Vieques is “that island the Navy used to bomb,” a small land mass just a short, scenic plane ride from the “Big Island” of Puerto Rico.  Though the Navy gave up bombing under protest a few years ago, the anticipated major development hasn’t yet happened. So the island remains largely wild, a tangle of vines and palm trees in the center, home to astounding and underutilized beaches (many of which opened only after the Navy left), wild horses, two dissolute towns with limited offerings to tourists and high property crime necessitating bars over every orifice in a building.

            Friends of ours moved to the island six years ago, before the Navy made its withdrawal official. With their customary innate ability to arbitrage personal real estate, they sold their suburban home here and bought a small underutilized waterfront bar and restaurant from a disinterested owner who wanted to trade the market full-time from San Juan. Motivated owners in residence and the end of bombing have had a wonderful effect on the business, and the place has prospered. They’ve been after us for years to visit, but other destinations beckoned, Europe in particular, and we never seemed to be able to find the right time to go.

            This past December they wrote of their daughter’s wedding a month or so before. We still thought of her as a teenager.  Realizing we’d missed too much of their lives already, we decided to stop making excuses and go. There was only one fly in the ointment - I’d started a health kick in the winter, emphasizing diet and exercise, and I didn’t want to abandon it entirely when I was only halfway to my goals. Our friends said they would assure us of sufficient activity, including the use of their personal trainer 3 times a week, numerous yoga teachers, horseback riding, snorkeling and regular walking. Satisfied I could at least make a stab at virtue while on vacation, it didn’t take long to arrange flights.

            Shortly after we landed and were warmly greeted and swept up by our old pals, we went to their business for a bite. It’s entirely open to the street, so conversation stopped and started every 10 minutes or so as another island local walked by to say hello, we are introduced and discussion ensued. Chief among the important island denizens we met that night was the personal trainer, “R.” R is the kind of guy who stops traffic - tall, muscled, shiny black and very handsome with a huge, megawatt smile and considerable personal charisma. When our friends introduced him to us, my husband turned to me with faux horror and said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be personally trained by that guy.”  I replied that I was now considering going twice a day. And so my husband, who has eschewed any formal exercise other than the odd game of squash for the last 30 years, came to our personal training sessions for the rest of the week.

            Turns out R was a pretty good trainer too. Low-tech, but effective at forcing us to use free weights, our own body weight, a jump rope, and a ball on a covered deck where we stared at the skull of a cow he thoughtfully placed in our eyesight. After what felt like 27 thousand squats, 2000 lunges and 100 hours of ab work, we were free to go, for a $5 per person drop-in charge. Cool. 

            We went back twice more and we got to know a little more of his story, both from his own lips and those of our friends. R came to the island via Boulder, Colorado to bury his father.  Despite the circumstances, R liked the place, and never left, and at some point his brother and mother relocated also.

Three years ago, R was in a horrid motorcycle accident which left him with serious injuries in one leg. Doctors had apparently wanted to amputate a foot, but he’d refused and the subsequent reconstruction belies the idiocy of that decision. His lower leg looks like a tree trunk, with muscles borrowed from other parts of his body, and just above the ankle there remains a big open area that never healed properly. You can see the wound suppurate through his sweat socks during training sessions. He limps a little, but he seems to have built a reasonable life for himself in this place with a regular, and growing, clientele of the North Americans who live here full or part-time.  

We noticed that he had a kayak in his front yard and told him we were considering a tour of the Bioluminescent Bay, the island’s proudest tourist venue.  He jumped at the chance to do it, said he’d been a guide and offered us a really cheap price. He was irresistible.

We agreed to a five-hour tour: a paddle through the extensive mangrove swamps, replete with flying fish, a paddle out of the bay a very short way to a spectacular ocean beach where we’d drink rum from coconuts, have a picnic dinner and watch the sun set, and then the dusk to dark paddle back into the bio bay to watch out body parts light up in the water under the stars. Sounded dreamy, and I couldn’t help but think of all the calories we’d burn paddling for that long. (Sick, I know). Plus, we’d be with R, who it seemed could use a good turn and the money and would be pretty reliable to boot.

