Hillery Occasionally

So I got this email from my dad today…we’re not talking yet, but we’re emailing our way through the nearly four year silence…asking me if I’d moved to Canada permanently, among other things.  I have not.  That is to say, there is no permanence in my life at the moment.

A month or so ago I bought a one-way ticket to Spokane, Washington, rented and SUV, and drove deep into the wilderness of British Columbia to maybe break up with my boyfriend or maybe make it. 
He lives part of the time in New York and part in the Canadian mountains.  Leave it to me to find the most complicated happy ending, right?  After ten days together and a week apart I remembered what they say about long-distance love affairs—they’re for assholes—and asked him to buy me my next one-way ticket.  I told the restaurant I needed an indefinite leave of absence, left my roommate with checks written out for two months of bills, kissed my cat goodbye, and that was that.

I’ve been here a week and I haven’t finished cleaning my new kitchen.  I open cabinets, cower in awe, rally with courage, and then dismantle and scour.  He signs off on piles assigned for drop off at the dump or conversely argues, “but my grandmother gave me that…and I was her favorite, sugar.”  How do you argue with that?  I throw up my hands and resolve to learn to love the slow cooker with crawfish dancing along the rim, incomplete with an ill-fitting lid.  At the very least, I’ll unearth a safe place to hide it. 

I make lists of things for him to do or buy and, miraculously, he does them and buys things.  There are no jobs here except for loggers and horticulturists, but I make the bed, and do the laundry, and bring in firewood, and load the dishwasher.  This leaves for a lot of downtime, thank heaven.  The first thing he crossed off my list was a writing desk.  We found an antique library table in Spokane and he loaded it into the back of his pick-up truck and then unloaded an entire room of furniture to make me a comfortable place to write.  So here I am, back to you, dear reader.

I have seeds and a starter set for gardening.  I’ll be planting my herbs tomorrow and working on my book and in the afternoon sometime we’ll go for a walk. 
Those are my boldest plans for the future.  Other items on my agenda include learning not to worry about what comes next, getting used to feeling loved, and not being afraid all of the time that affection will be stolen away from me in the night…or in broad daylight, for that matter.  Wish me luck!

Sometimes it feels as though we’re met with roadblocks at every turn.  Just as I was in the midst of elucidating and analyzing my love life, unfulfilling to the point of necessarily becoming imaginary, as you well know, dear reader…just as I was simmering the sum up, he came along…in the flesh.  The man I love.  Get that one and you get your name in the paper, as my father used to say of a seven-ten split. 

Solving the problem, as it were, in the middle of defining it leaves me at a disadvantage in this third installment.  I suppose the question becomes whether or not I met the man as a result of focusing so much attention on my issues with men.  Or perhaps it was simply the right time for both of us.  I don’t pretend to understand.  I do know I’ve been retraining my radar when it comes to attraction, wanting to focus on people who will be better for me and to me.  Looking back on what I’d been looking for over the years and who I’d been reeling in…well, it’s about time I started looking out for myself.

Although I feel I’ve finally resigned from the Fantasy Future Ex game, there may still be lessons to be learned through examination.  You see, there were things about Henry Rollins that appealed to me significantly, painful as it is to admit in hindsight, because I wanted them for myself.  It was his career in particular and also partially his notoriety.  He made enough money and got enough attention to start his own publishing company while touring both his band and spoken word act.  Then he got a radio show and then his TV show on IFC.  He’s the kind of entertainer who people feel passionately about.  They show up, not necessarily because of his latest film or record, but because they can’t get enough of Henry.  He is his own brand. 

For me, that was a larger part of the infatuation than I wanted to see while it was in full swing.  I think I also liked the idea of the age gap.  While Henry turned 45 this month, I am 33.  The potential experience gained in that nearly dozen-year difference seemed reassuring.  I see now that I liked picturing myself with someone who had established himself in a manner I eventually wanted to meet.  I suspect this is not uncommon.  And in reality, I don’t even want a profile that high…just, you know, slightly more than six readers, someday.

