Sunday-- On our way

We left early Saturday morning,too early by my estimation but not by husband's. We wound for hours through
the back roads of Vermont, New Hampshire, and reached the southern end of Maine via Sanford. The two
felines unresplendent in their captive plastic kennel boxes had given up and lay quietly nestled in their
bathtowels as the dog aimed her long nose toward the cracked open window. Bad music played through
the chinsey Ford speakers and still I slept on. I slept for most of the trip, broken up twice by two
half-hour stints at driving, choosing to forego panic induced by his driving triggered by my visual
perception problems and the dusky scenery of lakes, weeds, and mountains for the pleasures of sleep
adrift in my own world of blessed silence.

I had woken up fully by time we hit the Shaw's supermarket. Himself went in for the milk, the eggs, the
butter. Upon his return I walked over to the Goodwill, with aching back and hips and shoulders and neck.
I located some shorts made from a pleasing lightweight poplin striped material and an old teeshirt in
soft grunge style bearing the logo "Long Beach Island." I stowed my treasures in the trunk and he began
at once to complain about having to take the train back home a couple of weekends hence. Upon our return,
he will be forced to transport his elderly mother back up the back roads in her car with non-functioning
radio accompanied only by the blithering natter of her voice and the shitting of her two cats in their own
captive plastic kennel boxes. And for that I was momentarily glad-- my cats don't soil their confines.
At once arose my temper at my own pain and the betrayal of my own body. "Look," I told the complainer,
"I am quite sure you will be able to manage locating a cab to take you from the Portland pier to the
Portland transportation center off of exit 5 where the Amtrak station is. That is far better than me
having to endure six or seven hours of pain and fatigue and driving alone in order to come get you." He
shrugged. "I don't mean that," he told me. I knew he meant the mechanics of it all. The investigation
involved with finding the Amtrak schedule, the train ticket, the cab phone number, the two hour trip in
early morning on the mail boat. (I didn't bother to tell him that there was also a bus available at the pier. For
some odd reason, he considers the taking of buses to be "plebian." The word plebian appears to be some sort of insult
which he and family all hurl at any activity tha they consider to be beneath them somehow. I feel fortunate that
I did not grow up with such prejudices. For me as a child in Newark, New Jersey public transportation represented
a means by which I was able to get myself to places where I wanted to go without the necessity of relying upon the
parental units-- and in some cases the added bonus of not having to explain to them exactly why my best high school
friend Peggy and I oft felt compelled to travel to places where none of our parents would have allowed us to go. But
those tales are for another day). Husband-- like me-- is at once attracted to and flummoxed by the details of daily
living.

We got to the parking lot where the car was deigned to live for 15 bucks a night, payable up front. We
unpacked, I took the dog to the lower end of the parking lots by the weeds for a shit, I used the portajohn,
husband read, I paid for the car's residence, he stowed our luggage along with the two cats onto the back of
the bus. In short order, the cats and bean bags and cheap cloth suitcases would be joined by several
dozen plants and bushes, more bean bags, and a few people. The bus driver drove one poor soul to the
Saab dealership in her own station wagon. That place had promised to return the stranded woman's car to the
lot after it was fixed but had fallen down on their end of the deal. The bus driver lent husband the phone
so he could arrange for the island taxi to meet us and the luggage at the pier. "Knowing the phone number of the
taxi is not my job," she said gruffly. It did not matter because I knew the number by heart-- I recall phone numbers
and zip codes even from my childhood with easy facility-- and there was never any question of us needing
the bus driver to provide us with any phone number. I shut my mouth then. I have some very dedicated and
opinionated viewpoints of what constitutes anyone's job. Certainly I have declared in these pages that
customer service is dead enough times for the casual reader to know what I think about this paltry refusal
of a bus driver to refuse to provide tourists to Chebeague Island with the phone number of a taxi cab. But no
matter. I don't mind following the rules when I know what the rules are. Such rules-- the ones governing
the dictates of average interactions such as the one between a bus driver who hates Chebeague and those
customers going there-- escape me and always have. While I don't believe that I am any more or any less
entitled to service than any one else, I have often noted an absense of basic human respect glossed over
by the words, "It ain't my job." Customer service is a rotting corpse. Alas, I have digressed and so must
return to the subject of these feeble paragraphs.

We sat in the back of the bus so that the overly friendly dog would not distract or terrify the rest of the
passengers, some of whom may be distressed by her presence. Dog wagged her tail and alternately checked on
the well-being of "her" cats, sniffed at the flora next to their kennels, peeked at the water and bridge and
building flying by the windows, and slept at my feet. Once the bus had backed up to to wharf, she was
tempted to bolt but was held back and remained under my firm control. We shuffled back and forth from the
luggage drop point to the loading dock until all of the bags, plants, cats, luggage, and boxes had been
removed.

