Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: New Maine best seller

Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002 | 10:09 a.m.

SEVERAL HOURS OF MY DAY are spent reading newspapers and books. Usually my book reading is about ideas and history that affect life today in our state, nation or world. Reading novels and fiction just don't excite me, despite the fact some so-called serious articles contain more than a little fiction or the author's imagination runs wild.

This doesn't mean that I don't read for enjoyment. This summer has exposed me to several enjoyable books. One of the best of them is Linda Greenlaw's "The Lobster Chronicles." You may remember her as the author of the best seller "The Hungry Ocean." She has moved back on her Isle Au Haut where she makes a living as a professional lobsterman with her boat The Mattie Bell. It doesn't take long to realize the author's warm relationship with the boat named for her grandmother Mattie Belle Robinson Greenlaw.

Her island has about 70 residents who live there all year and she is related to 30 of them. What the island doesn't have allows the author to set the following scene when writing, "We do not have a Kmart, or any other mart. We have no movie theater, roller rink, arcade, or bowling alley. Residents can't get manicured, pedicured, dry-cleaned, massaged, hot-tubbed, facial-ed, permed, tinted, foiled, or indoor tanned. We have neither fine dining nor fast food. There is no Dairy Queen, Jiffy Lube, newspaper stand, or Starbucks. There is no bank, not even an ATM. No cable TV, golf course, movie theater, gym, museum, art gallery ... Well, you get the picture."

What many of the residents do have is hard work during seven months of fishing. Trapping lobsters with her father is hard work and a special way of life.

If you have ever lived in a lumber mill or mining town, construction camp or isolated farm town you will be able to relate to people described by Greenlaw. Heck, if you have lived any place more than a few decades you will enjoy her description of friends, relatives and neighbors.

Meeting Vic's latest flame, Alabama, started with the new girl flashing her breasts. It was a great party which would have made Las Vegas lap dancing sound rather mild. Greenlaw writes, "The breast occurrence was a minor incident compared to other activities that were reported to have transpired at Vic's after my departure. Stories spread like spilled paint over the Island the next day. And like most stories, they improved with every telling."

I have found the natives of Maine a hardy and friendly breed of people. Working with former Sun Editor Jim Barrows for several years was a special treat. Not only could he write, but he also had that laughing charm and sense of humor so often lacking in many people we meet nowadays. Even his description of combat on Korea's Porkchop Hill is threaded with glances at humor.

Today the Sun still has a writer from Maine. Jeffrey Libby is not only a good reporter, but earlier he spent three years working on a lobster boat. It must be the Maine environment or sea air that encourages good writing.

Greenlaw's sense of humor is sprinkled throughout the book from the time she is mooned by "three snow white bottoms" until the end of the book. Her description of the visitors who spend summer nights at Keeper's House Inn at the lighthouse goes as follows: "The true freaks are highly recognizable and nearly always female, sporting lighthouse clothes, handbags, and jewelry. Any woman from whose earlobes swing lighthouse towers or from whose arm dangles a lighthouse purse has got to be a guest at the Keeper's House. The men are less obvious, and unless accompanied by a woman whose jacket displays pictures of every lighthouse on the eastern seaboard, they can go about the business of lighthouse obsession undetected."

A reader will not only laugh their way through the book, there won't be an empty feeling when putting it on the shelf or passing it on for others to read. It's a good piece of work written by a person you would like to know and help trap lobsters or just sit down with for a visit.