A reason to rejoice > Author Doris Grumbach came to Maine and dropped her cloak of depression

Doris Grumbach lives at the edge of the water in Sargentville near the Deer Isle-Sedgwick Bridge. She is a writer, radio commentator, and former literary editor of The New Republic. She has four grown daughters and lives with a woman named Sybil Pike. They run Wayward Books, a store that specializes in unusual publications and neighborly chitchat. This year, Grumbach’s book “Coming Into the End Zone,” a journal written during her 71st year, was published.

These are the facts about Doris Grumbach.

A dozen years ago, I knew of Grumbach in a different setting. She was an English professor at American University in Washington, D.C., where I was a student. I never took one of her classes; I never saw her face. But I often walked by her office and read her name.

In the past decade, I’ve noticed that name on books, articles, and reviews, and heard the husky voice behind it speak on National Public Radio. Though she remained a stranger to me, I felt a certain connection with this woman.

That connection increased when I recently read “Coming Into the End Zone.”

To the backdrop of the Capitol Hill neighborhoods of my youth, Grumbach records her resentments, criticisms and anger about growing older. And, as if the regional coincidence weren’t enough, Grumbach’s book also tells how she fell in love with the Blue Hill peninsula and migrated north.

Both Washingtonians, both lured by Maine, it seemed this Doris Grumbach and I should meet.

In a raucous rainstorm, I drove down the leafy corridor from Bangor to Grumbach’s coastal home — appropriately named the Captain White House. (In D.C., we each lived not far from another White House.) Despite the familiar scenery of her story, the theme of ungraceful aging and the pessimistic outlook on life left me feeling uneasy. I had also read a review that called the book “cranky,” and a local writer-friend of mine had described Grumbach as a “grouch.”

Yet, Grumbach greeted me heartily, and we spoke of Washington, of swimming in the miraculous Maine waters, and of her book. She told me bookstores will probably file it in the sports section because of the title. (An earlier, serious novel, “The Missing Person,” was shelved as a mystery, and a second novel, “Chamber Music,” was shelved as a music book.)

Our discussion quickly turned to the book’s dark world vision and final description of how Grumbach threw off the cloak of depression, which weighted life during that fateful 71st year. Most of Grumbach’s book describes that depression in detail. In fact, reviewers criticized Grumbach for the unbelievably happy twist of fate at the end of her otherwise gloomy story. But, she argued, the move to Maine really did change her life:

“It is not a literary device. It was the way that year happened. It was an epiphany, I suppose. What I have here is what I’ve always wanted, but couldn’t have. I came to Maine and began to live in the sight of this ever-present beauty.”

Here Grumbach motioned to the cove, visible from her study window and depicted in the frontispiece of “End Zone.” In the book, Grumbach describes swimming as a return to the lightness and agility of youth. Underwater, she forgets the heaviness of her heart and the slowness of her aging body.

As a child living on Riverside Drive in New York City, she would look out the bathroom window to see a slice of the Hudson River. Even then, she knew she wanted to be near the water. “I told myself: `When I grow up, I’m going to live in a house where all the windows look out on water.’ It took me 63 years to do that.”

Each winter, when Grumbach returns to her Washington apartment, she fears the ever-increasing dangers of the city and her own vulnerability there. She remembers Washington when its many neighborhoods were safer, long before it won the distinction of being the murder capital of the world. Her distaste for inner-city perils, and concern for social and environmental issues such as the AIDS epidemic and nuclear power, strongly influenced her decision to move to Maine.

“The world never looks rosy,” she said. “I’m glad it was the color I saw it and not what people said it would be. I never had a great deal of hope, but in this small arena, I feel contentment.”

” `End Zone,’ ” said Grumbach, “is for anyone who resembles me: aging, despairing, having many strong dislikes, and troubled about the condition of the world, but finding, when coming close to the end, some reason to rejoice.”

It seems like a solitary life that Grumbach lives, spending long days in the company of her books while her partner tends the bookstore. In the evenings they share meals, movies, and thoughts. Both are active in the community, and know the locals because, as Grumbach said, “everyone comes to the bookstore sooner or later.”

This quiet life, for which she waited so long, is filled with small satisfactions, and Grumbach, despite her cynicism and grimaces, is a woman of faith — in her God, in her friends, in herself.

Toward the end of our conversation, when our thoughts on Washington were spent for that day, she looked through the window, out into the fine cove, and said:

“The one thing in life that persuades one that life is worth living is love — for another person and that person’s love for you.”