You Can't Go Home Again

When I visit the New Hampshire/Maine seacoast, either with Jeannine or by myself, it has always been my ritual -- usually when leaving -- to drive over to Dover, NH, and cruise past the house we rented and lived in for two years. It's a sentimental journey, for many reasons -- among them are the fact that this house was the first place where we lived together, where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created, and where we were married, in the small backyard in the summer of 1983… a ceremony presided over by a local Justice of the Peace, and attended by enough friends and family to almost fill the backyard (like I said, it was small).

Here's the house as it looked back then.

In the last couple of years, the house had not fared well. This past year especially, it has looked somewhat bedraggled, with a few broken windows and an air of abandonment. And there was a notice on the front door, some kind of official town thing that mentioned that it was slated for demolition.

I couldn't understand why. Aside from the broken windows, the house looked as sturdy as when we had lived there. But perhaps there was some underlying structural problem that we were not aware of. I really don't know. I considered calling our former landlady, a very sweet woman, but in case there was some unpleasant story associated with it which would upset her, I decided not to.

So when I drove down Union Street in Dover a couple of days ago, I was heartened to see what looked like a new coat of paint on the house. But… it looked different, somehow… and then, as I got closer, I realized that what I was looking at was the house BEHIND our old house. Our house…

… was gone.

Where it once stood was a rough patch of brown dirt. 

Even the lawn in the small backyard, where friends and family had gathered to see us pledge ourselves to each other on our wedding day, was mostly gone. The small garage -- which we never used -- had also vanished.

I had expected that I would be devastated if that house was torn down. I even gave some thought in recent years to buying it to save the old place, but that really made no logical sense, so I abandoned that completely sentimental plan. But when I saw it was gone, I felt very little… a small twinge of sadness, mostly.

I am sad that it's gone. I have many great memories of that house, most having to do with Jeannine and our first couple of years together.

But as she pointed out when I gave her the news, we still have those memories. We still have artifacts from those times, like this drawing I did of the front of the house. I can't remember WHY I did it -- possibly as a card, or perhaps as part of the directions to our wedding.

And we still have the photos from our wedding, and the lovely memories which go with them. 

        But most of all, we have each other. -- PL

... to Dover, NH, and points north in Maine

So, after escaping from Boston, Jeannine and I headed north, to our old "stomping grounds" of the Dover/Portsmouth area. We were pretty hungry, so instead of heading directly to our place of lodging -- the Cliff House in Ogunquit, ME -- we stopped off at one of our favorite seafood restaurants, Newicks, in Dover. We got great seats near a window and had Newicks' always-fresh seafood.

It had been some time since I'd stayed at the Cliff House with Jeannine, and it had changed quite a bit, including a whole new building (which is where we were staying). We had a nice view of the ocean from the balcony off our room, even though -- at least early each morning -- the ocean was covered in fog, as you can see in this view from the balcony.

But within a few hours, it cleared up and we could sit out there and watch the waves. I spent quite a bit of time wandering around on the rocks -- not on these vertical rocks…

… which are the cliffs from which the Cliff House derives its name, but on the safer, more navigable rocks to either side of the cliffs. I took many photos of interesting rocks, and did a little bit of sketching. Actually, I only did two sketches, and here they are.

I was hoping to do more, but I was too lazy.

I did manage to capture a few decent shots of waves -- here's one I shot from our balcony using the camera's zoom lens (love the colors)…

… and another bit of "crashing wave action" caught by the camera's high-speed "burst" function.

I even got myself in one shot. 

I never get tired of looking at these rocks by the ocean. They fascinate me with their shapes, patterns, and colors.

At one point -- I think it was on our first day there -- I was out on the rocks looking for good angles in the morning, while there was still quite a bit of mist on the ocean, when I heard the sound of a boat engine, and this lobster boat came slowly chugging out of the mist.

It's certainly not a rare sight on the coast of Maine…

… but I thought it was kind of cool.