Oddly enough, my real live here-to-stay boyfriend was born exactly a week after Henry.  And while I’m enjoying the age gap, it’s less about gained experience than accrued maturity.  He asks me why we didn’t meet a decade or more ago and I remind him he was Hell-on-wheels in his thirties.  He’s established himself in his field, a creative one at that, making a living as a painter for twenty years now and touring for a bit with a rock band in his wilder days.  But what I find more important is the way he treats me and feels about me and that he can and does articulate those feelings.  Still, I appreciate that these intimate riches could not come, at least not as easily, without the collective boon of professional approval and life lessons learned.

My bottom line, I suppose, is something along the lines of: fantasy is good, examination is better yet, but there will always be mystery…something beyond any bottom line.  Would you have it any other way?

You’re on the street—loud—calling me out. You haven’t seen me since that party, months ago, when I told you we weren’t really friends. I see you first and resolve to say hello even if you don’t see me, but you turn at the last moment and double take. I say hey without breaking stride. You say my name and I turn as I pass and say hey again. That’s when you get loud, calling my name. I turn all the way around and say, “I said hey,” as I keep walking. You call me again, louder. I backtrack and repeat, “I said hey.”

You are dumb. I shake your hand. You pull me in to kiss my cheek saying, “Since when do we do that?” Since we’re not really friends, I think. Since we’re like magnets—if we’re not on top of each other we’re best apart. Since I look amazing tonight and you’ve been thinking about me these months, but the mental picture was aged and fraying.

“Have I done something,” you ask, “to deserve this? To make you not come and see me anymore?” I never liked this bar and you know that, I think. And yet what I want to say is so much better, such a perfect retort it’s almost as if you’ve set me up. What I want to say is, “Well, you got married.”

I say, “No.” I say, “You’re not usually out here, but I walk this way all the time.” And haven’t I imagined this moment on all those other nights, carefully scanning the crowd outside as I passed…

I say, “You have a good night,” as I walk away and you watch me go.

Pretty girl keep growin’ up…Playin’ makeup, wearing guitar… 

A slight interruption in our broadcast schedule to let you know, in case you didn’t, how cool The Replacements are.  You should be listening to them right now.  (And once you hear Alex Chilton, you should start listening to The Box Tops too.  Ooh, and then Big Star!)  Solid Rock, great lyrics, totally relevant to the human condition…Paul Westerberg, but better for not knowing what the Hell he was doing and the company he kept.

Every relationship, real or imagined, develops from one kind of thing into another—but they all start with a spark.  You notice something about your other that compels you not to look away, not for a second.  I noticed Henry Rollins the first time I ever saw him, in Punk: Attitude, a rock-doc from Don Lets on a generation of music that at the time was completely unknown to me.  The film was solid, but my second (consecutive) viewing was solely to the purpose of confirming my first impression of this man—yes, I could listen to him talk endlessly and about anything and everything he might judge worthy of discussion.

I was in luck.  As a latecomer to his fandom, there were already hundreds of minutes of spoken word at my disposal.  I had a vocal record of Henry from his mid-twenties right up through the present, his early forties.  And thanks to the blizzard that paralyzed traffic in New York City that winter, I had nothing much else to do.  I used my new AirTunes gadget to stream everything I could download through my stereo—from bootlegs of early live shows to Eric the Pilot (parts one through six).  I listened to everything Henry had to say.  And with this influx of material—in lieu of any real interaction—I moved from one stage to another.

Infatuation is a willful state.  You hold on to your vision of the other through that lens of initial attraction.  While you may allow further appealing character traits into focus, you are quick to ignore or rationalize observations that don’t jibe with who or what you want to see.  You do not wish to pull back for a clearer look at the actual person or, in the event that such a one is wholly unknown to you, a look into that vast chasm of everything you do not know.  Being infatuated is the act of the lover and often has little to do with the loved.  Thus I am honest in saying that I was totally infatuated with Henry.  I didn’t need to know him in order to objectify him—it was probably more convenient that I didn’t.  He had no opportunity to mar my picture of the man I found it convenient for him to be.

