[Previous entry: "By Popular Demand"] [Cliffs - Home] [Next entry: "Last ActionScript Hero"]

06/08/2003: "Nantucket"

"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed; there - pointing to the sea - is a green pasture where our children's grandchildren will go for bread."

Obed Macy's History of Nantucket.

In the year 1993, following interminable back-to-back projects, first at Sears and then McDonald's; I found myself so corporatised that I, like Ishmael before me, required "a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peoples hats off". Then, like a breath of fresh salt air, a wedding invitation arrived in the mail. Not just any wedding invitation, but an invitation to a wedding to be held on Nantucket Island.

It seems the groom, Todd, a California boy and Oberlin classmate of my girlfriend, Ginny, was marrying a girl from Short Hills, NJ, whose family had a summer place on Nantucket. Excellent! The invitation was accompanied by travel and lodging information full of names that reeked of whaling lore. There were inns named after ships, and parts of ships, and kinds of whales; there were Bed and Breakfasts in houses that used to be the homes of whaling captains, and on it went.

Ginny and I had been dating for about eight months at that time, so fairly predictably, she asked me if I would like to go. We were still very much in the honeymoon phase of our time together and I was playing hard to get for some reason I can't remember. Therefore, I mixed drinks and brought them back into the living room before responding with an unqualified, oh yeah.

We had never been on a vacation together and with her being in need of some time off and my being in extreme need of same we decided to take a couple weeks and make it into a driving trip. The drive from Chicago east through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania can be a little dull and we had both driven that route a few times so we decided to drive through Detroit into Canada and then east to Niagara Falls, not hooking up with Ishmael until New Bedford.

I was newly divorced and the car, truck actually, I was driving was a bit rough. How rough? Have you ever seen a black desk telephone where someone has replaced the ailing black handset with a beige handset and cord? It was a full-size Chevy Blazer but, in addition to the aforementioned appearance problems, the engine was pretty well shot and I needed a road car. My girlfriend's ex beau was moving to Colorado, a good idea I thought, and saw himself "four wheeling" in the mountains. I swapped him my fixer upper Blazer and $1200 for a gun metal gray, "three on the tree", 1976 Chevy van that purred like a kitten. Now, we were ready.

Watch for The Duchy of Grand Fenwick where the story continues.

Note to readers:
Readers with Internet Explorer can use these links to "Add to Favorites." The rest of you are on your own. Remember, Cliffs Notes dot Info.
Click here to add this page to your favorites!
Click here to add this site to your favorites!

If you've enjoyed Cliff's Notes, click here to find lots more blogs. This link opens in a new window in case you realize you were better off here.
Last but not least, if anything interesting comes to mind about the above post that you would like to share, blurt it out in the form below. If you enter a "homepage," your "name," as you entered it, will become a link to your site. E-mail addresses, if entered, may be harvested by spammers.