We met him in the late afternoon at his place. There was only one two-person kayak in the front. He asked my husband to pay him partly up front so he could rent the other one at wholesale from a friend. Okay, we knew he was going to have to do that. He took off with a surfer-dude who introduced himself to us as Scott and was back in 20 minutes with another kayak.  Scott helped R tie both kayaks to the roof of an approximately 35 year old probably white Pontiac coupe with bald tires, no hubcaps and so many dents it looked like it had been through a giant washer coated with rocks. We were nonplussed. Most of the cars on the island were 30 years old (minimum) and dented from the travel down rocky roads to beaches.  What caused a little concern, however, was R’s evident lack of understanding of how to tie down the kayaks.  Okay, he doesn’t do this a lot, still how hard could it be?

“R, what happened to your arm, man?” I’d noticed some fresh gauze taped down. “Oh, I walked into a glass door this morning. Early, you know?”  Everyone needs an accident-prone kayak guide. But he’s so careful with other people, I thought to myself.

“Okay, who needs a PFD? They’ll be optional on this trip except for the little girl,” R said brightly, looking over at my daughter. “Really?” I said, thinking that no genuine insurance-paying guide would say that.  But then, it’s an island. Our friends tell us they have the cars inspected in San Juan without them ever leaving Vieques.  “We won’t ever be in water deeper than 10 feet,” he replied with that huge ingratiating smile and, perhaps, the faintest curl of a bicep. “Okay then.”

“Do you have a dry bag, R?” 

“Oh, man, someone walked away with my last one yesterday. I have some plastic bags here you can wrap stuff in.” 

I put my digital camera and a cell phone inside the plasticized and zippered bag I brought containing food and rum.  I had no idea whether it was waterproof. I guessed we’d find out.

We piled in the low-rider, crushing empty gallon plastic jugs with our asses, and crunching jewel cases and whatnot under our Teva sandals. Discarded Bob Marley CDs dug into our thighs. My husband sat up front, next to the extra car battery that was helpfully piled on the seat.  R saw him looking. “Just to be on the safe side.”  “Sure,” my husband said.  He and I are beginning to not be able to look at each other. We love the absurd.

Wedged between the front and rear windshields were four paddles, bisecting the car seating nicely, and threatening to cut our heads off in the event of an accident. Better buckle in, but of course, those rear belts were probably cut out of this beauty in about 1979.  “I won’t drive quickly,” he says reassuringly.

In about 10 minutes we are at the entrance to Sun Bay, the island’s largest public beach and the only one with facilities of any kind. It’s huge and gorgeous and mostly empty - I’d had a two hour yoga class there earlier in the week and we saw maybe two people in the sand. We drive to the end of the beach and then down a seriously rutted dirt road lined with turpentine trees and jungly foliage.  The road becomes a path which forks and we are off again, through one rut so serious and unavoidable we do it at maybe half a mile an hour so when the undercarriage scrapes nothing will break.  After a few careful minutes we are at the mouth of the bay.

We unload the boats, R parks the car and says, “we’ll take five or ten minutes here for instruction.” There is no instruction. We figure it out.  R’s satisfied and leads us off through the bay at a pretty fast pace. We reach the entrance to the mangroves, but back out awkwardly because another party is coming out and the canals are too small. Two kayaks come out, one guy alone obviously the guide to two pasty white people in better shape than we pasty white people. I recognize him from town - he’s the son and part proprietor of one of the better known (and probably actually licensed) snorkel and kayak guide companies.  He notices how bad we are at turning in a small spot and shows us how to dip the paddle to turn more efficiently. A kind young man we’ll call “A.”

Red mangrove trees are very interesting. http://static.flickr.com/29/44699794_542da0fcde_m.jpg It was dark in there, and dank, and the canal was so small that you couldn’t paddle but instead had to use your arms to drag yourself along with the branches and roots of the trees. The roots were amazing - crawling with life like little oysters and barnacles and most notably, little crabs. It takes some time to figure out the best place to grab and pull and which person in the boat should be doing the directing. The learning curve involves careening into hard roots filled with pissed-off little crabs and lying suddenly flat on your back when you realize the other person has grabbed onto something which is effectively directing a huge branch through your eyeball. All the while you are surrounded by the fetid smell of swamp mud. A wonder, undoubtedly, to a biologists and botanists and ecologists alike, and pure hell after a while to an inexperienced set of kayakers.