The boat came then. After it had emptied itself of folks going to the mainland, the deck hands came out (all
two of them) and loaded up the back of the boat, only after which we are bidden to come along and board. A small
wave of humans ambled down the ramp and onto the dock and then into the boat itself. We sat by the outward
door which would be the one to exit off of, again with the thought that the dog should not inflict herself
gregariously upon the unwilling. She flopped down contentedly at my feet. The engine hauled itself into
life (for there was no springing that came with this engine) and we set off for the island. The hotel came
into view first, as it always does, once white but now a sickening yellow, then the shoreline, then the dock.
Husband loaded the luggage and himself into the waiting taxi van. The dog and I walked past the golf course
skirting the hotel, past the intersection of the two roads, down to where our road would turn into a pleasant
dirt path and the mosquitos grew lush and wild, down past several other cottages and one mid-size monstrosity
to our own family cottage. The uber-rich had discovered the island in recent years and had begun constructing
mansions which looked out of place among the little gingerbread cottages that was more the style of this island.
As it happened, the two elder inhabitants had winterized their monstrosity and then promptly died. Their son and
his family now came up from Boston for the summers, although the son was a weekend commuter since his Boston
medical practice would not allow for three months off in a row. Truth be told, I missed his father a tiny bit
but not his mother. His dad was an interesting old fellow who freely allowed me access to his stash of Parabola
magazines. His mum had acted interested in a return invite to our cottage later on one week but then snubbed me
in the singular local grocery store refusing to acknowledge my existence, never mind a friendly hello. They
never did make it down to our cottage that summmer. More's the pity. First he died off and then she did,
leaving a bad feeling in the air between us and I as usual unable to puzzle it out.

The dog and I continued past this winterized half-mansion of a showpiece on past the gingerbread cottages more
to my liking, past the mailboxes on the corner, arriving finally at the family cottage which sits like a barnacle
on a rock but not quite jutting out into Casco Bay. The Barnacle indeed used to be a gentleman farmer's barn
and had been converted to a three season cottage sometime before 1956 when my husband's family had bought it.
The porches are fine and spacious, the one gracing the front of the house being roofed but airy and the one in
the back being more of a deck upon which to sit and watch the garden grow and the clothes dry on the old posted
clothesline. Dog and I went through the front door into the living room, dining room and then the kitchen where
I immediately reached for a soda. Husband had sorted out the three disposable litter boxes and were placing
them where our two felines would be sure to find them. I and my aching body carted our cheap cloth luggage
upstairs and began to unpack. We would be here this time for a week and a half, leaving on Tuesday the 9th.

I plugged in my laptop and sat down to read for a bit and relax. There is no television up here, no cable, no
internet connection, no radio. There used to be a radio but it had gotten seized by my mother-in-law and thrown
out or given away. In her world, anything she did not use herself was useless. Thus the radio, various pieces
of furniture, a variety of books not to her liking, even two bicycles belonging to other members of the family
were all frantically shoved out from under her vision just as soon as she was able to. But the mother-in-law was
not here this trip. And I can't remember the last time that the two of us (and the animals) were left alone in
this small barn with the too-narrow steps leading upstairs to the side of the house designated as "our bedrooms,"
the connecting room leading to "her bedroom and her bathroom with the smelly catbox in it by the singular bathtub."
Alone the five of us, two humans and three beasts, to enjoy our own company and each other without the interruptions
of a lonely elderly narcissitic woman who cannot stop talking-- ever.

And so we settled down to ziti and canned sauce, and time some time alone to enjoy our solitude. On our evening
walk, the dog and I were treated to the sight of a red fox with pointy nose and a "ROwwww ROwww" bark running from
the water along Patton's land uphill and into the woods from which more barking was emitting. Dog stopped to smell
his tracks but did not appear interested in seeking out the vixen's den itself.

Sunday morning came and being happily unchurched, we did not make the trek to the only church on the island. Instead
we walked along Hamilton Beach where I collected broken shells for my garden plots back home, husband pointed out
the old dock pilings, and dog trotted joyfully along the sand and lapping bay water. The dog spied a family of
four endeavoring to provoke skin cancer sitting on the beach with goosebumps littering their exposed flesh and
immediately sought to endear herself to them by giving them the sheepdog stare and then running around them in
large expanding circles. She ran off to the water then and threw herself in, demonstrating to us her secret. She
indeed swim, and swims quite well. she just does not want to be forced to swim and after a couple tossing of a stick
figures we mustent really want the thing and refused to retrieve it for the two human fools who keep throwing it
away. But there is no stick tossing today. Just a happy dog having her first romp on the beach this season before
it fills up with summertime residents and their labs (it's a requirement) and the hapless hotel guests who have
difficulty locating the public access road to the beach. In truth there are many beaches but only the locals and
the summer folk know the ancient right-of-ways. And many are determined to keep those little woodsy jaunts a secret
from those who must be confined to using the public access road to the somewhat public beach.

Sunday afternoon found us two humans walking a mile or so up to Calder's to try the newest item on the
menu-- clam puffs. At 7.50 per half pound which works out to a bit over a dollar a clam, husband declared the puffs
to be doughy, a disappointment, and not worth the money. "I won't have that again," he declared as we meandered
over to the grocery store and then a second time to the neighbor woman whose own mother-in-law had killed herself
a few summers ago by jumping out of a window and who in my estimation was too damn skinny. "But their lobster rolls
are really good!" she told him. Over homemade chili later on when I observed the woman walking down the road I said
"She really is too skinny," my husband asked if I told her so. "No," I said stuffing my mouth with cornbread, "I
know what anorexics are like."

After dinner I went back to the Edward Abbey book I was enjoying before dinner and before I had dropped off for a nap.
Abbey's world is the desert and places that used to be, before being taken over by Industrial Tourism, a fate which
this island also seems destined for although in the extreme east rather than in the West. I respect Abbey a great
deal since he also was intimately acquainted with the insides of a bar in Hoboken and so I engrossed myself in stories
of the west that I myself had travelled through on the trains from Chicago to Flagstaff with stops inbetween on a trip
that I had taken a few years back alone.