Dover dream

Jeannine and I have just started our two-week vacation in Maine, and yesterday, to avoid a ridiculous traffic jam on southbound Route 1 and Route 95 on the way to one of our favorite New Hampshire swimming spots, I took us on a slightly circuitous route through South Berwick, ME and then into neighboring Dover, NH. At Jeannine's suggestion, I swung by the house we once rented there, just to see what it looked like these days.

It appeared about the same as it always had, though the paint on the wood trim seemed a little brighter, but what was most interesting was the "For Sale" sign in front of the house.

For many years I have nursed a small fantasy of someday buying that house, and doing something with it. What, you might ask? Well, aside from just being a convenient place to use as a base station for our yearly vacation jaunts into New Hampshire and Maine, my daughter has suggested it could make a nifty TMNT museum, and I had thought about that, but it is pretty small and there is not a lot of parking around it. (Not that a museum of this type would draw a lot of visitors… which is another reason, among many, to NOT do something like that. More to the point, would I even WANT to get involved with a project like that at this point in my life? No, thank you very much.)

The real impetus to buy the place is simple -- nostalgia. It is, after all, the place where Kevin Eastman and I created the Turtles in November of 1983, but much more important, at least to me, it's where Jeannine and I really started our lives together, and where we got married in the house's small back yard. (And it IS small… much smaller than I remembered!)

However, as we discussed it later, that kind of nostalgic fantasy is fun to indulge in up to a point, but it quickly gets bogged down in practicalities. The house would need to be taken care of, and we would be absentee landlords. We would very likely not stay in it often (it was a lovely place to live in some twenty-seven years ago, and closer to the ocean -- about ten miles as opposed to about a hundred and twenty -- than where we live now, but if we were to buy a place closer to the ocean -- something we've talked about, and continue to consider -- it would have to be a LOT closer to the ocean -- like, within sight of it). This house in Dover is on a small side street, surrounded fairly closely by densely-packed houses and apartment buildings… not really our dream location.

So, as much as it appeals to the nostalgic fantasy part of me, I think it's probably wisest to just hold on to the good memories of the place. -- PL