And what did I latch onto in the first place, you might wonder.  What got me so excited about Henry?  He talks hard.  He’s an autodidact with a phenomenal vocabulary and not only does he know how to tell a story, he’s got a seemingly bottomless cache to draw from.  He’s aged exceptionally well.  Being Straight Edge, he hasn’t smoked, drunk, or drugged his looks away.  In fact, he’s easier on the eyes at forty-something than he was in his twenties.  When he talks about women, though it’s clear we represent to him an uneasy balance in the crosshairs of perturbation and desire, he never underestimates our sex.  “There is nothing more intense—in the world—than a female anything.”  Interpret that as you like, but remember it comes from Mr. Intensity himself.

That was the spark.  Any Psych 101 student will tell you that this is simply projection.  Like seeks like and people look for signs of themselves in others.  Language is my instrument.  Even more, I fancy myself a raconteur.  I would like to deny it, but all facts point to decided vanity on my part.  I desire the good company of men without pretending to completely understand them or their drives.  These facts about me mesh neatly with what first drew me to Henry.  And, in the world, I accept this explanation for the expedient tunnel vision that facilitates one person bonding to the idea of another…to an extent.  But when it comes to the fantasy future ex game the delusion runs deeper and, I think, it can be more revealing than mere projection.

My infatuation with Henry was drawn out over three decades of monologues.  In the recordings made in his twenties (The Boxed Life, Big Ugly Mouth, and Sweatbox) we got a fairly coarse Henry.  He was angry.  He hated U2, Edie Brickell, and all cops with a passion that overpowered any potential pause for explanation.  Except for the opportunity to make himself, or men in general, the butt of the joke, he was painfully uncomfortable on the subject of women.  Masturbatory technique was covered at length.  While you sigh and say to yourself, “Who hasn’t heard this before?” I answer that Henry does it better and I raise you the little flashes of brilliance interspersed throughout: TV ads for condoms, the Charles Bukowski postage stamp, and method-acting what he thought he was like the last time he’d gotten a full night’s sleep in order to carry on a coherent conversation with a suit from his record label.

In his thirties (Think Tank, A Rollins in the Wry, and Live at the Westbeth Theater) Henry mellowed…a bit.  This is when his role as Boy Scout came to the fore.  He didn’t want to pick a fight exactly, but there was some seriously asinine shit going down all around and he just had to point it out.  From mutant-monitoring at the Rite Aid to pining for literacy to the point that he advises teaching Clintonese in public schools…from learning secondhand that he was supposedly on the verge of coming out to Kennedy on MTV to knocking himself out cold on stage in front of thousands of people with his own microphone…from forcing himself to accept the entirely emasculating ritual of shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond to the similarly dire stakes of dating women, now that he’s a man, rather than girls.  What can I possibly say?  The one where he harasses his doctor, who also happens to tend to the throat of Michael Bolton, via facsimile from all corners of the world had me in tears I was laughing so hard.  It’s replaced Dennis Miller’s The Off White Album as my social litmus test.

In his forties, before he started his show on IFC, his spoken word material (Nights Behind the Treeline, Talk is Cheap I-IV, and the Shock and Awe tour) just about doubled.  He was talking all the time and in the era of W and the war his mellow side took a back seat.  The asinine shit was going to swallow us and Henry was our self-appointed defender, cultivating a rage in us to match his own and hopefully catapult us out of our comfortably entrenched American apathy.  This included downloading a transcript of a state of the union address from the Washington Post to better mock our president…to take it to a literal level.  You want a recipe for getting my panties twisted—that’s it.  On top of that, Henry’s wistful longing for the materialization in LA of women he could relate to was akin to my own practice of waiting, earnestly, for the perfect man to show up on my doorstep.  There’s an added allure in the idea of a man with so much appeal not being able to make a long-term connection.  I think it’s because, until we do, who of us doesn’t feel like the most extraordinary overlooked soul there ever was.  If Henry could fuck up the whole intimacy thing and still be cool, I was in no danger.  Even if I was infatuated with a man I’d never meet.

