No one ever goes to sea on a lobster boat expecting to be miserable. No lobsterman, male or female, believes that the ocean won’t provide. Yes, there are government regulations that they dislike and mandatory paperwork that they hate, and they suspect that the bureaucrats who make the rules know nothing, zilch, about fishing for a living. Worst case, this makes them annoyed, irritated, angry at times. But no, none of the roughly five thousand Maine lobstermen is a pessimist. In fact, each of them is an optimist. They realistically expect to land their lobsters, as they always have.
Say “Maine”, and people everywhere unfailingly react with “lobster”. After having traveled every U.S. state with the exception of Maine, Alice and I, while having dinner in a Maryland Red Lobster restaurant, decided to finally go see it. We went, and we stayed. Not for the lobster, though. For our first Maine dinner we actually did have lobster chowder, in Lubec, but the thing that truly grabbed our attention was a library. The little one in Fort Kent, at the far end of U.S. Route 1.
I knew Todd Bol, I had interviewed him a few months earlier at a librarians convention in Chicago, and we had stayed in touch since. Not many folks recognize his name today, but he was the guy behind that tiny library on Fort Kent’s Hall Street. Todd from Hudson, Wisconsin loved his mom, a teacher who had dedicated her adult life to teaching children to read. After she passed, in 2009 Todd dismantled an old garage door and built what to most people looked like a dollhouse, but was in fact a mini schoolhouse, a class room. He placed it on a stick in his front yard and filled it with used books. Anyone walking by could open the little door and take one home, at no charge. Borrowers were expected to return the book later, or keep it and replace it with another book. Todd Bol had started the Little Free Libraries.
He often quoted Martin Luther who was once asked what he’d do if he knew that tomorrow would be his final day on Earth. Answer, “Plant a seed.” Todd did. He died in 2018, too young, but he lived long enough to see that his nonprofit made it to Reader’s Digest’s “50 Surprising Reasons We Love America.” Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi ranked number 50, Bill Gates was at 25, and on spot 11, right behind sliced bread, were the little free libraries. Fort Kent has one, the Presque Isle/Caribou area counts ten, there are forty little free libraries in and around Bangor, forty-two in Augusta, and fifty in Portland. In all, hundreds and hundreds of Mainers have put tiny book-filled schoolhouses on sticks in their front yards.
Each one is an expression of optimism that doing something nice, something good, without expecting anything in return, will generate a positive outcome. Such as neighbors meeting neighbors, folks who live around the corner suddenly stopping and greeting each other while browsing what’s in that library, sometimes after years of never really having known one another. Or book lovers finally finding that old title that they were never able to dig up in the used book store.
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History is written by optimists & so is the future