Sometimes the rocks can seem barren, almost a moonscape, devoid of life… but then you look a bit closer, and there is quite a bit of life. This large spider (one of many on the rocks) paused in its rapid scurrying to and fro to allow me to snap a portrait shot…

… and one day on the way back to our room, I spotted these bluets growing among the rocks…

… and this bright lichen growing ON the rocks.

We had a great time, and ate lots of good food -- even went to "Johnny's Oarweed" in Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, the restaurant at which a pre-TMNT Kevin Eastman once worked as a lobster cook, and we had a lovely meal on a beautiful day sitting outside by the ocean.

However, I neglected to do one important thing while we were there, and I regret it -- I didn't call my pal Steve Lavigne to see if we could get together. Sorry, Steve! -- PL

Blast from the Past #353: Illustrations for "Dan Gabriel Real Estate" ads

(I apologize in advance for the "sketchy" quality of these images -- when I photographed this art last year, I didn't light some of it properly. I tried to tweak it in Photoshop to get it to look good, but realized pretty quickly that it would take hours to do that, so I just decided to use them as is. -- PL)

Back when we were living in Dover, and the TMNT comic had yet to bring in enough money to allow me to focus on that and not worry about getting other illustration jobs to help pay the bills, I got a number of gigs doing stuff for local businesses. The Dan Gabriel Real Estate company had offices on one of the main streets in Dover, and as I recall, they were going through some kind of big change in their business -- I think they were becoming associated with Coldwell Banker, or moving to a new location, or both, or something like that. Anyway, they wanted to do a series of ads which would announce this change in an eye-catching way, and for some reason, they hired me. (I cannot at this point remember HOW I got the job -- did I approach them? Did they approach me? If it was the former, how did I know they needed some illustrations? Who knows? I wish I did.)

Anyway, this turned out to me a lot of fun to do. And I am pretty sure it was my idea to do the ads this way. The basic concept was this fanciful notion of elves carving the new offices of Dan Gabriel Real Estate out of one huge solid block of wood, and I drew four stages of this activity, starting with the block just slightly carved, and ending up with a fairly accurate rendition of what the Dan Gabriel office's facade looked like. (Unfortunately, I have not been able to find that last drawing.)
Here's the first one…

… the second…

… and the third.

I also drew some small images which were to be used as "teasers" to get people to wonder what was going on with these wacky little elves showing up in various spots in local newspapers.

And I did keep one tearsheet from a local paper -- the Rochester Free Press, I believe it was called -- in which the ads were run.

In my experience, it was rare to get a chance to draw something for a client like a real estate agency which had any kind of whimsical elements, and this one was just about ALL whimsical. -- PL

[10-18-14: UPDATE -- I've been reading some old letters that I wrote to my parents during the period when Jeannine and I lived in Dover, NH, and I discovered the reason why I got the gig doing the artwork above. Apparently, I had made a contact with Terry Dunn, the editor of the "Rochester Courier", the local newspaper in Rochester, NH, two towns away from Dover. I had forgotten that he had helped me connect with various local business who needed artwork for ads and such, providing me with much-needed opportunities to make some money. Thanks, Terry! -- PL]

Blast from the Past #336: Design for "Press Run" road race t-shirt

This is another one of those "I can't remember the details of how I got the job, but I remember the drawing" drawings. And this is one I've always particularly liked -- I think because it was one of those times that the drawing just WORKED, and turned out exactly the way I wanted it. (Whether or not it turned out the way the CLIENT wanted it, well, that's another story... though my admittedly shaky memory on this issue is that they liked it, too.) The "Press Run" referred to in the design (in that hand-lettering which must have taken me laborious hours to do, and which could now be done -- and done better! -- in minutes using Adobe Illustrator) was, I believe, a local race sponsored by the Rochester Courier newspaper in Rochester, NH, which was just north of Dover.

Here's the front of the shirt...

... and here's the back.

Please excuse the slightly rough images -- I had to clean up the badly-lit photograph of this art, and it didn't work perfectly, I'm afraid.

I have done a few of these "front and back view" pieces before, and this is probably my favorite.

