Topsy Turvy
So, are you going to change your column’s name?
Since I emerged from my woods life of the past several years this summer and settled in town — not back in Portland, but in a town — I’ve heard this question more than once. When I resumed writing for this publication last January, “Out There” fit, geographically. I was adrift and in self-exile and didn’t see any imminent end to that in sight. But, if you follow this column, you will know there are many things I didn’t/couldn’t/neglected to foresee. Fortunately, the name serves double duty, and I assure you, gentle readers, I continue to be as out there as it gets.
Then, of course, there has been the guessing game of where I’ve landed. So exciting that you’re moving to Biddo with all the other hipsters! I hear it’s Portland’s Brooklyn! It must be Biddo, right? wrote a friend of nearly 30 years who should know better than to think I would tag behind a gaggle of tech bros and kombucha drinkers to a town with a nickname that sounds like a nursing-home activity. (And, my dear editor-in-chief friend, don’t edit out your wrong guess.)
And no, it’s not Lewi, a nickname I just made up that sounds like a person who would run said nursing-home gambling ring, although according to my exhaustive research — one Google click — Lewiston has long been known as “The Dirty Lew.” (AI hastens to add that the term is “sometimes [used] to reflect negative perceptions of the city,” just in case we didn’t understand that a name that sounds like an unclean toilet — or an unbathed bookie, if you prefer my version — was something dreamed up by the Chamber.)
I can also tell you where else I didn’t move: The Brook. I’m sure some branding consultant (Oooh, look at my mood board) thought that name made Westbrook seem sexy, but to me it sounds more like a con Lewi would pull during Biddo in order to scam all those lovely older adults out of their Social Security checks — at least while the government is still issuing them.
Nor is it Skowvegas, Disgusta, Swallowell or any of the other Maine towns clearly lacking a spin doctor. In fact, where I moved appears utterly devoid of a nickname: Topsham.
I know what you’re thinking. Topsham? Where’s that? Some might know it as the landmass across the bridge from downtown Brunswick or for the Reny’s in the strip mall you can see from I-295, but beyond that it just seems to fall into the no-man’s-land of Bowdoinham and Richmond, an area I’ve yet to explore lest I’m never heard from again.
I mean, I should know Topsham, seeing how it’s just seven miles from my childhood home of Bath. If push came to shove (which it frequently did in the halls of my bully-ridden junior high), I could walk there. But really, the only time this town came across my radar back then was during the annual Topsham Fair, where I jostled in line to get seated next to any cute boy in our 7thgrade class on the Scrambler so I could get centrifugally smooshed up against him. Unfortunately, I discovered boys could do their own jostling to make sure they weren’t crammed in a car with a dork like me.
Another drawback is people rarely pronounce Topsham correctly. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t either. It is not Top-sham, like the uppermost comforter on your bed. It’s Tops-ham, as in pineapple or mustard. (Just for the record, I am getting nowhere with this joke.)
Beyond all that, living in Topsham is basically living in Brunswick, and Brunswick is where my mother spent the last six years of her life in decline. It is also where my former husband grew up and the area where his family lived during most of our 20-year marriage. In other words, I have a lot of emotional baggage on the other side of the bridge. It’s as though all my ghosts convened and decided to land me in a place where they could conveniently converge around me.
But of course, that’s silly. Ghosts don’t wait around for you to show up; they haunt you wherever you go. Sure, if I squint when I walk down Maine Street, I can imagine my mother dragging me into Senter’s department store for school clothes or picture myself as a teen malingering over cheesecake and coffee at the Ruffed Grouse restaurant, holding forth about life. (The curly perm and monogrammed sweater only upped the dork factor.)
In the end, being this close to the hometown I so desperately sought to flee is a small price to pay to be able to live in this wonderful space filled with light and air and possibility, to finally have my things out of storage and a mailbox with my name on it. In other words, a home.
And you can tell Lewi that’s a gamble I’m willing to take.
Elizabeth Peavey rolls the dice here monthly.