Most people, when they date real people, get to a point where they realize they’ve got to fish or cut bait. They wade through posturing and psychological gambits to see if the more they know about this mysterious other actually suits them.  In the fantasy future ex game you either meet a real guy, catch Jemaine Clement on TV one day, or for some other reason your crush fizzles out.  My love for Henry was starved to death when my consumption of his persona outpaced his ability to provide me with new material.  He had his radio show, his touring, a reprint that deserved a new edition, a small part in a film, and he was prepping his IFC show.  There simply wasn’t time to flirt with the world at large for a while.  Too bad for me.  Or maybe not.  With a little distance working to my advantage, I see now what I didn’t see then about Henry…and what I was really seeing in him.

I’m going to admit it right up front, I hate dating.  I’ve done a lot of it, mostly in New York, and while I’ve wound up with a couple of nice boyfriends my statistics would suggest it’s a losing proposition…for me.  That’s why anytime I see something I like, someone who captures my loser-magnet gravitational pull, I dub him my future ex.  Best-case scenario, from a historical perspective, that’s what he’ll be.

I haven’t always been so jaded.  Like Janet Livermore, Bridget Fonda’s naïve character in Singles, I used to have a list of things I looked for in a man. 

1.  Employed

I didn’t care so much what the job was, janitor or journalist, just so long as the guy had somewhere to go and something to do from day to day…and at least a modest income.  I used to live in Williamsburg and I was particularly looking to avoid two similar strains of young men—the trust-funded and the lay-about.  The former, in my opinion, had no real perspective on life and the latter was not at all interested in gaining one.  Furthermore, men without drive are not the kind of men you want to get into the habit of sleeping with, or so went my logic.

2.  Hygienic

Me, I like a good bather.  Either I don’t know how to rationalize this one or I don’t understand why I need to.  I never did get you, dirty boys.  I know it’s a look, but what is it saying?  Are you too high?  Too lazy?  Too constantly inspired by your own brilliance to give yourself a wash?  Not interested.

3.  Coiffed

I’m not talking about a pompadour here, just a haircut.  I’ve always felt that if a man cannot choose and maintain a haircut—be it a ponytail, a buzz cut, or an afro—there’s something indicative of other character flaws in that inability…to commit.

4.  Aware

This does not apply to blind dates, but if you want to go out with me I always felt you should have at least an inkling of how fantastic I am.  In New York, especially, men and women scam and hook up for so many different reasons.  If you’re going to the trouble of dating though, you should probably have some interest in the other person’s…interests…and perhaps less concern over their look, or job, or income, or sexual ease.  I know all of these things come together in one’s subconscious calculation of attraction, but if you’re looking to see this person again and again and again it might be cool to, you know, dig what she’s about.

For a long time that was my Livermore list.  Some of my friends laughed at it and others thought it was obsolete, “Hillery, who would consider anyone missing any of those things?”  Then over time and for no particular reason, like Janet, I condensed the list considerably.  When people would ask me what I was looking for I’d say, “Oh, you know, someone who’s nice, but not dull.”

Nice and not dull?  Nice and not dull isn’t even nice and a refreshing change of pace.  Nice and not dull is hoping, at best, to avoid someone who beats you but otherwise bores you to tears.  Are you kidding me?  Talk about reducing your expectations to the point where you’re sure you won’t be disappointed and then having to roll them back again, and again.  I’m fairly sure that’s what got me to nice and not dull.

I don’t think we ever really give up our list.  Experience may influence the contents and we may deny its existence, but everyone I know who’s single clings to a romantic ideal of one sort or another.  I call mine my fantasy future ex-boyfriend.  He’s the guy I design for myself from time to time, molded on a handful of details I might pull together about men I’ve met casually or seen on TV.  My fantasy future ex interactions are often more fulfilling than those with the actual men who float through my life because they give me the rare opportunity to admit, if only to myself, what I really want in a partner…or at least what I’m craving.

