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This year, the Harpswell Anchor turned 5, my parents will celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary, and our country will turn 250 years old!
Is everything we do, from the most personal to shared missions, a great experiment?
Finding love is a perpetual test. Who can be sure they’ll not only love someone, but also like them enough to stick? How do you know if wet clothes forgotten in the washer until they mold or dirty dishes piled in the sink will become a deal-breaker?
Having kids? There’s no guarantee you’ll be the cool parent who can meet their kid for coffee, be breezy and never meddle. There’s no guarantee that the one time you gave them sugar after midnight didn’t turn them into gremlins.
And all that education! Can you count the number of choices and missteps you put into it? What if I hadn’t copied my chemistry lab homework from a classmate? Would I be a NASA scientist? Did all those English lit classes add up to anything? For some reason, Shakespeare doesn’t come up in my daily life.
In the end, we find out there is no end, because our whole lives are a series of questions and a search for answers.
Maybe the need for experimentation is why all great endeavors have a long ramp-up. When you get married, you meet, date, break up, get back together, get engaged, have a party, send out save-the-dates, have several more pre-wedding parties, spend a year planning one day, and finally, on the perfect day, in the perfect moment, say, “I do.”
Human gestation is 40 weeks, so you have lots of time to gain confidence, have a full-on existential crisis and then put yourself back together before the baby’s born.
And how many times do you matriculate before you graduate for the last time? I think I graduated from kindergarten, sixth grade, high school and college. Every graduation was an “attagirl” to boost me to my next test. It was also a pause for reflection — a natural point to see how the experiment is going.
And when you make it, you mark it! We love an anniversary! We climb atop milestones, shout out wins and turn our failures into cautionary tales. We take a breath. We survey the landscape, choose a direction, and, if we’re lucky, others walk along with us.
Did the architects of history time big events to ensure optimal conditions for celebration? Did they understand how much prep time people need to accept change and that experimenting is dizzying? Did they know memories are engraved in the details and rallying support requires a measure of joy and shared understanding?
I’ve always thought birthdays are the most important anniversary. What’s more fundamental than telling someone you’re happy they exist? As astounding as birth is, the real miracle is that people roll with change, absorb bumps, heal from bruises and keep chugging. Birthdays mark the heroic achievement of growing, learning and keeping on, even when you have no idea how your life will turn out.
Declaring independence in February, when the wind whipped snowflakes into projectiles and everyone’s thoughts turned to surviving winter, wouldn’t have gotten the notice a sunny day declaration got. A citizenry that’s hibernating is hard to rally. Yes, it’s true the tea went into the harbor in December, and I think that was part of the ramp-up to the big event — a moment of euphoria to bond the party when nobody is sure how things will turn out.
Maybe the power of anniversaries is the chance to look at the continuum of experience and experiment. Instead of thinking of anything as a one-time event, maybe we should give ourselves credit for preparing, experimenting, revising and starting again.
Because the trying is heroic and must be celebrated.
The Harpswell Anchor turns 5 this year — the anniversary of a group of people bonding over a shared mission and jumping in when they didn’t know how the experiment would turn out. Five years in, the people and the paper are still here. The paper’s getting fatter (not the people) and that’s something to celebrate.
The town of Harpswell came to be in 1758, making our stretch of the coast the wiser, older sibling to much of the country.
And the big event: Our country’s semiquincentennial (a word a student somewhere has already used as a basis for a bad decision, turning it into a drinking game) is July 4. Our great experiment is messy and glorious. It isn’t easy, just like most things worth having, and I’m grateful for this milestone and a moment to reflect on our progress and rest before the work begins again.
Happy birthday to the Harpswell Anchor! Happy birthday to our wonderful town. Happy anniversary to my parents and to all who are celebrating.
And happy semiquincentennial to us all.
