Monday, December 31, 2012
The most famous Vineyard visitor we never recognize.
I have my own Chelsea story but I’ll save it for last because . . . because it’s embarrassing, that’s why. It’s an “Oh God, I can’t believe I did that!” kind of riff, like tales about the time the hook wrapped around one's teen neck for shoplifting do-dads. So Chelsea has vacayed on our Island many times, virtually every summer with her parents, whether her father was a sitting president or a standing and schmoozing one. This is a girl who since the age of four has possessed the potential to be blazingly famous. Instead she’s the anti-Paris Hilton; a young lady in a kingpin position – or perhaps princesspin is more apt – so ingeniously protected from the spotlight, you would fail to recognize her if she stepped right up to you and …
Monday, December 24, 2012
Let’s Jump Right In With January!
If you live on the Island and you’re not constantly yammering on about your acer rubrum or hammamelis japonica, you clearly need to go back to whatever misbegotten suburb or metropolis you came from. In other words, you are making no effort to fit in. So let’s get fitted. First, to assure you of my own bona fides as the Island’s most idiotic and clumsy gardener, I started out in 1981 with a quaint little cottage in East Chop. The front yard faced the frigid winter winds they call the Canadian Express. The only things we could grow there were a green lawn and a white picket fence (yes, white picket fences are one of those perennials that hold fast year after year, unless a tour bus smashes into them). I also had some luck tending …
Monday, December 17, 2012
Do you have your final resting place picked out?
Sometimes you just know when a story is crying out to be written. I'm willing to bet that anyone who has ever set all 10 toes on this Island, strolling along any one of our astonishing harbors, then planting a face into two scoops of Ben & Bill's ice cream, this is a person who has turned to his or her companion, and mused out loud, "Wouldn't it be lovely to be buried here?" (I know, I know; most guys don't say 'wouldn't it be lovely?', they just grunt and point with their ice cream cones, and their partners get their drift, should they be remotely interested.) Thing is, when someone speaks of the "loveliness" of being buried somewhere, they don't mean, like, now. But a final resting ground, in a setting dear to our hearts, is a romantic…
Monday, December 10, 2012
How The Jersey Turnpike Is coming to our Island.
We were blissfully unaware, taking our walks in the sweet fragrant air, in whatever season. Even on our most casual errands, we beheld beauty on all sides – on the way to the supermarket, a saltwater inlet to the right, Nantucket Sound to the left, on the drive home from Menemsha, an ancient stone wall bounded by open fields and, in the distance, a doe and Bambi. Then . . . in a room somewhere, under fluorescent lights, town officials began to play with an idea for a quaint-sounding “roundabout” that would ease drivers through an intersection that sometimes jams up in the summer. And in another fluorescent-lit room in our capital city, state officials began to assemble suitcases of money. Beware government dollars. They come with a price. …
Monday, December 3, 2012
Yes, they visit here and God bless them everyone.
First, in all fairness, we need to ask ourselves: Do we behave this badly when we ourselves are travelers in faraway places? To answer honestly, we must sit alone in a dark room and go deep within. Finished? OK, I’ve just done my own agonizing reappraisal, and I’ve come up with this response, which I hope matches your own: No. We are, we Vineyarders, by and large smarter than the small minority of exhaustively stupid tourists who arrive on our shores in the summer. How do we know this? Well, if we were this clueless, how could we ever manage to put up rosehip jam in the fall, and look after our neighbors’ pipes and call 911 if we see icicles, and cope with the ferry schedule, and keep body and soul together in the poorest, drunkest …
Monday, November 26, 2012
Yet Neither of Us Gives A Hoot In Hell
The Islands are twins separated at birth. That was a long time ago; ten thousand years ago, to be precise, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet started slip-sliding away. Clueless travelers assume the two Islands have everything in common. Whaling captains! Pirates out the ying-yang! Cedar-shingles! Quaint little $59-million cottages! Frosty winters! Pop-up shops! Alcoholism! Jobless rates! Rich twits in summer! (Theirs are Republican, ours Democrat.) But in spite of being twins – well, fraternal, our squirt of a bro across the channel is only 14 miles long, we’re 26 miles tall – and in spite of being tagged in every guidebook in the whole freakin’ universe as The Islands, as in The Cape And Islands, our response to one another across a mere 12 …
Monday, November 19, 2012
A guide to this town's glam past.
First you clap your eyes on those New Englandy church steeples as you sail into the harbor. It’s quaint. Lots of pretty stores, folks with two-and-three-seater strollers for their expensive broods of kids. And while the town’s restauranteurs have finally – finally! – been sanctioned to sell wine with their coq au vin– say, did the coq in earlier years need to be prepared without vin as in coq au Shirley Temple? Harder forms of booze are still verboten. That means no bars, no night life, no drunken sailors lurching onto shore to find damsels with high cleavage and low self-esteem. It’s . . . a trifle dull in Vineyard Haven which, for some cockamamie reason, is also-known-as Tisbury. Is it an evil twin thing? “I love Edgartown!” “There’s…
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Dock Street Coffee Shop in Edgartown
You want to sit right behind Darren Patrick at the grill because what he’s doing with eggs and batter and toast and every kind of breakfast meat is surely as skilled as anything Nadia Comaneci ever performed on the tumbling mat. Your devoted correspondent is there on a November Sunday at 8 a.m. when one of the many morning rushes was taking place (the diner opens at 6:30). Darren has two salami-studded omelets spread out on the giant fry slab. They're the shape and size of deflated beach balls, and when he flips them once-twice-thrice into the classic burrito-bulked omelet, you realize that if only you could prepare something like that yourself at home, you’d be pestered with half-a-dozen proposals of marriage per week. To the left of …
Monday, October 29, 2012
How To Build Up Old Yankee Coastal Cred in Rough Weather
As I put pen to paper – I mean fingertips to keyboard – sweet punkin pine! This change in our ozone is making me write odd things (even odder than usual) – it’s Sunday morning, October 28, and some kinda monster storm is gustily, wetly and determinedly barreling down on us. The hurricane’s nome de blow is Sandy, but the media has re-labeled her Frankenstorm, evoking a correlation to, of course, Frankenstein, and the Perfect Storm of late October, 1991, when a minor hurricane spinning up from the tropics got yanked into a nor’easter whooshing down from Canada. Some other, I don’t know, conversion layer or El Nino got sucked in from LA (I'm just hoofing it here), causing the weather to bunch up and go all hormonal on us, and to drag itself …
Monday, October 22, 2012
Halloween 2012
This is the time of year when people take an interest in me. As Halloween approaches, it occurs to organizers of late October events that the dingbat Nadler woman, author of three collections of ghost tales, two of them Vineyard-related (and all of them true! true! true!), the third a really scary book about Boston hauntings (it’s a project that forced me, many nights, to sleep with the light on, after receiving emails about hideous metropolitan beasties and ghoulies), that I, the Ghost Lady – just as Vernon Laux is the Bird Guy (the first time we met we introduced ourselves to each other that way and then we shook hands), that I could be called upon to relate a fresh, untold creepy tale. Cue Bela Lugosi demented laugh track. So I will! I…
Michael West
12:37 pm on Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Perhaps Chelsea was practicing the virtue of doing one thing at a time and wanted only one book. Or, maybe, her TBR pile towered high above her bed and she was afraid of the tower of Babel tumbling down on her as she slept. Or maybe she didn't have the cash to pay her boyfriend back... more ›