Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Lake Massabesic, springtime 2007

Originally uploaded by Broompl.

Scrawny NH pine trees and pale springtime sky–Lake Massabesic reflects them.

Tonight I’m missing my beautiful NH, even though I now enjoy similar cold, wet springtime in Massachusetts. (My daffodils are coming up, but no buds yet!)

Lake Massabesic provides drinking water to my hometown of Manchester, NH. My raffish and beloved great-uncle Joseph P Devine and his wife, the former Mae Kelly, lived right on that lakefront, when I was a little girl. Of course, it is forbidden to swim in that water–but not to sail boats on it.

Let me digress to say more about my Uncle Joe, aka within the family as “Darlin’ Joe.” Much more than my grandfather Maurice Francis Devine (his baby brother) Uncle Joe carried on the traditions of his Irish parents–and he was their favorite. He and Aunt Mae took over both the family businesses that had grown out of the very successful carpentry trade built up by Patrick Devine–the Devine Funeral Home (because carpenters build lots of coffins) and the Devine Travel Bureau (because recent immigrants want to take those coffins home to be buried in Ireland.)

But whenever the humor was upon Uncle Joe, he and Aunt Mae would shutter both those businesses (which shared one building) and gather up some of the many children who loved them both for some new adventure. Often they’d take a whole bunch of us to Hampton Beach, bringing us home bright-red with sunburn, full of lobster dinners and saltwater taffy.

Once they completely terrified my poor parents by keeping us out until something like 2 a.m. at a drive-in movie where we saw a wonderful double-feature of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald. My mother assumed that “dinner and a movie” was an event that would get her four children home by maybe, at the latest, 9 p.m.

Now, with that preparation, I hope my dear readers will not be shocked to learn that on one very hot day in one long-ago summer, my Uncle Joe took us four Devine kids on a boatride onto Lake Massabesic, in which, I repeat, you are not allowed to swim. We were all wearing life jackets because you must, on a boatride.

In the middle of Lake Massabesic, Uncle Joe stopped. “Now,” he reminded us, “swimming is forbidden here. But sometimes it just happens … that you fall off a boat!” He then picked me up and threw me far into the water! Yes, remarkably, all four Devine children “fell” into Lake Massabesic on that hot day and had to swim back to the boat.

Not that I’m recommending to anyone else to be as naughty as my Uncle Joe. But now, looking back, I realize just how lucky I was to have known him.