And looking at this art again as I proof this entry, and noting the date of the race, I realize it is altogether possible -- in fact highly probable -- that I drew this thing shortly before Jeannine and I got married in our little back yard in Dover. Maybe what I made from this gig was enough to pay for our wedding rings. (They weren't too fancy or expensive -- simple thin gold bands bought at a local "Service Merchandise" store -- but to me, they are priceless.) -- PL

Morning at Kittery Point, Maine

This is another image from my trip to the Dover area this past weekend, taken fairly early in the morning, shortly before I surprised Steve Lavigne by showing up on his doorstep with no advance warning. With the help of my TrekPod and my camera's self-timer function, I managed to get myself into one of the three photos I used to create this small panoramic shot of Kittery Point beach in Maine, a place Jeannine and I used to go to sometimes to swim and walk. It was typically not very crowded because it was not, frankly, a great place to swim, but perhaps more to the point, there were not many parking spaces.

But it is a beautiful spot, and even though my panorama-making software once again had a few problems with the moving waves, I like this one -- the colors, lighting and composition appeal to me. -- PL

Weekend in New Hampshire (and Maine)

This past weekend, my wife went out to Minneapolis to visit a family friend and attend a convention of like-minded bloggers. I would have loved to have gone with her, but in spite of my best efforts, it just didn't work out. So while she was in the midwest having fun, I decided that rather than be miserable and lonely at home, I could be miserable and lonely* somewhere more interesting and potentially distracting in a good way. So I chose to spend those days by myself in the Dover, NH area.

I stayed in Portsmouth, but I made trips to some of our our old haunts, favorite areas on the seacoast as well as Dover itself and the neighboring town of Durham. It was interesting to walk around Dover and see what has changed -- not much, I think. The ice cream parlor that we used to enjoy going to is no longer there, replaced by a nifty little cafe where I ate two of my lunches that weekend, and they were both excellent. I walked over to the good ol' Dover Public Library, which we used quite a bit when we lived there…

… and when I went inside to poke around, I was happy to see that they still had the "magazine swap" shelf that I so enjoyed back in the early 1980's -- it was a great way to recycle your old magazines. (Although i think it may have been called a magazine EXCHANGE back then… but I could be confusing it with a similar thing at the Sharon, CT library some time later.)

Looking around the library, I found Jeannine's latest book, "Borrowed Names", shelved in the poetry for young adults section. That's it, fourth from the left.

Here's a shot of the cover of "Borrowed Names".

(By the way -- and I say this in a completely unbiased way -- it's a great book. Check it out!)


Continuing my stroll around Dover, I took one street that led to this view…

… a bit of interesting scenery I don't recall from our days in Dover. Maybe we never walked up that street.

After a couple of hours of reminiscing, I drove out to Ogunquit, ME, where I walked on part of the fabled "Marginal Way", and I was reminded of why I prefer the coast of Maine to the coast of Cape Cod (well, to be fair, the parts of the coast of Cape Cod that I saw a couple of weeks ago)...

... great rocks! You can't really see it in the photo below, but the stiff breeze was blowing spray off the white-capped waves -- very dramatic!

I did sit down and do a little sketching of some of the rocks, but it was pretty cold and breezy, so I only did one drawing. I have to spend more time up there in the warm parts of the year, I think.

The next day I decided to take a drive up to one of our favorite beaches, Long Sands in York… so named because it's, well, a long, sandy beach. I remembered that the last time we walked on it,  the sand was not very squishy underfoot, but firm… and I started thinking that MAYBE it would be firm enough to support me and my bicycle. So I parked near one end of the beach, carried my bike down the steps to the sand, and started riding. And it was GREAT! I think -- no, I KNOW -- that this was the most fun I had all weekend. I spent probably an hour riding up and down the beach, dodging seagulls and sandpipers, going in and out of the surf, and watching my shadow, cast by the setting sun.