The canal empties into a wide open space. Fish are indeed jumping around and it’s lovely and exciting. But wait, there’s a gorgeous white heron on the near shore. How beautiful! Is that thing STANDING? How deep is this water? We were stuck on a mud bank.  After a few frantic minutes, we dug the paddles straight down into the muck leaned and pushed clear.  We are wearing a good deal of stinking mud though. The rest of the trip through the swamp was anxious and unpleasant. “Damn you, let me know when you’re pulling!” “Ew, I nearly got another crab.” R. finally figures out that it’s “unusually low water” and agrees to turn around so we will have enough energy to paddle to the beach.

We are relieved to be back in the bright beautiful bay. We splash some clean water over our legs and I notice my back hurts - we’ve been at this for a couple of hours and there’s no back support in these models.  We go out the mouth of the bay into a very large channel and R says, “Let’s get some instruction on blue water paddling!” I look out to the sea and watch some seriously angry looking waves break in the distance.

“Okay!” R is smiling again. “We’re going to paddle out right to the breakers, right at that buoy! Don’t worry about the waves coming in, but you are going to have to wait for a break between them to paddle. Once we get out there, there’s a coral reef and it’s a good place to snorkel.  I’ll stay with the boats. Then you can get back in, we’ll paddle a little further, turn the boats and the waves will just carry us into the beach!”   No beach is presently visible and I’m thinking about being in the breakers in a plastic boat.

“I think I’d just like to head for the beach,” I say. The idea of trying to get in and out of the boat without a dry bag for our stuff, with R trying to hold on to everything in rolling waves did not appeal. “Okay then, let’s go!” And he, with his arms of iron and my little girl, who is totally a paddling champ by now, are off well ahead of us into the sea.  I can’t let him run away with her, so off we go, through the waves, and it’s very different from the placid forgiving bay. This is some serious work, but it turns out we need not go anywhere near the breakers, as at a much earlier point R is directed to the beach by A, whose party has already landed there and are beginning to wander around.

When we land, we are very grateful. It turns out the beach is called Novillo, it’s reachable only by kayak, and is fabulously unspoiled, even by the standards of this undeveloped island. 

My daughter decides to snorkel, and A points out the safe place, because the place she’s waded out to has a strong current. Thanks A.

We snack a bit, break out the rum. R doesn’t have a coconut. He forgot. But maybe there will be some on the beach. There are not, but there are trees. A climbs up a tree like a lizard and grabs one, brings it down and cuts it expertly and quickly with the machete he’s brought for his clients. Given R’s luck with dangerous objects, I’m not that upset about the failure to bring the machete. My daughter emerges from snorkeling with a coconut cut open. A gave it to her. I’m starting to love that boy.

In the meantime, R is drinking the rum straight out of the bottle. We had no idea what to bring other than fruit, cheese, water and some pbjs. We have a little bite here and there and watch the sun go down in a glorious blaze.

Thank God, the plastic bag seems to have worked for the camera. Before the last light disappears, we head back from the Caribbean into the bay, with the wind and the tide helping us along. We hang in the upper part of the bay for a long time, chatting and taking the odd desultory paddle to keep from drifting too far into the mangroves.

Finally it’s really, really dark and something magical happens. Wherever the water is disturbed, it turns a bright, luminous green. Stick a hand in and form a cup with your fist and watch the glow run down your arm like stars with the water. It lights up where your paddle hits the surface. Trail anything in the water and you’ll see it light up. It’s really like something out of a science fiction novel - a bright greenish, gorgeous glow.  A more full scientific explanation can be found  http://www.elenas-vieques.com/bioluminescent.html, but all I need to know is that there’s a little single-celled critter called a dinoflagellate, which emits an enormous amount of light when it feels pressure on its cell wall. I also know that this chemical reaction begins with a “luciferin” (like Lucifer, get it? Light emitter?) which in this case is evidently some chemical produced by the mangroves. Or so R. said.

