I sit here, at my kitchen table, wrapped up in flannel, wearing a ski cap (it is FREEZING, despite the heat blasting throughout my apartment), waiting for my computer desk to be delivered. Blog publishing is temporarily down, but I figured I would pass the time by giving some bullet points about my long luscious holiday at home.
— My parents took me out to dinner for my birthday on Tuesday night, after my arrival. We went to a restaurant in Jamestown, right on the water, looking directly out at the lit-up fantastical Newport Bridge. We sat on the glassed-in porch, candlelit, had some wine, ate some fresh seafood (I said to the water: “So what you’re saying is, is that basically my entree was swimming out in Narragansett Bay as of this morning.) and talked up a storm. It is a complete joy: my relationship with my parents. They are terrific. Not only is there love between us, but there is also LIKE between us. As in: I feel like my parents actually LIKE me, and I like them. It’s very cool.
–Wednesday morning, my birthday, began early. I opened my eyes, peeked at the window, and saw a world of white. The snow was still falling. Our backyard looked like Narnia.
–All the New Yorkers were arriving that evening. 10:30, 11:30 p.m. I spent a long quiet day with myself. I drove down to Narragansett Beach, the car being buffeted about by the wind. The beach’s sand was packed hard and frozen, with a layer of snow on it, reaching right up to the water. Crashing ice-green waves pounded the shore. The wind was fierce. If I had to choose only one sound to listen to all the rest of my days, it would be the sound of surf. I found some beach glass. Which is a symbol for me. — (undisclosed name) and I both collected beach glass. It was a “thing” between us. After it all ended, and I moved to New York, occasionally I would get a tiny envelope in the mail, open it up and a teensy piece of beach glass would fall out. There would be no note, nothing. But I didn’t need a note. So every time I go to the beach, every time, I have a beach-glass search. And so far, with all of my hundreds of trips to the beach, I have never ever come away empty-handed. It’s amazing. And once I find the piece of beach glass, it is as though it has been waiting for me all along. “Ahhh, there you are…” I think, as I bend over and scoop it up.
— Picked my brother, Melody, and Cashel up at the train station that night. I was expecting to see my brother get off the train, carrying a passed-out small child in his arms, but this was not the case. I got out of the car to wave them my way, and from across the parking lot I could hear the nonstop Cashel chatter going on. It is all about Star Wars. All Star Wars, all the time.
— Thanksgiving images: A full house. The smell of turkey from the kitchen. Snow-packed fir trees outside. Siobhan playing the piano. The living room floor cluttered with Fisher Price. A LOT of laughter. Brendan made Bloody Marys for the group. My father and Hunter talked extensively about painting, about the painter Jack Yeats. The entire time a small Jedi Knight bounded nonstop in and out of our space. Racing down the hallway, with his imaginary light saber. The whole morning, also, we were waiting for Jean to show up. It was like Waiting for Godot. Jean did arrive and immediately put on an apron and went to work. Hunter and Cheryl sat down at the kitchen table and began to make placecards for everybody at the table. It was adorable: our two guests with construction paper, scissors and magic markers. Hunter feverishly wrote RHYMES for everyone at the table. He literally did this in 10 minutes, as the food was being set out.
Rhymes I remember:
Siobhan: Siobhan is a bartender, she serves drinks
She goes home early and about songs she thinks
Jean: Jean lives in Rhode Island, she drives a jeep
Out of her brain education seeps
Mine: Sheila lives in another state
She dreams of Sharon Tate
Hysterical. Out of her brain education seeps??? WHAT?
We feasted. We talked. My mom outdid herself. It got dark outside, and our dining room was lit by candles. The snowy night outside. Brendan has written three chapters of a book as Umero Nuno, a bizarre parody of Umberto Eco’s nonsense. It is SO STUPID and SO FUNNY. He read it aloud to us at the table, in the accent of Umberto Eco. I was crying.
