With Maine in mind

   I believe that my family rented a house in Maine for at least one summer, though my memories of it seem more life a recollection of someone who had shared with me their history . In fact, I probably only believe that this time ever happened in my life because others have said that we were all there.

   My mother once told me that she thought my father had possibly had an affair with the young nanny that she and my father had hired to look after me and my sister when on vacation there, adding that the nanny and my father used to smoke pot together. I wonder though if her own aversion to the stuff created the bond she thought the two of them had. Perhaps she believed that the smoking of the substance formed a kind of allegiance. I seem to remember my father once saying years later that she had smoked it once and freaked out.
   I find it rather interesting that I remember absolutely nothing about this young caretaker; nothing except that she evidently existed, and that her name, was Robin. I literally cannot summon to mind one aspect of her appearance, even though I had seen her in photographs years later. It is perplexing to me that her name should stay with me, yet nothing of her physically. It's as if she, like that time, never quite existed beyond the description of them.

   There have been situations when during a discussion, I have relayed a story of times when my family had stopped at some roadside shack on the drive up to Maine during that year or years, eating some relatively inexpensive lobster, fresh from the sea. I imagine that I have told this tale to illustrate that lobster does not have to be as costly as it now seems to be, though I cannot for the life of me imagine why this subject would have come up more than once or twice during my lifetime.
   Spoken in a way a person might when trying to fondly recite a personal event, the sounds coming from my mouth enacting that tale of lobster eating now seem to me more credible than the actual event. It feels like I may have been to that roadside shack, but as was the case with Robin, only because I have words to tell of it.