Anyway, it’s fabulous, really. Add to this an extraordinary starlit night - one of those Caribbean skies where you swear there are at least 1000 times more stars than you’ve ever seen before, and you are totally, utterly entranced. And if you are me, you are thinking, we all survived. It’s okay. It’s stunning and I’m so glad I did it and I’m so proud of my little kid for hanging tough here all day.  A sense of misbegotten well-being crept in. We elected not to swim, realizing how tired we all were, asked just to head back. R. obliged and we paddled off.

“What are we making for?” “Um, the red light.” There are no fewer than 4 red light towers. R has neglected to bring flashlights (which A and his crew and all the other nighttime-only kayakers have) so we’re having some trouble keeping up. We keep calling out to him. There’s a shout from their boat, and it appears my daughter is a little agitated. We speed up - it appears a fish jumped into the boat and hit her knee. She is not amused, and not willing to pick it up and send it back. (Damn you, National Geographic Channel! She probably thinks it’s poisonous).  R pitches it back in the bay, we see its impossibly bright and fast trail under the water. Wild. We keep paddling. Then R turns around and we follow. Then, he turns again and we are shouting at him.

“Oh, I came in at a different spot today. Marked it from that boat, but they moved it.”

“R, are you lost?”

“I’m a guy, I’m never lost!”

A few minutes later he has changed direction again, now to try to find half of the paddle that has broken off somehow. My daughter gives up hers.

We spend what could have been 10 minutes or an hour paddling along the inky black shoreline, looking desperately for the little launching beach, or any other break in the foliage all trying to keep his boat in sight by watching the light his paddles make in the water. We call out and ask if we can’t beach just anywhere and walk to the car. “Nope, foliage is too thick.”  My husband tries to persuade him to ask some other guides, but whether its pride or fear of prosecution for being an unregistered vendor, he won’t do it. I begin to worry we will have to spend the night floating on the bay. Finally, we find the break, where, of course, A is putting his client’s kayaks back on a truck and preparing to return those lucky folks to their guest house.

We are exhausted and very wet when we stumble upon the sand.  My husband and another guide help R get the kayaks on the low-rider. Someone asks R to turn off his car while they get their big busload of tourists out. He complies. We all pile in the car and he turns the key and click click click click.  After a few more efforts, he pulls out his spare battery and installs it. And  nothing. There’s the inevitable re-turning of the key and switching of the batteries and still, nothing.

My husband immediately identifies the problem as a dead starter motor.  Then the second miraculous sight of the night occurs - all the other pirate (i.e. nonlicensed) kayak operators left on the beach come over to help. There are four or five of them, their clients all standing on the beach whimpering, while they play a version of “Puerto Rican Operation” - putting any metal object they could get their hands on into the engine and poking it. “No man, don’t do that again, last time you did that I got shocked man.” This goes on so long it becomes thoroughly social, “So, you lived in St. Croix? Me too! Which town?”

While this lovefest endures, I’ve discovered that the plastic bag did not protect the cell phone. It’s fried. I don’t have our friends’ number anywhere else. We ask one of the other hapless guides to call the restaurant they own and they do it, but no one picks up. Not unusual on a busy night. We ask if anyone else can give us a ride home, and one guy, the guy from St. Croix with hair like Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club says he will come back for us after he drops his people off. We hear this as “yes, you wait here, suckers, and I’ll be right back.”

We discuss walking out, but we don’t know where we are going and there’s a real chance of getting lost. There are iguanas, tarantulas, fire ants and scorpions on this island, none of which we know enough about to know whether they are nocturnal. I’ve met three people and one dog who have been stung in the last 4 days and I so do not want to be in their number. We wait it out, and now my kid is whining full force and understandably.

“Operation” has come to an end. Now they toss a length of webbing, frayed in places, and secure it to R’s car. We are to be towed by the other pirate crew’s SUV. We consider staying on the bay, but ultimately say all right, and get in the low-rider with the head-endangering paddles wedged back in.  The SUV at the other end of the tether is moving with its load of boats and clients and guides and so are we. At the rear of the SUV, standing on the bumper, is the Emilio Estevez lookalike. He’s a skateboarder, R says, and therefore crazy. What the hell are we? R brakes carefully, consistently. We hit the horrible car-eating rut with amazing care. The frayed lifeline holds. The car scrapes only a little. We are safe.