— A bunch of us headed down to The Ocean Mist that night. We were meeting up with Rachel, another Rhode Islander. Her birthday was on Thanksgiving. Jean drove us all there, taking the back way. Dark country roads, lined with snow-covered fir trees, with random mailboxes perched at the end of the dark driveways. We blasted The Eminem Show during our journey, much to Hunter’s chagrin. However, when we got out of the jeep, Hunter had to admit, “I hate what Eminem stands for, but I have to say I liked all of what I just heard.”
The Mist was pretty dead. Rachel was there, in her red kimono jacket, with her sister, playing pool. There were a group of guys playing darts, and a couple of drunken fishermen sitting at the bar. And then US. 6 dressed-up girlie girls, and one gay man. We had a blast. We pumped the jukebox full of money. Hunter said, “I really need to gay this place up…” so he picked out a bunch of dance tunes. Each of the girls had gone up separately to the jukebox, and each one of us separately chose “Without Me” by Eminem. One observation: the first time “Without Me” began … Eminem’s loud bratty voice screaming like a punk: “TWO TRAILER PARK GIRLS GO ROUND THE OUTSIDE, ROUND THE OUTSIDE, ROUND THE OUTSIDE…” the atmosphere in the place changed. People started moving. Dancing. You could feel the excitement level rise, and no way can you stand still when that song comes on. There was a guy we referred to as “Daddy Warbucks”, who was doing some rather alarming dance moves. We cowered in fear.
We were a table of girls, shrieking along to Eminem, dancing on our stools. The bartender, who was highly amused by us, randomly turned on a colored disco ball which was right above our table.
— One thing about the Mist, which I don’t know how to describe (I wish I had had a camera, or that David Lynch were there to film it for me): The Mist is a huge shack which sits directly on the beach. There is a deck, where you can stand outside in the summer, and drink Bloody Marys, watching the ocean roll in below. The deck is on stilts, and on really stormy days, the grey waves crash directly under The Mist. It’s spectacular. The “front” of the bar sits right on the road, and actually has the look of that bar in The Accused. The “back” of the bar is lined with windows, looking right out onto the ocean. The bar teeters so close to the shore, that you can only see water out those windows, no sand.
Okay, so there’s the set up. Now you can picture what I am about to attempt to describe.
We stroll into the shack that is the Mist. It was nighttime, so of course all of the windows facing the ocean were pitchblack. There are floodlights on the Mist deck, however, and they were on, shining out into the blackness that we knew was the ocean. And I got a glimpse of something very bizarre, wasn’t sure if my eyes were seeing correctly … Then I realized what it was and I felt the surge of excitement in my soul that I get when I am confronted with something out of nature which (that??) is truly phenomenal. Bobbing on the black surface were, no lie, 150 seagulls. Blindingly white, like paper cut-outs of birds on a black background. They were just hanging out in the spill of floodlights, which, apparently, they like to do. But I have never seen anything like it. I stood at the window, with my beer, gaping out at them. I could tell that the ocean was heaving only because these white paper-cut-out seagulls were bobbing up and down. They did not move. Or swim. Or fly. They all just sat there, on top of the frigid black waves. I wish I had a picture of it. It is something that has to be seen to be believed. It looked unreal. Like it couldn’t be something merely created by Mother Nature. It was a picture, a poem, an image that spoke to my soul. So BEAUTIFUL.
