I shared a house with Maia for seven years. People sometimes assumed we were a couple, but we were not. She did, however, help raise Liam since he was only seven when we moved there. Liam and I both learned a lot from her and I imagine we might have rubbed off on her as well, though I’m not sure she would cop to such a concept.
I’ve known Maia since I was about 22 when I moved to Baltimore and went to school with her sister. We had even traveled for a couple weeks in Peru together (though that saga deserves its own project). In 2003, she was operating a fledgling home-cooking service. I was staying temporarily at her mother’s trying to make a plan and she said, “Come up on the hill and cook with me.” So I did and ended up staying for a long time. The cooking business didn’t make it, but we certainly did plenty of cooking. And baking. And canning. And jam making. And eating. And visiting. And we successfully managed to share with three dogs and three cats a tiny house that I worked continuously to organize and clean. That part wasn't really a “we” operation since, as Maia’s friend Sister Mary Martha told her, “a housekeeper you are not.” My joke about the housekeeping was that as soon as I cleared off the surfaces and found places for everything, Maia would go to a yard sale. That is not actually a joke. Rather, it falls into the category “true jokes,” which are, of course, the best ones.
Maia likes clutter and I learned to live with it.
Maia tells the story of raising her voice and yelling at Liam early in our residency. He surprised her by bursting into tears and she says she realized that no one had ever yelled at him. Teaching Liam to hold his own and not get personal in a raised-voice confrontation is not something he could have learned from me. But I was not against Liam learning how to stand his ground, and I let him negotiate his own way with Maia.
Sometimes Liam does things or says things and I think, “He learned that from Maia.” For example, he will go through the refrigerator, ceremoniously opening all the containers of left-overs, and take the time to fix himself a nice-looking platter with a little bit of the food from each container. Had he learned just from me, he might stand in front of the refrigerator and polish off a single container!
The reason the word of the day led my thought to meander around sharing a house with Maia was that she liked having at least one bottle of shampoo of every color in the shower at the same time on the grounds that you never knew what color you might feel like using on a given day. Prior, I had never questioned the assumption that one should use exactly one bottle of shampoo at a time. But who could argue with the concept of having all colors available at all times?
She was definitely a colorful person- and reminds me of my ceramics teacher in high school. I don't I ever remember seeing her without clay smudged on some part of her- clothing, hands, face. Even a graduation!