On the paved road at Sun Bay, our rescuers set us free - they have to return their clients, campers, to the campsite. We say no problem, the town where our friends’ bar is located is maybe a 20 minute walk. We head off when my husband realizes R may not be able to walk that far on his barely functional foot. Within few minutes, the third miraculous sight is had, when two off-duty publicos, or taxis, are located at the entrance to the bay. The only slightly less reluctant one is persuaded to take us to town, and we finally get to the bar, where our friends are not. After some more delay, we get their number, they pick us up, we shower, drink beer, and laugh hysterically for an hour or so.

Oh sure, it wasn’t safe. Could have been a frightful disaster. But now, it’s just a story.

Me:  So that you can make that underperform also?

Him: Our investors would like a new market-neutral strategy!

Me:  We are market-neutral. You lose money when the market’s up, and you lose money when the market’s down.

Him: We’ll make the minimum investment really really high!

Me:  So only the very very very rich and stupid can be in. Hmmm. I like that.

Him: So get all the documents ready, we need to have a product ready to go!

Me:  No. I’m not going to run around like an idiot, putting together, conforming, and negotiating hundreds of pages of agreements with multiple counterparties because you had an “idea” when you have no real notion that people want this product, managed by an ill-educated idiot like you.

Him:  Everything needs to be ready at the end of the month!

Me:  So that you can take out all the expenses from the bottom line, and screw the employees next year. Nice.

Him: Sorry, but everyone just has to work harder!

Me:  Hard to accept that after you’ve come back from two weeks on a beach.

Him: And can you also terminate our lease, coordinate our move to new space, handle the employee relationship problems we have, stop trying to prevent us from violating the law ’cause that’s just costing us money, and get us licensed to do business in 3 Asian countries?

Me: Not for that bonus, brother. I think my headhunter just called.

I’m considering the question because I have in my heart jumped on the Barrack Obama wagon. And it shocks me that I’d think to ally politically with the good people of Iowa. It shocks me more because I didn’t think he’d performed so well during the debate I saw a few weeks ago, and then finally it test my feminism, because I have longed for a woman to vote for as President.  I sat on the fence for months, refusing calls from fundraisers of all stripes, to see how the race developed. What’s changed? His ebullience at winning that race, the sheer emotional power it seems to inspire in African-American people and young people, and his formidable speeches.

The evening of his win:

Years from now, you’ll look back and you’ll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months we’ve been teased, even derided, for talking about hope. But we always knew hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.

Next day, in New Hampshire:

They say I need to be seasoned; they say I need to be stewed. They say, ‘We need to boil all the hope out of him — like us — and then he’ll be ready.’

Damn, that is some rhetorical genius, there.  He has in one stroke lifted hearts and reduced those who criticize him for inexperience to dried-up, old, self-aggrandizing crones.  The air around him is charged with  Kennedyesque youth and glamour, but with the advantage of being a brilliant, self-made guy. Hillary is reeling now, trying to simultaneously cast herself as having built a long political resume for change.  She can’t live on both sides of that fence, though, not with a real candidate like him in the race. Of course, he’s not without flaws. Of course he’ll have problems. But for now, he’s getting my check.

She started to wear a watch to make sure she got to class on time. With a precision I never had, she measures just how much television she can have before she concludes her homework.  The lowest grade she’s received on anything graded was an A minus, which she gleefully pointed out to the teacher, had been miscalculated originally as a B plus.  She has a class called Civilization, which is a combination of ancient history, social studies, historical fiction, writing and standard English.  Her teacher is a writer whose won some impressive things as an amateur. Once it was understood that writing was a shared pasttime, school got even better.

She writes vividly, though the punctuation is still wanting: stories of a mouse versus rat war at the Vatican (where the rat’s perfidy is uncovered by the press, no less); stories of Neandrathals learning how to use tools, featuring a surprising amount of dialogue, and so on.  The teacher adores her, encourages her, and the result is a kid anxious to tell you that human history is “no more than a speck upon the elephant’s butt” of time.  (I told you it was vivid).

