Nows and Forevers

I hadn’t been paying attention to the news Wednesday night but checked my email to find mention of the president being informed about the latest mass shooting. Reflexively, I Googled and lost a breath with the answer.
Maine.
I’ve never lived in Lewiston, which is in southern Maine, hours from where I lived in the northern part of the state in the ’90s. Yet I’ve certainly been to Lewiston and Auburn, the twin cities the locals call L-A. It doesn’t have a ton in common with the other LA. These are old mill towns that dot the landscape in Maine and New Hampshire.
In the mid-90s, in fact, I was through Lewiston several times because of a friend who lived nearby.
But I can tell you that Maine, a big state, really is a small state. There are less than a million people in the whole state, top to bottom. The biggest city is Portland, with about 65,000 residents (I’m working from memory here.) Lewiston is the state’s second biggest city, with 38,000 people. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else.
There’s a lot of that in Maine. I’m from the New York City area and Connecticut, which are densely populated and full of more people even in a small-ish town than you could ever imagine. It’s where I grew up and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But I learned so much from living in Maine and it has a piece of my heart still. In fact, it has more than that, long ago.

When I moved to Maine, in my late 20s, for a job, I had a culture shock not from the accents and the rural nature but from how familiar everyone was. Being from Away, as it’s called there, I was both a curiosity and also someone from the Big City.
Like I said, where I’m from, you can’t know everyone and you don’t really know the ins and outs of your town or city because it’s so big and things are going on. Not so in rural Maine, where if you work and live and worship in a small town, you get to know most everyone in it. I lived in a town of about 500 people in a county of about 14,000. I knew a lot of people there. And even when I moved to Aroostook County, where I ended up having the most ties, it wasn’t much bigger: I spent most of my time in a city of 9,000 or so and a town of about 3,000. And I knew people in other small towns there, too.
When something happened, either good or bad, you knew it. And you felt it.
And while I could tell you of the multiple Maines that exist, I also know that when it comes to tragedy, Maine is all one state and it’s hurting right now. I don’t know how it comes back from something so tragic, made all the worse by the fact that the suspect in the mass shooting hasn’t yet been found.
“Maine in mourning,” the TV station said.
I believe it.