A well-known fact in newsrooms all over Maine is that my colleague Amy Calder is one of the best local-beat reporters in the state. Regular readers of the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal have long known that. When she started writing a weekly column, Reporting Aside, in 2009, it seemed like icing on the cake.
But the column proved to be a lot more than icing. Her new book, “Comfort Is an Old Barn,” is a selection of those writings that reveals the capabilities and sensitivities that make up the top-notch reporter. Amy’s key ingredients are curiosity, a laser eye for details, and human warmth, and all three qualities deeply inform the book.
Her willingness to go anywhere to talk to anyone about anything is inspiring. She hears about a dog named Wilbur who greets school kids every morning, so she goes out to talk to him and his owner, and the kids. She spots three young adults pushing a shopping cart apparently stuffed with their belongings, tracks them down and draws a vivid picture through conversation of the stoic frustration of trying to hold a job while homeless.
She drives to Belfast to talk to the last engineer on the Belfast & Moosehead Railroad’s local track. Accompanies Viviane, years after sharing a hospital room with her, on the 90-year-old’s bucket-list fulfillment—horseback riding. With genuine magnanimity of spirit she eulogizes everyday admirable people like John “the Cross Man” Lewis who plied the streets of Waterville blessing everyone who crossed his path. There’s a fantastic story about a crow living in Waterville in the 1950s who was as intelligent as the humans he befriended.
She’s endlessly curious about the different weird ways time marches on. The disappearance of phone books. Christmas cards as the original social media. A conversation with an energetic young newsroom colleague who doesn’t know where to put the stamp on an envelope. (“You hearing this?” she says to the grizzled editor at a nearby desk.) Verbal expressions peculiar to Maine. (The day after reading the column, I heard one of them for the first time in a doctor’s office when a harried nurse said she’d been “on screech” all morning.)
“Comfort Is an Old Barn” by Amy Calder; Islandport Press, Yarmouth, Maine, 2023; 208 pages, paperback, $18.95.
The most powerful element of Amy’s columns is their humanity. Emotional warmth of every kind — from compassion, to grief, to nostalgia, to amusement, to full-on love — glows from every page. This is no small feat for a writer, and cannot be contrived. It is an innate flow coming through words. It’s most powerful in her recollections of growing up in Skowhegan — 1960s Christmases, ice skating, summer heat, risky sibling adventures, childhood illnesses, the state fair, the multifaceted good nature of her parents, the cool, quiet retreat to the barn, all evoked in astonishing detail.
There are some similar Maine books, among them Tom Lyford’s memoir of growing up in Dover-Foxcroft, “Playing with Fire: A Childhood Memoir”; Jeff Shula’s collection of Waldo County community profiles, “Fireside Chats”; Kathryn Olmstead’s “True North.” But the warmth of “Comfort Is an Old Barn” belongs uniquely to Amy Calder. If you want to know what it was like to live in central Maine in the 1960s through the 2020s, seeing it through extraordinarily engaged and compassionate eyes, you should read this book.
“Comfort Is an Old Barn” is available through local and online book sellers.
Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