It was almost too picturesque, and shortly made even MORE so by the rising of the moon just off Nubble Point near the lighthouse. I took a few photos of this scene using the zoom lens on my camera (which is why the moon looks so huge, I think), and put them together into this little panorama.

On my last day of this impromptu vacation, I headed up a little further into Maine, to drop in unannounced on Steve Lavigne and his family. I think I surprised the heck out of him, but we had a nice visit. Then I decided to drive back to Dover one last time, because i had a mission there.

You see, on my way up on Friday, I had stopped at a general store called Calef's just outside Dover, and picked up a few postcards which I intended to mail to Jeannine. One of them featured a cool aerial photo of Dover, and I was hoping to see if our old house was, by some chance, included in the image. So I was studying it, and for some reason, I just couldn't figure out exactly from which direction the photo was taken… which was a little odd, because I am pretty familiar with the layout of downtown Dover. So I once again walked around the streets of Dover, trying to pick out significant landmarks and compare them to the tiny images in the postcard, attempting to get my bearings.

And after about ten minutes of this, it hit me -- the photo was REVERSED! I found it kind of surprising that just reversing the image would throw me off so much, but it did. (When I got home, I scanned the postcard, flipped in in Photoshop, and instantly everything fell into place and made sense.) Sadly, our old neighborhood was just out of shot in the postcard's aerial image.

On the drive back home, I decided to take a spin through nearby Durham, NH, and had to stop to take a photo of this fabulous tree, which just at the moment I was driving by happened to be lit up perfectly by the sun. It was simply blazing. -- PL

(*Full disclosure: I was not actually miserable. -- PL)

Clouds and waves

Steve Lavigne and his wife Denise, who live not very far from where we are staying for our Maine vacation, invited us out to dinner last night in York. They treated us to a very nice meal at a restaurant where, as Jeannine remembers it (I only have a very vague memory of this) she and I were turned away years ago (because we did not meet their dress code), probably on one of our return trips to the area after moving away from Dover, NH to Sharon, CT. This time, it was not a problem -- either because we were less scruffy than we were back then, or the new owners are less insistent upon such protocols. I'm not sure, but it was great to see Steve and Denise. Thanks again for the meal!

After this delightful get-together, Jeannine and I headed back to our rental home, but we decided to take the shore road, thinking it might be nice to do that beach walk we'd been talking about for roughly a week and a half. We'd had the idea that we wanted to take a walk on a long beach, preferably without too many people around, and maybe near sunset so the sun was not blazing down on us. And at low tide, too, so there would be more of a beach to wander upon.

I can't believe I had forgotten that this beach existed, because just a couple of years ago, Steve Lavigne and I had ridden our bicycles to it from another vacation rental home (not more than half a mile away from the one we are currently enjoying). It's called "Long Sands", it's in York, ME, and it turned out to be perfect. As it was about 6:30PM, there were lots of parking spaces available along the sea wall, and very few people there, and the tide was pretty far out.

Jeannine and I took off our shoes (she first, me following a minute or so later when I realized what a dopey thing it was to be walking in my shoes on this beautiful, soft sand beach) and walked down pretty much the length of the beach, enjoying an occasional wave across our bare feet and the feel of the sand beneath, watching a few hardy surfers catch some late waves, several dogs enjoying a romp through the waves, and some parents chasing little kids across the sand.

And a big plus was the fact that as the sun was setting, it was turning the clouds various shades of purple and gold, colors which in places (if you looked westward, toward the sunset) were beautifully reflected off ripples of water on the beach.

Looking east, out toward the ocean, I found myself compelled to take some photos I could later stitch together into a cloud panorama. I knew the waves would very likely not stitch together correctly (and I was right), but the clouds did, as you can see here.



That figure walking toward the ocean just to the right of the center of the image is Jeannine, who enjoyed the small waves cresting over her feet. She thought the water was even warmer there than it had been earlier in the day, when we'd taken a couple of "boogie boards" and romped around in the surf at York Harbor beach. I think she was right, and we may go back to Long Sands today to swim, if it warms up. It's our last full day here in Maine on this vacation trip, and it would be nice to get in the ocean one more time before we have to leave. -- PL

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

Back home

It wasn't a long trip, either time-wise (three days, two nights) or in terms of distance (somewhere north of three hundred miles round trip), but it sure was fun… and relaxing. I definitely want to start doing more of this kind of thing.