Today we had the “first semester conference” which went predictably well. She was asked her goals for the year which involved “being a better friend to the new girls,” “stepping it up” a little in math, and “writing even better stories” in Civ. Oh and working on the Service Board (a position she won in a contested election by a landslide) organizing drives for local organizations and information sessions about Darfur. 

She’ll be playing in tennis tournaments in January and indoor lacrosse season starts in February. (There’s a place with an indoor turf field. Who knew?) She’s knocking the cover off the ball at every opportunity.

This is all wonderful, but would be easy to compartmentalize. We all want to dream our kids our good students. I have one. Self-motivated even. No, what scares me is how she’s progressed in her social life.  She attends an all-girl school, so it’s not like she runs into a lot of boys. So she signed herself up for the local ballroom dance class. Yes, she’s meeting boys there, boys forced by their mothers to wear ties and to learn how to fox trot. She claims not to enjoy it, but she plans the outfits carefully.

And then, there’s ice skating. There’s an ice rink in our neighborhood which is largely closed to the public. Except on Friday nights, when from 8:30 to 10:30 there’s a public skate. For $6 you can get in and rent skates and hang out. When she was smaller, she’d beg us to go as a family. There were a few other families there, we noticed, but lots of teens on dates and younger kids just learning to have social lives.

Four weeks ago, she started asking to go skating without us. She assured us all her friends went. I said okay, but only if she could confirm to my satisfaction that at least one friend I knew and trusted was going to be there the whole time. She duly organized it. That first night she could barely skate — it’s not what she does. But now, after four consecutive weeks of lobbying, finding a friend and going off, she’s pretty good. Fast, turning on edges and skating in circles.

I know though that she’s not there to learn how to skate.  She’s there because that’s where the 11 to 15 year old boys hang. Some of them she knows from dance, some from church. But she’s shy and doesn’t get to know them too well. So she’s taking her first, deeply tentative steps, into dealing with the opposite sex.

I show up early, of course, to make sure nothing untoward is going on, and it’s not. She’s even happy to see me. Thrilled with independence and incipient hormones, she’ll often stay up for a while after coming home to read. I consider it helpful that she still asks to be tucked in. Don’t know that I’ll survive this.

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is archy.
My great-grandparent is Why Now?
My grandparent is Over the Cliff, Onto the Rocks.
My parent is  http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com/2007/10/pharyngula-mutating-genre-meme.html

The best sword and sorcery novel in SF/Fantasy is: Eragon by Christopher Paolini.

The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: Brazil.

The best sexy song in pop is: Right-Hand Man by Joan Osborne.

The best album in alternative music is: Get Away from Me by Nellie Mackay.

In order to keep mutation alive, I’m passing the meme on to:

Switters of The Outer Sanctum
Schadenfreude of Wordflare

For the 7 years I took lessons, I equated the piano with hell. My teacher was a decent, but undemonstrative, guy who I now know was pretty technically solid, at one point studying briefly with Godowsky. I was sent to him because he was known, locally, as the best, but my Mom was always a little worried that he wasn’t enough of a perfectionist. So she tried to instill perfection at home and the resulting push me-pull was ugly. Screaming, crying and yelling are pretty much what I associated with the instrument, and the biggest compliment I got at a lesson was: okay, next piece. I assumed I sucked. I didn’t know that not every 11 year old was playing Bach two-part inventions.

Anyway, in the third grade I started taking violin lessons in a class. Since I could already read music and had a pretty good ear, I got better quickly. Though I never had any independent study, by the time I was in junior high, I was in the local orchestra (which was run by the same people who taught in the schools).  I made friends. I listened to music. I smoked dope.  

By the time I was a senior in high school I was the concertmaster of the local orchestra and the school orchestra. This is truly meaningless, since both ensembles were execrable, but hey, it’s true.  We rehearsed frequently, so I was out of the house away from the crazy people a lot on a perfectly acceptable excuse.  I discovered that I had a different personality when playing in the orchestra.  I was powerful — all those bows had to go my way.  I was talented — people had to imitate me.  I became sexy.  I can’t tell you how this changed my life.  Power and glory was mine in this postage-stamp world and it gave me hope that I might actually escape it.  Little slivers of a world outside emerged.