This is a little game we all play from one degree to another.  What I find interesting is that in examining how we construct our ideal other we can in effect deconstruct our own desires, I think.  Anyway, it’s my excuse for dishing on my ultimate fantasy future ex-boyfriend.  Tune in next time for: The Girl Who Loved Henry Rollins.

Turns out, it’s not all that hard in here for a pimp…not if you don’t have to leave your bed to get the word out.  Okay, not exactly the same thing, but it’s working for me…sort of.  I’m well aware that I don’t have a ginormous media footprint, what with my six regular readers and all, but here I am nonetheless.  What am I doing?  Oh right, let me tell you about my friends who actually get things done, rather than moi (who yammers and dodders). 

Once upon a time, I was a barfly.  Hard to believe, I know.  I went to the same bar all the time and I was very attached to my bartenders.  When they left I would grieve.  In an attempt to hand me over cleanly, without the dénouement, David told me he had hand-picked Katherine as his replacement with me in mind.  She was a writer…a good one…I had nothing to worry about.  Years later after she’d left the bar and we were friends I told her this story and then Katherine told me the truth, which was a very different story indeed.  She’s quite good at knowing the difference between the two, which she proves expertly in her debut novel Rules for Saying Goodbye. 
The main character is also called Katherine Taylor and while the truth is omnipresent in every description, these are not strictly the facts of Katherine’s life.  I know Katherine and I know her stories and yet I couldn’t put this book down, partly because I couldn’t wait to see how it ended.  I laughed out loud at how smart her humor is in prose and paused at how gently she can provoke emotion.  Glamorous and enviable at times and all alone in a crowd (even if it’s a crowd of two) at others, the fictional Katherine Taylor wears shoes well worth walking in.  Buy the book!

So, before I departed Corporate America to pursue creative endeavors that’s exactly what my friend Russell Brown did.  I totally copied his paper, except he finished the test.  He made a movie!  I know everybody’s friend made their first feature the other day and they can’t all be good, so I had fairly low expectations when I sat down at the screening.  I was totally floored!  It was beautiful to look at and meaningful and there are real actors, you know, doing real acting—not like in everybody else’s friend’s first feature.  I knew Russell was smart and savvy, but I had no idea he had full-blown characters in him who felt so much and could move me so deeply.  The film is called Race You to the Bottom and it’s available on DVD right now.  Check it out!

Back when I had the office job I wasted time trolling strange websites, just like you.  My favorite was TheSpark.com where Christian Rudder operated this quirky corner of bizarre experiments wherein he cultivated a nasty case of Athlete’s Foot and got people to gain 30 pounds in 30 days.  Once I saw the Date My Sister Project, I had to meet the guy. 
I tried to get him and his partner to do a book and he said, “Thanks.  I just started this band with my friend Justin and I’m going to see how that goes.”  I may have scoffed.  He sent me their demo and I’ve been hooked ever since.  The band is Bishop Allen and their new record is The Broken String.  You should totally buy it and listen to it and love it, but don’t forget the buying it part!  My new favorite song is, you guessed it, The News from Your Bed.  Oh and they’re currently on tour, maybe coming to your town this very day.

Hopefully, at the very least, Katherine will listen to The Broken String, Russell will read Rules for Saying Goodbye, and Christian will see Race You to the Bottom—they’ll tell their other friends who actually do things, everyone will be duly admired and appreciated, and I’ll have it in writing that they heard it here first…my pimpin’ cred established for doing not very much at all, as per usual.

So, it’s my last day of vacation. 
I’m nursing a little bit of sunburn.  You really do need to apply sun block when it’s cloudy, even if you’re sitting in what looks like the shaded area on the deck—trust me on this.  The flip side is I got carded at the liquor store buying a bottle of white Burgundy.  Not just carded, scrutinized, and without a stitch of makeup on my face!  I don’t believe in fixing what ain’t broke, so I opted for a fresh clean face again today and whisked my new hat off to lunch. 

I went back to A Slice of Life (50 Circuit Avenue, Oak Bluffs, 508-693-3838), their slogan is “we love food,” by the way, and ordered the Fried Green Tomato BLT…again.  I cop to being a creature of habit, but I did order their grilled scallops on Tuesday night.  They were great, but for my last meal I wanted nirvana.  And I got it.