Jeannine and I decided that it would be nice, for our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, to return to the New Hampshire seacoast area. That's where we got married, in the little back yard of our rented house in Dover, NH in the summer of 1983. We didn't invite a lot of people, but our friends and family members did quite a good job of making that small space seem filled to the brim with life and joy. A few days ago, while sharing memories of our wedding day, Jeannine reminded me of the lopsided carrot cake she'd made as our wedding cake -- I honestly can't remember it being lopsided, but knowing her baking skills I have no doubt it was extremely tasty. I mostly remember being fairly giddy with excitement and happiness, and filled with an unshakable certainty that of all the good decisions I'd ever managed to make in my life up to that point, this was at the top of the list.

And it still is.

Our wedding was a civil ceremony, with a Justice of the Peace from the Dover City Hall officiating. Afterwards, we had Jeannine's carrot cake for dessert following a variety of other foods, some prepared by us, others -- like the roast turkey brought up by Jeannine's dear friend Marguerite -- supplied by helpful friends and family.

A few of our friends stayed for a while after the wedding, and joined Jeannine and me in a drive out to one of our favorite beaches on the New Hampshire coast, Wallis Sands. We walked on the sand and hugged and breathed in the fresh smells of the salt air as the afternoon light waned. It was a great way to cap a wonderful day.

Twenty-seven years later, it seemed appropriate to revisit that beach and remember that day back in 1983. It was cloudy this time, and a bit cool, but still beautiful. We walked about a mile down the beach, and I persuaded Jeannine to pose on some photogenic rocks poking up from the sand.



(I hoped to put together about five shots taken at this spot into a panorama, and it kind of worked, but I forgot about the "moving wave" problem, so it did not stitch together perfectly. But that's okay -- I really like the image of my lovely wife on those rocks, with the backdrop of sand and water and sky... and the memories.)

It was a relaxed couple of days (almost, I was to remark to Jeannine when we got back home, like the honeymoon we never officially had), spent mostly walking around Portsmouth, finding interesting places to eat, cozying up in our hotel when it rained, or doing a little browsing in Portsmouth's many cool shops.

(Speaking of our hotel, here's a view from our little balcony looking out over part of the working harbor of Portsmouth. That green bridge just to the right of the center of the image is one of two vertical drawbridges, this one the innermost, which connect Portsmouth to Kittery, ME. I remember that on our first trip together to the Portsmouth area, back in 1982 when I had come with Jeannine to help her look for a place to live while she was going to graduate school, we had to stop at the outermost of these two bridges, and wait while the large middle section of the bridge was raised to let a ship pass underneath, then wait while it was lowered to allow wheeled traffic to resume across the span... and Jeannine was a little spooked by that. I think I was too, a bit, having never before encountered or driven over a bridge which was not just one reassuringly solid, unmoving surface, but -- as in this case -- something that could split in two, leading the overactive imagination to dire visions of cars accidentally plunging into the salty depths. The large green arching bridge seen off slightly to the left in the distance is another New Hampshire/Maine connector, this one the major highway between the two states, Route 95.)



While waiting for Jeannine outside one of those Portsmouth shops, I spotted this odd twig sculpture being erected on the sidewalk… I have no idea what it is or is supposed to represent, but it's kind of nifty.



One place that Jeannine wanted to go for supper our first night -- and breakfast on our third day -- was a small restaurant near the central square in Portsmouth called Popovers (named, I believe, for the delicious popover pastries in which they specialize, which I can attest are quite yummy). Here's a shot of me enjoying my breakfast fruit salad at Popovers.



Although we discussed it, we never did get over to Dover to walk around and reminisce, but maybe we'll save that for our next trip to the seacoast. -- PL