Megan and I have moved a lot over the past eight years — seven times by my count. It’s like one of us is in the military or wanted by the authorities (or both á la The A-Team!) and we have to keep stealing away in the midnight hours. I have to seriously wonder if all this relocation has given us an aura of displacement because my workplace, situated in the same Mid-coast town since 1990 and in the same cozy offices therein for the past 12 years, just up and moved last month. The move was only 8 miles down Route One, but still I feel somewhat responsible for our recent need of change of address forms and sturdy brown boxes.
Overall, I love the new office. The building is more modern in both its design and amenities and is only two miles from home, so I can bike to work, thereby combating both high gas prices and my carbon footprint. It has been kind of strange to make the shift from our old “single serve” bathrooms to the large, public affairs we have here. It wasn’t a huge leap back into my memory banks to remember that, even if you see someone you know in the men’s room, anything beyond a polite nod and quickly muttered salutation is sort of taboo. Like when you find yourself in a dicey neighborhood, keep your eyes forward, just keep moving, and for God’s sake don’t point.
We’re located at the topmost floor, the fourth, so this gives me great opportunity to exercise a little bit each day. But whenever I come across people on the stairs, any smile or friendly hello on my part is treated with surprise and even suspicion. Something about the stairs — closed in by cinderblock walls, narrow with lots of blind corners — spooks people. A frighteningly large percentage of the folks I see look fearful of some masher attack. It makes one wonder if something unfortunate happened in this building, in the very stairs that are meant to connect floors. But most likely it’s just the insular attitude that many people in Maine have. It’s not unfriendliness, but it certainly isn’t sociability.
Of course, I could always just sell out and take the elevator. I do periodically when something large or unwieldy needs to be moved up from or down to our basement storage area. But then you can be trapped with people in a little box, forced to decide between idle chat or staring resolutely at the floor number display as you ascend. But taking the elevator wouldn’t only betray my marginal fitness goals, it would also seriously slow me up. Several times, people who can clearly walk have gotten on the thing for a ride of just one floor. Trying to get from the basement to the fourth can be confounding enough, but running the gauntlet of one-floorers can be downright enervating.
Maybe it isn’t laziness though. Maybe these people take the elevator because of the Incident that happened in the Stairs. Maybe they know the elevator to be a safe haven, a story-spanning sanctuary. Perhaps that humble lift is this building’s version to the Headless Horseman Bridge: offering secure passage to those who reach it in time.
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Either that, or they’re just lazy!
There’s an elevator in Rock-around-the-clock-Land? Shh- keep it quiet otherwise your building will be over-run with folks with straw in their mouths from the outlying districts taking thrill rides.