After savoring every last morsel, and taking this picture of my plate, I made my waitress listen to me kvell about my lunch. 
She kept nodding and saying, “I know!” again and again.  Then she told me that on her first day training she was too nervous to eat anything, not having a lot of experience, but the kitchen accidentally made an extra BLT and the chef gave it to her to eat in the back.  She said she took one bite and all her nerves disappeared.  “I thought, ‘I get to work here,’” she told me.  And that’s when I knew this was quite possibly the BLT of all time. 

Seriously, I recommend you go to Martha’s Vineyard just to eat here!  The clam chowder has won awards.  It was my pick of the week and you know I tried everyone’s chowder.  Not only that, but I actually ate the coleslaw that came with my BLT—all of it, both times—and I have a solid history of disdain for this particular summer side.  Okay, I’m moving on!

I stopped into Mad Martha’s, a Vineyard ice creamery since 1971, to see if they had any swag that my often irritated colleague Martha might enjoy, but I got my ice cream elsewhere.  I went into The Black Dog for t-shirts for my niece and nephew.  I bought a silver ring at the kiosk in the middle of Main Street in Vineyard Haven. 
And I thoughtfully appreciated my last afternoon tooling around amidst friendly traffic in the clunker.  We ordered dinner from John’s Fish Market (State Road, Vineyard Haven, 508-693-1220), where I’d been buying fresh fish.  They also take orders for prepared meals you can pick up after 5:30.  We got ginger glazed halibut and a fisherman’s stew very similar to bouillabaisse.  Super yum!

I flew out in an eight-passenger plane, same as I came in on, but as the ninth passenger I sat in the co-pilot seat.  For a white-knuckle flier, it was quite a pleasant and educational experience.  As we pulled away from the island, I could easily identify East Chop and West Chop and then, as we flew over, Oak Bluffs, Vineyard Haven, the yacht club and my friends’ house (by way of The Monstrosity, which is a sore thumb even from the air).  Finally I had to look ahead, but I can’t wait for next summer!

They say a good thing never lasts, but I generally feel as though I come into the good things I find at the tail end.  As Cameron Crowe put it, via his incarnation of Lester Bangs contemplating rock and roll, I get there just in time for the death rattle.  As I begin the end of my vacation, I’m feeling that way about this island.

It all started with The Monstrosity.  Wait, first the good news and then the bad.

Here is why, in my opinion, this place—Vineyard Haven and West Chop in particular—is ideal.  All the houses are pretty, tastefully landscaped, and well maintained without being cutesy or ostentatious.  Cutesy is Oak Bluffs.  Edgartown can certainly be ostentatious.  But Vineyard Haven is fairly laid back. 

The community is dedicated to preserving the quality of life here, but there are simply some roads that will never be paved because…well, what a bother! 
There’s a family living in the lighthouse, maintaining that federal property, and they have a basketball hoop over the garage door. 
The tennis club is participating in the voluntary water ban.  Most of the cars in the parking lot at the A&P have the same bumper sticker: Mopeds are Dangerous.  Everyone waves at me or says hello when I run or bike past them…and they mean it—the pleasantry is sincere.  They don’t know me, but I’ve found my way to their neck of the woods and that’s enough.  They’re happy to see me enjoying their way of life.

Then there are the people themselves—families who’ve been coming here for generations and the friends they’ve lured in to keep them company.  I overheard a conversation between two women at lunch the other day.  The older one said, “I know the Elliots introduced you to your husband, but did you know we invited them here for their first visit and helped them find their house?”  They look for any way to weave you into their lives. 

The yacht club is not what you think.  It has exactly eight deck chairs.  Mainly there are benches and picnic tables covered in plastic tablecloths. 
And no computers or cell phones are allowed on the deck.  Everyone knows each other one way or another or they introduce themselves and find they have someone in common.  There is no dress code.  People wear bathing suits, tennis clothes if they’re actually playing in the courts out back, or cargo pants and a t-shirt.  Strangers who sidle up and tell me they like my red polka dot dress simply mean it.  There are no cocktails. 

