have that gift, that get-along mentality in order to live and love in communities.”
Observant, funny, yet totally unsentimental, Beem works in his sunroom office, metaphorically hugging a sometimes hard-to-love world.