I dated older men and younger men in the group, mostly trumpet players (love those lips). I auditioned for and got in the district, regional and state orchestras as a senior, where I developed a new circle of friends with even better drugs. Which I needed. State orchestra was frightening. These kids hadn’t grown up badly instructed in Podunk. They went to something called Settlement Music Schools or had extensive private training and about half the group played in the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra (which is roughly the equivalent of most small cities’ professional groups). A quarter played in the Pittsburgh Youth Orchestra. The rest of us rubes were brought in from the hinterlands to prove that even people with corn and coal in their ears could be taught something.

The conductor was the first woman to get a doctorate in conducting from Julliard. She introduced herself by asking the oboe to sound an “A” for us to tune, and then told the player that she  hadn’t put her reed in correctly — the A was not 440. She sang the right note and told the oboe to match it. My standmate (she and I knew each other from our own district, and she had great dope) looked at each other and said: we’re fucked. 

We had two things going for us: first, we sat 5th stand, second violin. Roughly middle of that pack, but towards the back mostly out of the scary woman’s sight and right in front of the percussionists. Second, I was a spectacular faker. I can look interested and intense and I had watched enough orchestras on PBS to know how energetic the bowing should look.  As a result we largely escaped attention, though when we played “Night On Bald Mountain” (which, if you don’t know it, is something you hear all the time at Halloween) after a really long session with a big bong and the chimes began ringing in our ears, both of us shot out of the seats. To the conductor’s lack of amusement. “Oh, sorry,” my standmate said to Her Perfect Pitchness later. “We just got so excited. ” The nerdy exceptional players around us laughed, a little nervously. All far more talented, and not one of them were ever going to make as much money or have as much fun as we did (so we told each other).

That was the year I met kids with $100,000 instruments. I was quite sure that was a sum of money that could buy my hous and our cars.  One of those belonged to a sardonic tall skinny kid with a bad bowl haircut I met at districts. His prized viola was stolen from the stage at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh where we played.  He had a backup factory jobber and the pilfered one was insured, but he’d lost a superb instrument and he cried for days.  I told him not to worry, he wasn’t that good anyway. (true).  I then taught him how to use a bong. 

The final concert in Pittsburgh was trippy.  We stayed sober for it, as we knew we’d have to do. Walking backstage we passed Andre Previn’s door and rubbed it for good luck. We played NOBM and the Moldau from Ma Vlast and something else I forget. It sounded unbelievably good to me, and remains the ultimate musical experience of my life — the only time I’d ever be associated with something of that quality. I smooched my new friends, promised to write (never did) and went back to crappy town.  Everything was the same, but different.

I won a local music competition in the anthracite city at the end of that year, playing I don’t even remember what and beating a really arrogant jerk who played the French horn.  He considered himself a real musician and me a poseur. He wasn’t wrong, but I was a better performer. He was really angry and I made it a point to rub it in and then we stopped dating.  There’s a horn player by the same name in the Philadelphia Orchestra now. I nearly choked when I saw it, but I have to think that it can’t be him.  He couldn’t have improved that much.

I was never deluded about music. I was truly mediocre — I needed to practice all the time just to stay mediocre.  And I lacked the desire and energy to practice enough to actually be, well, good. Plus I knew that I wanted to be able to shop without great difficulty. All the professional musicians I knew, and I knew a few, could play rings around me, but they weren’t living so high off the hog. I liked the hog. I’d had enough of living low on it, and I wanted more.  Music just made me confident enough to go get it.

They have an interesting house — modern. Like a house designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright it sits low on the lot, but it’s one and a half stories and two distinct wings. In the backyard, maybe 100 yards from the house, is a freestanding square deck, lit from below with spotlights. There’s terrific sculpture visible from that vantage point too — a red metal structure that looks like an extended concertina, a smear of metallic yellos in another corner. (I saw it all while chasing our then-young and curious dog through all the yards in the neighborhood). Some days, I’d see him down at their springhouse, doing garden work. All in all, I remember thinking to myself: “This is so unlike most old people!”