— Saturday night I hooked up with Betsy, a friend since we were 10 years old. She was Nancy to my Artful Dodger, once upon a time. We wrote a book together at the age of 11 called What Lies Below the Well. Oh, if I could find that manuscript now! It, to me, is like one of the precious pieces of papyrus lost forever when the library at Alexandria (or was it Ramses II’s library?) burned down. We were so obsessed with Oliver at the time that we made our heroine in the book have “gruel” for breakfast. Also, when the main characters peeked into the well, and saw that a staircase was inside, one of them exclaimed, “It’s a long thin winding stairway without any bannister!” We went to the Mews (another local watering-hole), had a drink, and then drove over to Mere’s house to hang out with her. A beautiful South County evening. We sat on Mere’s porch, drinking wine, with the Christmas lights strung up around us, talking, catching up. My friends from high school are essential
— Sunday morning, 7:30 am. FREEZING COLD. My friend Beth and Mere pull into the driveway. We have a date. To go get Bess Eaton coffees and take a walk on the beach. It is devastatingly early in the morning. We are bundled up like Eskimos. We are giddy with laughter. We are together for three hours, and literally do not stop talking EVER. There is not more than 10 seconds of silence in that entire time. The beach is so freezing that we feel like complete lunatics. It is low tide. We walk with the wind to our backs half the time. I love my friends. They are my heart. We turn around to head back to the car, and are immediately confronted with hurricane force gales. For a while, we walk backwards, pushing into the wind. Laughing at how ridiculous we are.
Without even looking or concentrating on it, I find another piece of beach glass. And think to myself: “Of course. There you are…” as I put it in my pocket.
We sit on the ocean wall, watching the waves rolling in. Beth regales us with a tale of how she accidentally tossed her keys into the ocean, while her two kids were sitting in the car, on Good Friday. An entire crowd gathers, trying to figure out how to get the keys back. Everyone has suggestions, two cents tossed in left and right. The keys can be seen in a gap in the rocks below, but the surf keeps crashing in, freezingly, and it is very dangerous. Two businessmen approach, and get completely involved in how to help this mother out. With two crying kids in the car. One of them begins knotting bungee cords together, and his friend teases him: “Who do you think you are? F***ing MacGyver?” Finally, a man walks along in a wet suit, who looks like Santa Claus, and calmly, rationally, steps out on the slippery rocks, scoops up the keys and hands them back to Beth. Beth’s daughter Ceileidh breathed in awe: “Santa helped us!” Beth’s kids refer to that as “the day Mom threw her keys into the ocean.” Beth tries to explain to them that it was an accident, of course she didn’t MEAN to whip her keys out into the waves … We also laughed at the thought of Santa making a benevolent appearance on Good Friday.
Our butts were completely frozen and numb after twenty minutes of sitting on that wall.
The ocean was incredible. Clouds racing overhead, turbulence in the sky. So the water was sometimes dark blue, sometimes a blazing green, other times a blinding sky-blue. And at times, looking out at the bay, the ocean was all of this at once.
— Jean drove me over to the school where she teaches to show me her classroom. This was on Friday. First of all: it was so strange and not altogether pleasant to be in a high school again. The long rows of green lockers, the cafeteria … Stressful memories. But Jean’s room made me want to cry. She explained everything to me: what the kids are working on, and why … She showed me some of their little essays which she had tacked up on a bulletin board. I had tears in my eyes reading some of them. These little 13 year olds, reading Rudyard Kipling, and talking about it in their papers. The room had a terrific vibe. I told Jean that it really feels like a team atmosphere in there. Like: we are here to ACCOMPLISH something, so let’s DO IT.
I’m very proud of Jean.
— Then we drove up to the Showcase Cinema, through yet another snowstorm, to see 8 Mile. AGAIN. This, too, shall pass. It’s an Eminem virus, taking over my blood.
— Cashel and I had a coloring fest one morning. He sat on my lap, in his pajamas, and we colored at the kitchen table. He drew (surprise surprise) Darth Vader fighting Luke Skywalker. Cashel purposefully drew Luke to have frowning eyebrows, to show how serious the battle was. He continuously informed me, lest I should forget: “You can’t be too mad at Darth Vader because he does go back to the light. He starts out light, then he goes to the dark side, but then he goes back to the light.” Yes. He goes back to the light. Eventually. So I won’t be too mad at Darth Vader, because, after all, he does find redemption, eventually, and that is what matters.
Cashel’s got a sensitive heart. A good heart.
