By Nancy Dorrans
I’ve known Carol Trapp for as long as I can remember. Our families’ friendships go way back to Dearborn, Michigan, where her father, Ron, grew up alongside my dad. Carol’s parents, Ron and Marilyn, played music and sang folk songs together with my dad and other folksy friends. Marilyn played the wash-basin bass, Ron played the piano and my dad played the guitar. My mother sang along—frequently off-key, yet full of joy.
Ron and Marilyn moved to Muskegon, Michigan and started their family. Carol was born there just three months before me. The family came to Dearborn often to visit family and us. I vividly remember when she and I were four or five years old and they visited us with Carol’s new baby brother, Carl. He’s a big dude now, but he was so little then.
Soon after Carl was born, our family moved from Dearborn to Northampton Township, near Akron, Ohio. I became and still am a Cleveland Browns fan. When Carol was in high school, the Trapp family moved to Pittsburgh. Even though she became a rabid Steelers’ fan, we remain friends!
There were a few years, decades even, when we didn’t connect. But she and I always picked right up where we left off as if no time had passed.
We’d seen each other more often and kept in closer contact on social media since my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in 2005. Her mom and my dad are both 93, and when they turned 90 Carol and her mom drove down to Tennessee to celebrate their milestone birthdays together and to chat and laugh about the “good old days.”
And so, when Carol contacted me this summer and said she wanted to come visit me in Portland, I was thrilled. It took a while for our schedules to mesh. She also wanted to visit her good friend Gail from Pittsburgh who now lives in Boston and her former roommate Dan, also originally from Pittsburgh, who lives in Groton, Connecticut. Plans were set for the first week of October and she landed at the Jetport on Thursday, October 1st.
Not long after the NFL schedule came out. She texted me “How about this Kismet?”
The Browns were scheduled to play the Steelers on Thursday Night Football the day she arrived! Divine intervention perhaps? I imagine my mom and her dad Ron probably had something to do with it.
Adventures with Carol began with me showing off Portland’s neighborhoods, trails, and my friends.
The sun came out and the fall colors were popping! Our first stop was a yummy lunch at Mazzat Mediterranean on Bishop Street, right off Morrill’s Corner. We caught the golden hour at Maine Audubon’s Gilsland Farm, then headed down to Fore Play Sports Pub to watch the game with other members of the Old Port Browns Backers fan club. It was a close game between these historic rivals. Happy for me, the Browns won! We almost always don’t.
The sun stayed with us all week. The next day we met up and hiked with friends from the Maine Outdoor Adventure Club (MOAC) on the Mill Brook trails in Westbrook. It was First Friday and in the afternoon we strolled down Congress and caught Homer at the Portland Museum of Art.
Adventures with Carol Continued…
We traveled over the rivers and gems of Maine, through the White Mountains and peeper crowds for a rendezvous with my friends Tom and Karen, dishing out paddle boats on Echo Lake. The crowds on Artists’ Bluff were out of control. A gondola ride to the top of Loon Mountain Resort gave us more blazing views!
Onward south down by the Banks of the River Charles was a serious trip down memory lane for me.
I moved away from Boston 30+ years ago and so many memories mixed in with new ones; on the subway, at The Black Rose, Eataly Boston, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Suffolk University, new monuments, and the Boston Public Garden and Library. Still love that dirty water…
Carol’s friend Gail has an amazing apartment on Saint Botolph Street with alley parking! “The icing on the rainbow cake,” was Drag Queen Bingo at Club Cafe nearby on Columbus Avenue. What a hoot! We all won!
Then it was the bottom of the 9th, and we went into extra innings with a line drive to Groton, Connecticut to visit Carol’s friend Dan, pizza shop owner and high roller extraordinaire. He had points at the Mohegan Sun and booked us a room on the 29th floor!
After donating to the tribe, we headed back to Portland via the bewitching town of Salem, Massachusetts.
I think Winnie the Pooh said it best in the 1997 film “Pooh’s Grand Adventure.” Piglet asks him, “We’ll be friends forever, won’t we, Pooh?” Pooh gently replied, “Even longer.”
Cheers to a lifelong friendship and more grand “Adventures with Carol!”
