It has been over a year since we folded all the flaps on our big tent, lowered the blinds and waited for someone to knock on the door and tell us it was over.
Like most of you, we had no idea when we would be allowed to poke our heads out of the window, sniff the wind and come out.
We knew it wouldn’t happen all at once. Look how long it took for the 2016 election to end. We put on our masks and went back to life.
Vaccines were offered, three flavors, like ice cream on North Street: Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson. We picked one and waited for the side effects. When we didn’t die, we went back to shopping.
We had our groceries delivered until that got boring.
Like we Americans always do, we turned fear and loathing to survival games. Take out companies sprang up like dandelions in May.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and a couple thousand others provided entertainment.
We arranged our designer masks by color; Trump went home to Florida, and “Uncle” Joe and Kamala rode into town, and sent us money. What’s wrong with that?
Now here it is, and we’ve been given hall passes to come out and party.
Over the year and a half of hoarding toilet paper and wiping down our groceries, we decided to break out of our comfy personal Shawshank cottages, and renew old friendships with those who served us with a smile before the darkness fell.
So we gassed up and made the rounds of our favorite eateries.
First, the Last Unicorn on Silver Street in Waterville.
We sat at a table in the shade on the veranda, watching two monstrous dinosaur-jawed earth-movers chew up Stern’s and Faye Nicholson’s old REM offices, and spit them out into perpetually running trucks. Berlin, 1949.
Young servers floated from table to table, and then to ours.
“Is Helen still here?” we asked.
“Who?”
“Helen, or Judy, Chloe, Katy?”
“I didn’t know them. I guess they got done.”
“Got done,” we learned long ago, is apparently Mainer code for: quit, moved on, went back to school, got fired, married, had a baby or moved to Falmouth, where the tips are better.
So we blew the dust off Main Street off our silverware, ate our salad and “got done.”
Augusta’ Panera. Same story.
Olive Garden. Same story.
Pier One. Closed.
Next down I-95 to Hallowell to revisit our old server friends at Slates, who had moved while we were gone and shrank their big, comfy restaurant into a room.
Onto Liberal Cup just down the street for their famous Thanksgiving plate, even in July, where we used to be greeted by familiar faces.
We tossed out some names. All had apparently gotten “done.”
She and I have arranged to mount a stone in the Catholic cemetery.
“KAY AND JP DEVINE. THEY GOT DONE.”
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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