A ‘lobster coma’ and a trip down memory lane

Thank you to all who answered our reader survey — your feedback confirmed your love for UNH and your affection for this publication, while also offering new perspectives. As promised, one respondent was chosen at random to receive a lobster dinner for two, and that lucky person was Joanne Hartman, a California native who graduated from UNH in 1982. She shared a bit about her connection to UNH recently, and so I’m “yielding” my editor’s column space to her, because frankly, I couldn’t have described the feelings that connect us all to this place any better:

Recipe for Nostalgia

Grow up in northern California and spend a semester at UNH on an exchange program where you are introduced to lobster for the first time. Or “lobstah” as you hear it. “Wicked good lobstah.” Learn to be fine with wearing a plastic bib — a necessary yet extremely unfashionable fashion choice.

Fall in love with New England so much so that you transfer to UNH and spend three years doing all the things that New Englanders do: marvel at magenta-colored fall leaves, ice skate on frozen ponds, learn what wind chill factor means, get caught in summer thundershowers that make everything shamrock green. Decide that the Northeast is where you want to stay.

Graduate during a recession and reluctantly return home to California, where the hills are the color of camel humps and the crimson crustacean becomes a rare delicacy — an infrequent restaurant splurge only offered as tails or bisque.

Sort of forget about lobster, and try to replace it with crab. Not the same. At all.

cartoon headshot of Michelle Morrissey, UNH Magazine Editor-in-Chief
ILLUSTRATION BY KATHRYN RATHKE
Decades later, receive an email from the editor-in-chief of your alumni magazine that sounds like spam but is not. A drawing has been held of UNH Magazine readers who responded to a survey: YOU WON the grand prize of a lobster dinner for two shipped anywhere in the U.S.! You note the irony that this email arrives the same day you are on a cross-country flight to move to New York, so much closer to the land of your early days of crustacean love.

Wonder if the creatures will be alive. Thankfully, they arrive cooked. With no nutcracker on hand, you use the hammer in your tool kit to crack the shell, surprised by how easily the muscle memory returns, bending and twisting the tail to separate it from the body as if you’ve done it just yesterday.

Devour the meal on your deck, facing northeast toward New Hampshire. As you dip the last of the claws in the drawn butter, the look on your face is one your husband describes as “in a lobster coma.” He says they’re “fresh and sweet; buttery.” He’s right, but to you they taste like nostalgia. — Joanne Hartman ’82

Beautifully said, Joanne! I hope you all enjoy this issue and that something here evokes a memory of your time on campus.

MICHELLE MORRISSEY ’97
Editor-in-Chief, UNH Magazine
Alumni.editor@unh.edu