While the gettin's good

The last day on Martha's Vineyard was spent waiting to go home. I hate leaving late in the day, because there are fewer options in case things go wrong. And this was a busy Sunday in peak season, and there was uncertainty as to when the Obama's were leaving, since the approach of the president sends the airport into a complete seizure. The last thing we needed was to have a bunch of sun-baked politicos making us miss our connection in Boston.

As I noted in a prior entry, most of the flights to the Vineyard are on Cape Air and their little 10-seaters. Sometimes, this allows a pretty cursory security check, but not when you're going onto Tarmac that the President might trod upon. The MVY airport has what one might call modest space for departing passengers. The existing terminal is a palace compared to the quonset hut that served when we first began going there 20 years ago. The terminal is quite roomy, but the space is poorly distributed in that about 40% of it is devoted to rental cars and baggage claim, a room in which I have never seen more than a dozen people. Another 40% goes to the ticket counters, which is probably about right. Only 10% goes to in-terminal passenger waiting, 5% to security and 5% to gateside waiting.

What this means is that after you've cleared security there is no bathroom, though there is, according to the TSA guy, a dark, smelly, full-of-bugs portapotty outside. There is a tent outside and enough space for around 50 people to congregate, but you can't go there until an airline employee lets everyone go outside right before you actually get on the plane. This is made clear by the very official signs at the gate.

The scrawl in the upper left corner says "Not TSA," so only airline employees, not the guys running the x-ray machine, who have never been spotted in that room. I'm not sure what the symbols in the lower right corners are. In other contexts, I would assume that they were smiley faces, but this is a secure area we're talking about.

Note also that not only do all flights leave from Gate 1, but that there has clearly been a major problem with boarding passes saying otherwise, causing someone to underline two words once and another 3 times. I've never seen Gates 2 or 3. Gate 4 is an actual regular gate in the fence outside by the parking lot. Our boarding passes were savvy enough to not have any gate listed, since as we all know, all flights leave from Gate 1.

Our flight, or our section of the flight anyway, got delayed by almost an hour, chewing up most of our layover, especially since you need to leave the Cape Air terminal and then re-clear security at the US Airways terminal, but we made it to our connecting flight just in time. One of our three bags made it. The other two showed up midday on Monday.

Still at the Vineyard

There's a song called "The Summer Place" by Fountains of Wayne that I like- any song that starts with the lyric "She's been afraid of the Cuisinart since 1977" can't be all bad. The song recounts the ups and downs of the family summer home and ends with the bittersweet line, "The injuries fade but the memories last a lifetime."

I understand this song. It's the morning of our second full day here and my fight or flight reflex is in full gear. I'm not much of a fighter, so I'm trying to flee in some fashion.

I'm not really sure why I feel this way. Nothing bad has happened and I don't anticipate anything awful on the horizon, aside from dinner for twenty tonight, and that can be ameliorated somewhat with the proper application of adult beverages. And yet when I went out for my bike ride this morning, it took nearly 20 miles for my head to clear. I am, I think as much as anyone else, comfortable in my own skin, but not today.

I think there are people my age who are able to be around large family gatherings with no baggage, but I'm not one of them. Blame it on my not being able to articulate what felt bad or on my burying whatever was bothering me instead of dealing with it, but after nearly 40 years of coming here, there's just too much accumulated muck for me to take a step without my foot getting stuck in it.

That being said, it's been quite beautiful here. I went to the beach yesterday and lay out in the full sun from 11AM until 2PM, just the way dermatologists tell to. And of course, because I diligently used sunscreen, most of my skin is fine except for oddly-shaped blobs and patches where I guess I applied less than the circumstances call for.

The biking has been fantastic, in part because the Obamas are down the road and all the traffic is blocked off from the other side of the island. Said roadblock is the main topic of conversation around here, because if there's one thing rich vacationers hate, it's detours. You'd think that having to detour and drive an extra 15 minutes would simply provide a little local color to one's vacation, but no, it's a nightmare.

So we leave tomorrow. Hopefully the Obama's are leaving earlier in the day, because if there's one thing I hate it's having to wait to check in for a flight behind the president. It's just a nightmare.

To the Vineyard!

