As I've noted in the past, over the last couple decades I've spent a number of strange times in strange places, especially, it seems, during holidays: being wished Happy 4th of July by a border guard as I crossed from Croatia to Montenegro; killing the better part of a birthday in the Istanbul airport; laying on the sand in the Jordanian desert, next to a broken down bus, on a birthday; many Thanksgiving meals in the Wadi Rum; celebrating New Year's Eve on a plane on the way to Iceland; driving across the Namibian desert on a birthday - and on and on. That said, maybe my strangest holiday related event was sheltering in the Calais Elementary School on Christmas Eve. Now, to be fair, we had a place to stay in the cabin, but I had Janet drop me off so that I could charge up the portable battery we had just purchased (CPAPs and power outages do not go well together). While there I had to fill out a form explaining why I was using the shelter. Happily, I was just passing through, but it brought home once again the unfairness and heartless at the heart of so much of life in America. We had ended up there because the electricity had gone out in our cabin for thirty-six hours (actually, we skated, many of our neighbors had it much worse). Driving by the closed Maple Corners Store I saw this sign out front: "Shelter at the EHS - Heat, Soup, Charging."
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