My last summer adventure
This past Labor Day weekend Steve and I drove down to Star Island to visit my brother for our last adventure of the summer. Star Island is an island half a mile wide off the coast of New Hampshire, where smiling, attractive, liberal employees called Pelicans keep an enormous hotel running smoothly and, thanks to my brother, well-painted. I’ve only been there twice but I love this place. It has an amazing history, from Blackbeard’s buried treasure to storms, fires, tragic deaths and hauntings.
We embarked by ferry from Portsmouth and churned out 10 miles to the island. Jordan and his girlfriend, Jocelyn, greeted us on the dock. We found our room and then I proceeded to run 28 times around the island for a total of 14 miles. After I thoroughly established my reputation on the island as a lunatic who ran around it all afternoon, the four of us had dinner and then watched an amazing sunset from Jordan’s cottage. All around us was ocean and far in the distance one could see the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts stretching out in a long line. Once the sun went down, a crazy fun night of card games and beirut followed.
The next day Jordan and Jocelyn took us around a tour of the island- graves, memorials, cottages, secret hidden hideouts, and clamboring and leaping nimbly over sun bleached rocks. It was an amazing sunny dark blue oceanday.
We watched the Pelicans play softball, we played some basketball, ping pong and tennis, and watched a movie. After dinner we played the board game “Scruples” and had good talks. Jordan and Jocelyn are busy planning and trying to figure out where they are going to live and what jobs they will have once they leave the island in October.
On Monday we were out on the 11:45 am ferry. There’s something about leaving a place on a ferry and watching it grow small and desolate in the distance that breaks my heart. The tears poured down and Steve comforted me. I was overwhelmed with a wish to be able to defy distance and protectively enfold Jordan and Jocelyn. I wanted them to come live in Vermont where I can help in every way I can to make it as easy and smooth as possible. Please let the real world be kind and accommodating to them.
After disembarking the ferry and quite hungry, we headed home. We were rushed because I had my first class of the fall semester at 5. We stopped at a gas station to grab some food and when we went back out to the car I realized that I had locked my keys in my car. I couldn’t believe it, I’d never done that before. We called triple A and they said they would be there anywhere between a few minutes and 45 minutes. Naturally, they arrived in about 46 minutes. I was officially going to be quite late to class.
I seem to have a curse, because it was going to be the third time I’ve walked into the very first class of the semester quite late in my graduate career. The first year I was hurrying to class, slipped on some ice in the parking lot and my ankle went *pop*. I had to be carried to the campus medical center and then hobbled to class on crutches, arriving an hour and a half late. The second time, I was involved in a fender bender on my way to the first class of the fall semester and walked in a half hour late. Needless to say, I am not a stranger to walking into a classroom full of unfamiliar people and making a doubtful impression on the professor as I attempt to explain why I’m so late.
However, it doesn’t make it any easier to have it happen again. To make matters worse, all my information was at home and I didn’t have time to go home to get it. So I didn’t even know which classroom I was supposed to go to and, better yet, I didn’t even know WHAT class I was supposed to be in. I knew it was one of three possible classes I was taking, but I had no idea which one. I booked it to Vermont at a high speed, a speed so high that the only cars passing me were from Quebec, those crazy Canadians. I arrived a half hour late, and after looking up the course schedule online in the computer lab, I arrived to class. Thankfully the professor was very nice and laughed at my locked-my-keys-in-my-car story and there were no problems.
So goes my last adventure of the summer.
On a further note, my friend Monica, a vet student, informs me that animals in fact have quite a lot of dentistry issues including too many teeth or coming in quite crooked. This includes cats and dogs. There are even people, who must live in a bizarre sub-dimension version of our reality, who put braces on their pets for cosmetic reasons.
Comments Off
Sep 2nd 2003Uncategorized