Just in time for autumn apple pie – oh and cranberry raisin, pumpkin, too — and heart-warming pot roasts – yes and roast turkey and pork and braised beef ribs – we took delivery of our new gas range. Shiny black and perfectly clean, and level (!).

We were happy to buy locally and to enjoy the perks attendant: free delivery and disposal of the beastly old range. One of its burners had to be lit with a match, and we could have lived with that for another eon. But when the oven went …

And so one afternoon last week I proposed to roast a chicken: roast chicken is to a new oven what champagne is to a new ship. But, in my haste to see the last of the old stove, I’d failed to remove the roasting pan from its drawer. A meeting at the library and a trip to Marden’s for a new roasting pan later, the ceremonial chicken was roasted.

Speaking of meeting at the library:the Sun Journal interviewed Kim Sequoia and me there last Tuesday.

I like attention as much as anyone, but was chagrined to see my name writ large in Wednesday morning’s Sun Journal.

I’m a newcomer to the Rumford Performing Arts Committee. The seven who have been meeting and working since mid-August are Mitzi and Kim Sequoia, Carolyn Nash, Dick Lovejoy, Burt deFrees, and, especially Chairman Jim and Carrie Rinaldo. Their names should be writ large!

Likewise, those who return again and again to give blood. Rumford Hospital partners with the Rumford Area Rotary to sponsor three blood drives a year. Jane Bubar coordinates the donor programs which are held at the American Legion. The Legion, too, conducts three drives a year. Donors know where to go.

Volunteers Dot Benedix and Patsy Merccier staffed the registration table at last week’s drive; others, Dick Lovejoy, Joe Sirois, Sonya Robinson, and I plied donors with water, juice, and snacks. We also timed their 15-minute apres-blood draw rests. And we visited: with George Kimball and Reggie LaPointe and Tammy Houghton, who was on a long break from Carlisle’s. “Bob won’t mind if it doesn’t get too busy.”

A good number of young people give blood: a pretty young woman, for example, whose boyfriend waited and hovered nearby. Another, a young man I took for a high school student. Asked if he’d taken time out from Dirigo or Mt. Valley High to give blood, he responded “I’m not in school.” “Oh, sorry” Remember when you hated to be mistaken for younger than your years? “I was class of ’08,” he added. Ah.

Turns out he is considering enrolling in the Bangor Job Corps. His description of the dorms and work and rules and regulations reminded me of Louis Cayer and his time in FDR’s CCC program during the Great Depression.

(Oh how that Louis Cayer could tell a story! Riding logs down the sluice by the Falls or trading cigarettes for eggs in World War II France. Wonderful.)

Today’s Job Corps is administered by the US Department of Labor. There are two “campuses” in Maine, one in Bangor and another in Limestone. Nancy Allen, Adult Education Director at Region 9, said that candidates for the Job Corps must meet eligibility requirements, including age (16 to 24), income, and a high school diploma or GED top.

There are, we all know, lots of young people in the River Valley for whom the Job Corps would be a boon.

To find out more, call 1-800-733-JOBS, or go to the web site: www.jobcorps.dol.gov.

Linda Farr Macgregor is a freelance writer; contact her: ljm@gwi.net

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