Bliss is more

God is in the details — lots of them

by Max Alexander

The holiday season in rural Maine during wartime looks a lot like the holidays during peacetime, but with more flags. This presents a problem around the average Maine farmhouse because, in a typical Christmas season, the styrene Santas, chipboard reindeer, glow-in-the-dark snowmen, icicle lights, and foam candy canes need only compete for space with the orange jack-o-lantern leaf bags and aerosol cobwebs. Adding Old Glory to the decorative mix is a little like gilding the gild on the (plasticene) lily.

But the question of how to simultaneously deck the halls and wave the flag is not exactly an aesthetic challenge around here, where the notion of economy applies to car parts, not lawn ornaments. Rural Mainers are suspicious of the Modernist tenet that less is more, which sounds like double talk invented by flatlanders who read magazines and, worse, want to save trees. If less were more, why don’t they sell small eggs? In fact, the problem boils down to a riddle of physics, the square footage available for decoration on any farmhouse exterior being finite.

I was pondering this Maine-bred philosophy of more is more on the way to Thanksgiving dinner at Sarah’s parents. Although her grandfather is still alive and relatively healthy at age 91, Sarah’s father Bob and stepmother Annabelle have become the de facto patriarch and matriarch of the clan, in part because all their offspring live near them in Maine. Here then was truly a celebration of more — 16 people around one impossibly medieval board. Squeezing everyone in was like watching the entire Basie band perform in one of those Greenwich Village nightclubs, where the trombone player needs permission from air traffic control to hit a low note. “If you need to use the bathroom you’d better go before you sit down,” said Annabelle, and she wasn’t kidding — once in place you were pinned, and all you could do was pass the gravy.

Besides, as they say in the ads for horror movies, no one would hear you if you screamed. Sarah’s family is not the brooding, melancholic type, or even the repressed, WASP-y type. Everyone pretty much has something to say, and it’s often about fishing.

Thanksgiving is a good time to talk about fishing because you can’t actually fish, November falling as it does between the end of the open-water season and the start of ice fishing. So Sarah started talking about the first time her dad took her fishing. It was around her ninth birthday in the summer of ’67, and they went to the hardware store and picked out a spiffy junior rod and push-button casting rig. At the fishing hole, which was actually a high bridge over a slow-moving stream, Bob gave her careful instructions and a casting demonstration. Sarah pushed the button, cocked back her new rod and sent the line flailing out over the abyss.

“Let go! Let go!” cried her dad. Of course, he meant let go of the button. But Sarah, who has always been a good listener, heard exactly what he said. Less, in this case, was not more.

She let go of the rod.

Her father didn’t remember much about that day; the image of a brand-new rod and reel cartwheeling into the drink had been repressed. “What did I do then?” he asked.

“I think you were pretty angry but you managed to control it,” she recalled. “You said something like ‘Well, that’s all the fishing for today.’ ”

Nobody in Sarah’s family cares much about football, and at any rate her parents don’t own a TV, so Thanksgiving entertainment is bring-your-own-banjo. Bob and his brother Laird are both banjo pickers, and both have played professionally on and off for decades. But it’s mostly out of passion; you get the feeling they love old-time music way too much to turn it into a mere living. They’ve been playing and listening together since they were kids, and they collect obscure 19th-century instruments and they know that the 1948 “MTA Song” (“He may ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston. . . ”) is just a remake of the traditional “Wreck of Old ’97,” and they can sing either one from memory. It’s not the kind of thing you learn by watching TV.

Once they start playing, it’s hard to tell them apart. One will start a song, strumming out a few chords and the first verse, then the other picks up and joins in on the chorus, and soon their neck muscles are stretched tighter than kite strings and their hands are flying up and down the frets and they’re both wailing out the words until one or the other takes a solo and starts popping strings and bobbing his head, and pretty soon it’s just a blur of beards and banjos.

Two bearded brothers on banjo can make a lot of noise, but they need more. They need a third brother on guitar. The third brother was young and strong, except in one tiny, fatal way, and now he is gone and Sarah plays the guitar. Nobody talks much about the third brother because it’s still too hard, but his memory hangs over every song like a Christmas tree ornament that’s a little too heavy for its branch. Every now and then one of the two brothers will mention The Reunion, which was the last time the three brothers played together.

The Reunion was a 1996 family gathering at a camp in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains — a region like Maine but with pig barbecues — and in Sarah’s family it has become the fulcrum of Before and After. “There’s a dark and a troubled side of life,” sings one brother as he strikes up the 1906 gospel classic. “There’s a bright, there’s a sunny side, too . . .”

But there’s more. There’s the widow of the third brother, at the Thanksgiving table, laughing, possibly louder than a banjo, like I hadn’t heard her in years.

Max Alexander can be reached at malex@midcoast.com.