Back in the last century I headed up to Maine for my youngest sister’s birthday. Watchic Pond was a short distance outside of Portland. Not much had changed along Route 25 and even less at the lake, except the pine trees were taller and we were a little older.

After a long day lazing around the camp on Watchic Pond we sat outside on a long wooden table for a lobster dinner. One-and-quarters were cheap that season and my brother-in-law boiled a two dozen in a huge pot. My father, aunt and uncle, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews consumed big bottles of white wine, as the sky darkened to a cobalt blue and lake lapped at the shore speaking a wind-driven language.

We broke the shells to get at the succulent white meat. The empty claws, tails, and legs, and knuckles grew into a substantial pile.

“That’s going to make some bears happy.”

“What do you mean?” my uncle asked from the other end of the table.

“Don’t you remember the bears eating garbage at the Standish dump?”

“I never saw that.” My eighty-five year-old father drew a blank.

“I remember seeing them sitting on their haunches, eating food from people’s trash.

There had been no plastic bags in the 50s.

“Are you making this up?” my aunt and uncle asked in unison.

My older sister and brothers rolled their eyes and Pam demanded, “Were you on LSD?”

My younger sister was a trial lawyer and I was thrust onto the stand for interrogation.

“No, I was only five.” I was almost sure of my answer, then again no one had proven that the CIA hadn’t experimented on children in the 1950s.

“Maybe it was an acid flashback.” My brother-in-law laughed at his joke.

Everyone from our generation joined him.

I was the family’s one hippie.

“What’s so funny,” my father grumbled from his seat.

“The bears at the dump.”

“Never happened.” My father returned to his post-dinner stupor.

“No, I swear I saw them.”

“Well, there are bears in these woods.” Uncle Russ looked over his shoulder. He had graduated fromthe University of Maine. Their mascot was a brown bear. He was also partial to a good story.

“Not these woods.” Pam had heard too many lies from her clients. None of them ever told the truth and nothing but the truth.

“Maybe not this time of year, but I had a cousin up in Naples.” My uncle was a Maine native. “This bear kept on eating his garbage. My uncle locked the lids and build a shed. The bear found a way in. He finally stored the trash in his house,”

“Did that solve the problem?” My brother-in-law was good around the house.

“No, the bear crashed through a kitchen wall.”

“What your cousin do then?” my older sister was scared of any animal bigger than a cat, although her twenty-pound Shadow was no kitty.

“He shot the bear in the ass with buckshot and the bear ran away. Never to be seen again.”

“Like the bears at the dump.” Pam wasn’t letting it go.

“I saw what I saw.”

My older brother had been there then and I looked to him.

He shrugged to indicate I was on my own.

“I believe you, but everyone else thinks you’re lying,” my sister joked to the laughter of our gathered family.

“Here’s to your 38th Birthday.” I raised my glass.

“You never mention a woman’s age,” my aunt Sally admonished me.

“I can live with thirty-eight.” Pam was on the other side of 40.

“So some lies are good.”

“36 would have been better and bears at best left in the woods.”

After dessert I helped bring in the plates.

“What about the lobster shells?”

“Leave them outside. We don’t want them to stink up the house.” My brother-in-law loved his camp.

We washed the dishes, while my family disappeared into the bedrooms. My brother-in-law and I had a vodka for a nightcap and he said,”I love that story about the bears at the dump.”

“It really did happen.”

“All stories are true, if interesting.”

It was an old family adage.

I bid him good night and went to my room.

Lying on the bed I thought about bears.

We had a long history and I went to bed remembering my teddy bear. His name was Billy. I have no idea where he went astray. Maybe it was during our move from Maine to Boston in 1960, but I wished he came out of the trees tonight and rolled over to shut my eyes.

My next connection to bears came from the book GOLDILOCKS. My dearly departed mother read it to my older brother and me before switching to Lynd Ward’s THE BIGGEST BEAR as a bedtime tale. The plot followed a nicer version of THE YEARLING, in which a boy adopted a bear cub in a Maine farming community until the bear grew too big to be with humans. The happy ending was the capture of the bear by hunters from a city zoo, although the bears at Franklin Zoo in Boston did not seem to happy with their lot in life.

Once we moved from Maine to the South shore, bears figured less and less in our lives, but they popped up as Yogi and Boo-boo on TV and I read THE BIGGEST BEAR at least three times a year. I begged my father to take us to Franklin Zoo in Boston and he relented one week. The lions and tigers slept on dusty soil and I said in front of the bear den, “These bears don’t look very happy.”

“Bears are bears. They’re only happy when they’re eating,” explained my father, but I never asked to visit the zoo again.