There’s an intermittent low rumbling in the air this morning. I think they are shelling the beach.
I’m reminded that the Wednesday West Tisbury Farmer’s Market isn’t
nearly as good as the Saturday one.
There’s no Grumpy Potato Guy, or Fancy Potato Lady, and critically, there
is no corn anywhere! And this isn’t
restricted to Wednesdays, but the Grey Barn people are just a little too full
of themselves, which is annoying given that I want to buy a fine Prufrock
cheese but I hate rewarding arrogance. Still,
the egg rolls and an iced Vietnamese coffee are and always will be a Breakfast
of Champions. And there’s a new guy
selling pork, sitting in the back of his pickup truck, in a little collapsible
chair, straw hat on his head, feet bare and covered in . . . pig farm
muck?
A gent, stopping by: “Just wanted to say
hello!”
Pig Farmer Guy: “Yeah, just give me a
minute, I’m doing some math.” (continues
to sit there. It is in his head,
apparently.)
Later: the beach is intact,
with only minimal shells. Today we bring
cards and after a couple jolly rounds of BS, Izzy and I settle in for a poker
lesson. I’m accused of cheating but all
I was really doing was winning. There
are a couple of ospreys doing lazy circles in the sky and occasionally
practicing their diving, or at least, they keep shooting down and then pulling
up. Maybe they are mistaking seaweed
clumps for fish. Or maybe it’s a shark –
too big for an osprey!
It’s kind of windy today and our new umbrella quickly gives up the
ghost, what a piece of crap. But when
you walk into the wind, as I did on the second leg of a long walk to the Split
Rock, it is wonderfully cleansing.
We bring a few entertainments to the beach: books, of course, and the cards and a small
Packers football, and the Waboba ball. The
latter is specially designed to a) float and b) bounce on the water if you
throw it just right. We spend endless
hours playing piggy-in-the-middle, to the point where Bill says he might get
Waboba elbow if he keeps at it. Peter
responds, then I guess you’d need Tommy Bahama surgery. Hey-o!
In case you are counting, yes, it has been four trips to Cronig’s in
four days.
As noted above, all rental houses have a random collection of books,
which is fun to consider. Who left this
one, that one? Do they belong to the
owner or some previous renter? And what
do they say about the owner or the person who left it? Many houses hereabouts have a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard
Bach’s ornithological allegory about freedom and basically Sticking It To The
Man, or in this case, The Flock. It’s a
slim story that you could spend some time in, pondering flight and leaving The
Flock (which could be said to be the same thing), or one’s greater purpose, or
just giggling at the fact that the gulls sometimes address each other as “Hey,
man” as in, “hey, man, where did they learn to fly like that?”
Even more fascinating was the piece of paper that fell out of the back
of this copy of Jonathan Livingston
Seagull. It was a resume, ca. 1982,
of one Cynthia Berman, who had just graduated from Wellesley and was seeking an
opportunity to develop and apply her skills in organizational psychology.
Despite a kind of ho-hum resume, we’re happy to report that young Cynthia did
grow up to be a psychologist with a private practice in Cambridge. Thank you, interwebs, for permitting us some
closure to the story of Cynthia Berman.[1]
[1] Some members of our party find this whole episode a little
creepy. What if she’d been dead, for
example?
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