When the lights are on you could see the bright colors of the interior, orange and metal and picture perfect 1950s style. Apparently, they’ve lived long enough for their views to come back in style.

We met them at neighborhood barbecues, or we’d see him walking their old cocker spaniel past our house for our dog to meet. He greeted our Samoyed as “Whitey!” and pet her happily. They drove a convertible in most weather, and my heart jumped whenever I saw them head out; she with a headscarf and glasses like a surviving Grace Kelly and he with a devilish gleam and their golf clubs in the backseat. I saw them and prayed, prayed, that my “sunset years” would look like theirs — blessed with health and looks and fun.

Lately I’ve seen how much changes in time. About 10 years ago, the fire department had to be called when they put a not entirely extinguished cigarette in the kitchen garbage. Over the last year or two, I’ve seen him outside multiple times, dressed inappropriately for the weather, looking confused. I saw her once, looking for their dog, and the beautiful mouth was a slash of misapplied vermillion wax. She was hunched over and hysterical. I called their next door neighbors, who are durable, decent, interesting people a decade or so younger. They told me they were also worried, but that the couple’s children were involved, and would step in. But I never saw them.

This Spring, on one of my early-morning perambulations, I found pages of their brokerage statements in front of their house and blown about for blocks. I tracked it all down, every page of it containing social security numbers and account information, gathered it up, put a rubber band on it and returned it with their morning Newspaper. I wonder if they noticed.

My husband saw him wandering aimlessly a few months ago about 10 blocks from home. He offered a ride home. The man accepted, and kept introducing himself to my husband, who said just once, “We’ve been neighbors for 15 years.” He didn’t remember. He still walks a dog (they seem to adopt elderly cockers) past our house, but has become afraid of Whitey, who is too beset by arthritis to get within 30 feet. He’s cursed at us for not locking her up, and appears genuinely afraid. We didn’t know what to do anymore — I don’t know the names of their children, I don’t want to burden the neighbors, I don’t want to insult them. But it’s increasingly obvious they can’t care for themselves.

Yesterday when I came home from work I saw some more papers strewn in a perfect arc from their neighbor’s house to theirs. I stopped the car and gathered a manila folder and some stapled sheets. Clipped to the folder was a card of the Admissions Director of our newest area “Care Center.” Its a gorgeous place, with first rate facilities and stunning views of the local Black Angus and sheep farm. On the one hand, I’m thrilled — they need help and this is precisely the sort of place they belong, where other interesting people who are having difficulty congregate. But I know in my heart that as they approached the house, he (or she) threw the folder out the window, seeing its contents as the beginning of the end, the prison from which they will never escape. For these intelligent, free-spirited people, this very last part of their lives must be the worst. Their considerable beauty is gone, their bodies shrunken, their sanity and freedom on the run. They don’t want to give up the afternoons in the convertible. I can’t blame them.

Today he fired someone I like. Not for bad reasons, though not for particularly good reasons either. The guy is young, his wife is pregnant, and his undeniable screw-ups were not nearly as bad as a lot of other people in the business. This was all about “feeding the wolves” — the people who kiss his ass who he knows are smarter than he. And who were jealous, and snarky about this fellow. At 6, I was asked to meet up for a drink. I thought we were drinking with the fired guy. Instead, it was an informal “celebration” — at least I can find no other explanation. I am disgusted.

Send me your pie orders. I need out.

The one I let run away but not fast enough was a sailor, and through him I got to both subsidize a boat on Cape Cod and learn how to sail (a little). For the latter, I thank him still. The former was just another in a litany of things I accepted because I thought it had to be. It didn’t.

Anyway, since then, I’ve loved the way boats, but particularly sailboats, look. On our recent trip to da Vineyard, I had lots of opportunity, both from the ferry and the beach, to indulge. So these are for you, Claude:

Yep — gratuituous sunset shot. But from a boat, heading back to Woods Hole. Someone tell me again why I don’t live up there?