Personal Best: Place to Become a Regular
The perfect Saturday morning spot turned out to be just three blocks away.
Michaela Cavallaro
When you watch reruns of Cheers, becoming a regular seems so easy — you pick a local bar, hang out there for a while, and before long, everyone shouts your name when you enter. In reality, it ain’t that easy. I spent years lurking around the late, great Portland Green Grocer, buying sandwiches and inexpensive bottles of really great wine and even a phenomenal (and phenomenally expensive) Thanksgiving turkey or two. But I never came in quite often enough to get to know the cashiers, or to chitchat with the owners about life and food.Because it turns out that becoming a regular actually takes discipline, courage, and persistence. And, when it comes down to it, I’m a lazy, slightly shy person who has been known to give up rather than be defeated, whether the pursuit is Scrabble or chatting up a barista.
So it’s somewhat remarkable that I have become a regular at Scratch Baking Co. (416 Preble St., South Portland, 207-799-0668.) [for the rest of this story, see the January 2008 issue of Down East]
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Reader Comments:
I am late in responding to your "Where in Maine?" January photo of Mark Island (Winter Harbor, ME) in Frenchman Bay, with Cadillac Mountain looming behind. I was sternman for Dale Torrey on his lobster boat "The Agitator" for two summers ('89 & '90), and we fished all around it.
Dale was great friends with the artist David Armstrong of Pennsylvania, who had a second home here, and often took David to the Island to paint. David did MANY paintings of Mark Island, for which he felt a special affinity. He once wrote: "I feel an unexplainable spiritual reverence for some of the places that I paint. It's the same way I feel when I enter a magnificent temple. These places can be as monumental as Canyon de Chelly in Arizona or as humble as a four-acre island with an abandoned lighthouse off the Maine coast."
The only time I was actually ON the island was one fall, after its summer occupants had left. On a full moon night, at low tide, Dale took David Armstrong & his wife Georgia & me onto the island by boat, where David made sketches and took photos from the southerd end of the island. Later, this preliminary work generated the magnificent oil titled "Silent Light" (1989) which has been used as a fund-raising poster by Frenchman Bay Conservancy (typically, David painted in watercolors). Seeing this photo caused a flood of memories to percolate up in my mind...a pleasant experience.
I highly recommend that Downeast do an article about David Armstrong and his Maine work. You may contact his daughter, Katy Armstrong, at P.O. Box 261, Kent, CT 06757 (860/927-3719). She and her brother handle his collection, as well as the print business he started.
Sincerely, Mary Lou Weaver of Winter Harbor, ME