To the editor:
Porter had his bedtime stories, but ask Ina for a story anytime and she might say, “I’ll tell you a story about old Mother Morrie and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another about Tommy’s brother and now my story is done.”
She had no time to tell bedtime stories. Working in the studio six days a week meant evenings spent in the kitchen till 11. She did rock OB, but I was 8 and soon vied for the privilege.
The upholstered living-room rocker traveled across the floor as it rocked, requiring me to get up often and move it back to its starting point. My repertoire of songs included Ina’s “James’s O’Shea” and “Red Sails in the Sunset,” and then I went to Christmas carols, good any time of the year.
“James O’Shea was cast away upon an Indian isle. The Nabobs there, they liked his air. They liked his Irish style. They made him chief of Nabobs…” and now I would have to go online for the rest.
“Red Sails in the Sunset” had a bitter sweetness about it. If sailors did not heed the warnings, they could die or be lost at sea. At a practical level, the song fitted in with Ina’s weather observations such as, “Open shet, sign of wet” and “Rain before 7, shine before 11.” To tell the direction of the wind, wet your index finger and hold it up to the air (outside). Since some storms came from the south, you could tell if a storm was coming. Knowing the weather would have been important when she was growing up on the family farm in Hodgdon.
Of course, it took more than weather prediction to live off the farm. Even her father’s big general store at Hodgdon Corners did not make up for the farm’s bad years, so around 1920 her parents made the big decision to buy a farm in Carmel.
Ina had graduated from Ricker and a teacher there wanted to help her get a scholarship for Colby, but her father nixed it. So she tried teaching, but not for long. One of her uncles Orrin and Zorrie, living in Amity, would take her in their horse-driven cart, to the school, early enough to have a fire going before the students arrived, then teach all eight grades. Whatever it took was too much for her and she quit after two weeks.
She did have other stories or little facts about her life. When her oldest sister Vera cleaned house for Porter, his wife and a growing family, she asked Ina to substitute for her just once. She warned Ina that sometimes an employer would leave a penny on a window sill or cabinet as a test. “Don’t take it.” Cleaning was not meant for her; working in the studio would prove to be a better fit. Thus, she stayed in Houlton when her family moved to Carmel.
Porter’s true stories were few. He had visited the school across the street at about age 3, perhaps to avoid a sister who was born too soon to suit him. The teacher gave up sending him home and let him stay. A sister, probably the same one, threw a butcher knife at him, which missed and lodged in the wall behind him. When, at 13, his father refused to let him take a girl to a dance, he left home to live with his grandfather.
During high school Porter worked for a pharmacist, who wanted to put him through college and medical school, but thoughts of paying him back resulted in refusal, possibly because Porter was already selling pictures he took of people with a small snapshot camera.
Oh, yes, his father had red hair and died at 62 or so. A great grandfather had stood out in the middle of the Miramachi River to avoid the Great Fire.
With five kids in his first family and three of us in the second, Porter had a total of eight (six boys and two girls). We assume that the real life story told of quality, in contrast to the quantity of 14 (seven boys and seven girls) in the bedtime story he told us.