I'm in Martha's Vineyard now, hanging out at the family house. This is about as mixed as bags get as far as having a good time. The beach is pretty and there's a nice pool and stuff, but having this many people around and being related to nearly all of them is not the most relaxing thing for me.

Getting here is its own thing. There's no direct service from Philly, so you have to change planes somewhere and get over here on something called Cape Air. Cape Air is a regional carrier that has a bunch of little planes that they fly around Cape Cod in the summer and Florida during the winter.

The planes they fly are these little 10-seaters, with the pilot being one of the 10. Someone gets to sit next to the pilot and look at all the instruments. This is really flying. If you get on a major airline plane, you might as well be on a bus. Youre pretty much completely removed from the whole airplaneness of it. When you're flying Cape Air, you feel every wind current and you see absolutely everything, out both sides of the plane and out the front window as well. You feel uncomfortably close to everything that's going on. 

Adding to the spirit of fun this trip was a series of operational issues, as they call them. The staff is Boston appeared to be a half dozen college students working summer jobs. They have several flat screen monitors that display nothing except the airline name and an offer for discount tickets. They called a bunch of people to the podium and told them that their flight to Nantucket was canceled and that they were getting what they called a party bus (pronounced patty bus in the local accent) to take them to the ferry.

Then, it was time for our flight. There were two sections, numbered 1 and 2. For some reason, the second section got called first, then our section. You board these planes by going down a staircase and huddling at the bottom until they let you out onto the Tarmac to walk to the plane. We get called, check in, and go downstairs, then outside, then someone calls and says they weren't supposed to take us outside yet. We go back inside and wait for 10 minutes or so. Then someone comes downstairs and tells me and my family that the 3 of us have to go back upstairs. We do, and 2 other people go down to take our place. 

They had miscounted how many people were getting on the plane. This is hard to do when there are only 9 of us. Then it took them a while to figure out that to have one fewer passenger, that they needed to take a party of 3 off and replace them (us) with a party of 2. Then we joined another group for what I guess was the secret third section. Downstairs we went, then outside and then to the plane. We get there and there was no pilot. I guessnit really was a secret section. So we stand outside the plane while we wait for the pilot to show up, inspect the plane, then invite us in. 

So a half hour after we originally boarded, we were finally on a plane. At least the flight itself was routine. I hope things go more smoothly dealing with my extended family, but I'm not confident about that. More to come.

What are those two dots called?

You know how sometimes you see the two dots over an o? What do you think that's called (and I use the singular because the two dots are a unit. There is never just one dot)? It turns out that it's called 2 things. If it's over one vowel it's an umlaut, which itself sounds like an appetizer, and it changes the way the vowel is pronounced. If it's over a double vowel, it's a diaeresis, which looks like a medical condition, is pronounced, according to the New Yorker, "die heiresses," and gives an idea of which vowel has emphasis or if they are to be said as a diphthong, which itself sounds like, oh never mind.

For me, I'm going to use it as an umlaut, to accent the word boring, or böring as I will now call it. It should be pronounced as if there's a double o, like booring.

Why am I doing this? Because I've decided I hate the word, or at least the way it's overused. People have begun to attach the adjective böring to describe anything that isn't as exciting and attention-grabbing as, say, a new text message or Snapchat. Books are böring, classes are böring, hanging out and relaxing is böring.

Here's my thesis: Anything can be termed böring if you pay it insufficient attention and refuse to look past whatever immediate gratification it can bring. And on the flip side, anything can be interesting if you really pay attention and think about it. Böring is not an intrinsic characteristic of anything- it's a frame of mind, dependent totally on the person.

You know this is true; how else could, for example, two people go to a museum and one describe it as fantastic and another as böring? It's the same stuff. How can it be both? It's a bunch of art or science or whatever, and it only gathers adjectives when people attach them.

This problem is particularly prevalent among adolescents. My kids used to sit at their computers and phones and converse by Facebook or text how böred they were. And I used to say- "Of course you're böred, you're sitting around looking at a screen instead of actually doing something." Whoever you're "chatting" with? Go see them! Walk, take the bus, something! Get up! Go do something!