There is traffic in Vineyard Haven, but no one drives aggressively.  They stop for you and wave.  They ask you if you’re lost when you’re stopped on your bike consulting your book or map.  Also, people drive hybrids and clunkers, not monster SUVs.

The food is mostly grown or caught locally due to the expense of bringing cargo on and off the island.  I was at the fish market again yesterday and I saw a sign that read, “Fishing is not a life or death matter.  It’s far more important than that!”  And this is how people here feel about the food they provide.  There is a farm here that operates greenhouses without soil and another that has backtracked the farming of peaches to recreate The Real Peach.  I may get to taste one tomorrow, but my point is that someone cares about this.  These people care.

I’m also staying in a gem of a house.  Originally built in the1800s and architecturally renovated twenty-some years ago, it’s typical in size for West Chop.  It is fabulously located with a view of Vineyard Haven Harbor and a high hedge that keeps out the noise and general obstruction of cars passing on the road between the house and the waterfront. 
The view remains unobstructed because my friends helped turn the waterfront land into an extension of the Sheriff’s Meadow preserve.  And by securing against future building on this tract they unwittingly invited The Monstrosity…and the end is nigh.

Some Miami trial attorney with more money than sense bought the other two lots that face the protected waterfront land and is in the midst of constructing a five building compound with a swimming pool, tennis courts, a putting green, and a regulation basketball court. 
The hedge is not high enough to block this obstruction. 
As if anyone in the neighborhood were less than appalled by his activities, the owner has posted black and red signs at each end of the construction sight: Private Property, Keep Out!  This is what my friends call The Monstrosity.  I’ve taken to calling it Xanadu…better yet, Xana-Don’t!

I’ve been privy to all manner of worst-case scenario discussions since this business began, but you have to see it to believe it—to understand how things really are changing here.  You let someone like this get a foothold and in twenty years all you have left is yet another enclave for the super rich.  What do you wind up with? Loud parties, drunk drivers, dinner reservations, valet parking, spa day, and a makeover to cover those bags under your eyes.  In short, mopeds are the least of your dangers.

You know how I love to shout out from vaca!  I find myself fortunate to be spending the week with friends on Martha’s Vineyard and I don’t know when I’ve been to a more picturesque, friendlier place—certainly none with better food!

Monday I drove around between Vineyard Haven, where I’m staying, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown just to reacquaint myself with the geography.  I went to the fish market and got a three-inch thick cod filet and then when I picked up my friends’ grandson at the yacht club a friend of the family presented me with a bag of vegetables from his garden.  We ate it all together for dinner…so good!

I’ve been biking around on my friend’s GT Windstream every day.  Tuesday I rode a seven-mile route up around Lake Tashmoo to the Vineyard Sound beach and soaked up a little sun.   

Then I had lunch at A Slice of Life in Oak Bluffs.  I’ve been eating chowder every day, every way, but this place fed me the BLT of my life: fried green tomatoes, Applewood smoked bacon and thick-cut toasted rye bread with rosemary.  Unbelievable mouth heaven!!!

Today it was a little cloudy, but I’d had so much fun on my ride I went even further—a fifteen-mile trip to Christiantown and the Cedar Tree Neck Sanctuary.  I never actually found Christiantown and when I got to the nature preserve the hill was really steep and muddy going down, so I decided the rainbow was in fact the pot of gold and turned back. 

My inland adventure took me through woods, past farms, stables, lakes, and the last cranberry bog on the island.  (Aside from the latter, it reminded me a lot of rural Wisconsin—what those from the sticks call God’s country.)  I had a lobster roll for lunch and got home before it started to rain.

The sun might be gone for the rest of the week, but it’s not supposed to rain tomorrow so the Windstream and I will be out on Beach Road between Vineyard Haven and Edgartown.  Tonight we’re going to see Ratatouille and I get to try another wonderful vineyard eatery.  TTFN!