Last June, for my birthday, Kathy and I spent a week in an old cottage on a Maine lake. As Maine lakes go, this one was neither particularly large nor remote. It was about the size of the Cape’s largest ponds and only 20 minutes from Portland. The cottage, too, seemed at first nothing special. We were told the older part of it was built “around 1911,” but much of its original charm had been “renovated” out and the place looked generally run down. The day we arrived there were lots of motorboats