I know this somehow our fault as baby boomer parents, because everything is, but I'm sorry, get over it.  I am proud to say that I am never böred. I can always find something or someone worthy of my attention, and if you're actually thinking about something, that's engagement, not böredom. Give it a try. Think, "I am going to look for something interesting in everything I see and interact with today. I will not dismiss anything, either because of my first impression, or even worse, because of what someone else said."

And if someone tells you that a class, teacher, book, place or whatever is böring, then tell them no, that the greater likelihood is that you're böring.

Fault lines in Cape May

Cape May concluded itself reasonably well. As tends to happy on family vacae, we were fairly sick of each other by the end of it, or more accurately the kids had kind of had enough of the parents. This brought an end to the sitdown dinners and the beginning of takeout. Fortunately, there's no shortage of that in Cape May, be it from a sandwich shop or a pub.


I grew up in a household influenced by Tom Lehrer. This included an admonition that he gives on one of his albums, where in describing a movie where all the characters bemoan their inability to communicate says, "if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is shut up."

However, I can say with virtual certainty that having a family workshop on communication skills is a good idea. Nobody is a good at this as they would like to be. One thing you have to know as a parent, however, is that your kids are going to be mad. About something. This also fits my contention that every parent screws up their kid. That's one of the joys of parenthood. You may not do it on purpose, you probably don't do it on purpose but you still do it and then you sit and watch what happens next.

So if you are like me and have done some bit of therapy over the years, you spent some time convincing yourself that the mistakes you've made are not your fault. And that you shouldn't feel bad. That's what individual therapy does. Family work is an opportunity to find out that it was your fault, and that you have to live with the consequences. I find this somehow comforting.

The other thing I found equal parts disturbing and freeing is that the psychological profession has so expanded its definition of the word abuse (which now means doing pretty much anything that makes someone else feel bad, or maybe even less-than-good) that any parent, or in fact, any human being who has ever interacted with another human being, is guilty of abuse. Based on what I said last paragraph, this is both your fault and not your fault, depending on who you ask.

So where does that leave us? For me, somewhere other than Cape May. Next weekend, it'll be time to go visit my parents at their vacation house in Martha's Vineyard, where we can resume our past communication practices. What a relief!

Cape May blogging

Hanging out in Cape May this weekend- all four of us. I haven't been in Cape May in a really really long time. When I was in biz school around 1980, one of my housemates knew people (a couple of teachers from George School, I believe) had bought this run down old hotel called the Chalfonte and were fixing it up on the cheap by trading room and board for student labor. So a few of us came down here at least twice, spent our days sanding and stripping and painting, and were given lunch and dinner and free evenings to just hang out. I remember it being hard work and great fun. Apparently, they still do this.

This time, we wanted to be in a "nice place," so we chose something called the Ocean Club Hotel. It looks lovely on the website, and I wouldn't say that the site is totally deceptive. It's just an overstatement. This is a funny mix between a big beach motel and a nice hotel. You walk into the very nice lobby if you enter from the front. If however, you are arriving by car, you walk in through the back door, which brings you into the hotel on a concrete ramp, leading to a painted cement floor and hallway that, while inside, looks suspiciously as if it were originally exposed to the elements.

I don't really know much about the history of this place, but I would guess that it was originally a large motel that is trying to transform itself into a nice hotel. The attempt seems sincere and is not just putting a glossy face on things. The people who work here are professional and helpful. They are, however, stuck with the bones of motel.

We are on the 6th floor, in what is affectionately referred to as "The Penthouse Suite." If simply being on the top floor makes something a penthouse, so be it, but there's nothing special about either the floor itself or the rooms. Don't get me wrong. The rooms are decent sized and pleasant, with balconies that either directly or indirectly face the ocean. But they're bland and dull and the hallway was clearly originally outside.

I could go on and nitpick everything, but I'll leave that for my Tripadvisor review. The main problem, or perhaps the elephant in the suite, is the elevator situation. There are about 20 rooms on each of 6 floors, and there is exactly one slow 6-8 passenger elevator. Let's just say it's not adequate. I've heard from people who work in the hotel that they will be putting in a second elevator over the winter. That means it would take only slightly longer to wait for that elevator than for the existing one. Having a room on the top floor suddenly becomes much less attractive when it takes 5 minutes to get there or back.

More to come.