No Man Is An Island

We are leaving in four days for a week in Martha's Vineyard. I know, I know: you are thinking I am totally hanging there with the Clinton's and Diane Sawyer and Carly Simon. That is only half true.

Fifteen years ago, we crossed from the mainland to the Island on the Ferry with two other couples. Six people. We played "dry Marco Polo" (please don't ask) and canasta, drank beer like water, avoided poison ivy, took outdoor showers, slept on the beach, and talked about when (and maybe even how?) to have babies. We rolled into a fancy BYOB restaurant (with our newly issued credit cards) not with a bottle or three of wine, but with a cooler. A cooler on wheels. Filled with cheap beers in cans. The chef, a Deadhead, was our friend within the hour, and, to hell with the real live celebrities to our left, he fed us like kings and queens. We were a teacher, two traders, a marketer, a record company flack, a social worker, and we were fun.

And broke. We took the next summer off to work our skinny asses to the bone.

Another couple moved "back east" and they joined our happy, drunken crew the following, more flush year. They added carpenter/entrepreneur and realtor to our resumes, as well as expert Scrabble players and so a new game was on. We also had a mom and a dad amongst us that year (thanks to the outdoor shower), and a mom-to-be, also known as the Oreo-mauling Jabba the Huttish 8.5 months pregnant beyotch. And yes, that was me.

Flash forward to now: there are twenty in the crew and ten are children and two are babysitters (we got smart about that around year 8). And we are leaving in four days. And though I have done literally nothing to prepare, and the preparations are massive, like moving a house to an island, I can not wait.

It seems weird to me sometimes to leave the Small Town during its high point, when all the boats are in the water, the weather is relatively awesome (even on a sickly hot day, the beach is about ten degrees cooler, in more ways than one), and everyone is "around" a lot more than they are during the ski season. I say "around" because between day camps and yacht clubs, though most of my friends are physically here, it is not like I bump into them as much as I might like. Which is probably a post for another day. When I am feeling more political. And invisible.

The truth is, something changes in me out there. I feel it the moment I get on the ferry. I feel myself fading, dulling, blurring. I feel myself quite literally shaking off the skin of this mom and wife and suburban grown-up that I have become and growing the skin of the person I want more to be. I find myself holding hands with the Stud in the car while Neil Young sings, and breathing in the clean sea air more deeply than I normally do, and noticing how insanely beautiful raw nature can be and raw people too. I find myself saying yes more than no to almost everything (food, a drink, my kids). I find myself trusting the Stud and other dads to take care of the posse when they say they want to jump off a bridge or surf the big waves with the rip tide. I am, within hours of arriving on the island, laughing from the gut without any worry about anything with women I literally cannot live without (and I'm lucky: I get to do this in the Small Town from time to time too, and err, umm, here with you also).

So I go. I go every year because we have (and now since a great majority of our kids can speak, they have) made it so this expensive, planning-intensive, packing-obsessive annual event is a "family" tradition none of us can live without.

And since I am kinda worked up about it and it is Friday and my sister and her family of five are arriving tomorrow (and the house is bomb-hit and fridge-empty), I am going to rely on you to finish this wee essay with your answer to a question, ala my girl Carolyn...Online who used the nifty device earlier today (but more subtlety):

What is your place to go (real or metaphysical) that changes or refreshes you?