Last night I was hanging out at a strangely familiar house out on Sand's Pond Road on Block Island with Jim Kriegel and Jess Brown. Around 7pm Jim's rescue squad pager went off, alerting members that a 70-year-old man had collapsed at a party on Old Mill Road.
My father, 68, was on crutches and at a party on Old Mill Road.
Panicked, I called him and was hugely relieved when he picked up and said he was fine, it was an older island resident. Later I drove home past the medical center and an ambulance was pulled up to the front with its lights flashing, giving the impression that something was on fire.
Today I see this Facebook Status from my neighbor Lisa, the island's police and rescue squad dispatcher and general all-around amazing woman. Working through all possible weather conditions in an environment where it can be frequently hard to get the medical help necessary, this kind of thing goes unpraised far too often.
Yesterday it had been five days since my father was able to go outside due to his fractured leg, so midafternoon we took him outside on a tour of the island.
For a dead rock in the ocean in the middle of winter, it was surprisingly impossible to go anywhere without life. Click any photos to enlarge.
If it's gonna go out it might go out like this. Just replace the riverbed with an ocean and the sunny day with a hurricane. I think I could sleep peacefully knowing it was out there somewhere, slumbering beneath the waves, waiting silently until humanity someday needed it to rise once again.
Saturday AM I manage to bang down to the 11am ferry in
record time to get out to Steve and Jennifer's wedding. I've
known Steve since god knows when – used to steal SNES games off him when I was
12 -- and had run into Jen (AKA “Larry”) occasionally out on the island in the last few years since they started dating. Just a great couple, really couldn't be more
of a fan of them -- both separately but especially together.
Still exhausted from Friday I get out to the island and borrow
the parents' Cherokee, then make my way down to the Cushman house at the end of
Minister's Lot where the wedding was set to happen on the beach. Place was a
great setup. Except for the horizontal, sheeting rain.
The crowd trundles from the house down to the dunes, rain
smattering everyone off the ocean as the waves roll in under a dark sky. The
groomsmen and one of the more stunning lineups of bridesmaids I've ever seen
come down, the girls goosebumped and shuddering uncontrollably in the wet cold.
Steve walks through the group looking pimp in an all-white suit and finally
Jen shows up looking rather amazing and not at all like any kind of Larry.
The wedding goes rather quickly. Some intense fumbling is
done untying the ring. Vows are exchanged. Two people are eternally unioned. There
might have been some making out, I don't know. And everyone heads back up the
dunes. The wedding party takes off in Vin MacAloon's van to do photos on the
bluffs, leaving the rest of us to start drinking. The wedding
party gets back twenty or thirty hours later, dinner's rolled out with some pot
roast, baked stuffed flounder, and chicken marsala, there's some speeches from
Greg and Steve McGirl and crytalking from the bridesmaids, and the night goes on.
I'm actually supposed to head home around 6:30pm to my
parents’ dinner party so I can make the 8:15am boat the next morning to be able
to get back to Boston for a Sox game with a vendor. But given the crowd there –
many of whom I hadn’t see in four years or more – a 1pm boat and no game started
to sound better and better. This situation wasn’t helped by one of the
bridesmaids -- a girl out there I’ve thought was amazing for years -- suggesting
I should stay so she could buy me a drink at the bar later. Which later turned out to mean I could have her share of the Beirut cups.
So there's a funny/great first dance with the Dire Straits'
Romeo & Juliet. Funny only because I remember Gasper, Zephyr, Marcus and
myself all standing around a bonfire listening to it at 3am sometime in 2000,
and Steve commenting at the time about how much he f#%&ing loved
the lyrics. Kind of cool to think back to someone standing there alone nine years ago,
listening to a song that makes him think of a woman he hasn't found yet, then come
back to the present and he's marrying her.
At one point Jen performs the bouquet toss. Second
bridesmaid Nadine knocks everyone over like an Austrian steamroller trying to
get to it and makes the catch. Steve then is on his knees and gets his wife's garter off with his
teeth, then also tosses it back. I have no idea why I'm doing it but manage to
snag the thing out of the air. Turns out I’m doing it because it means I get to put the thing
back on Nadine’s leg with my teeth as someone holds my arms back. Which I find
hysterical. I mean, the girl has incredible legs but I can barely keep the
thing in my mouth from holding back the laughing.
After awhile we move foosball and ping-pong tables upstairs, and
some pretty serious Beirut and foos action begins. Greg and I totally let the
newlyweds win. Around 8 or so I
drive my parents’ car back to their place as they’re stressing about it, have
some coffee with their friends who seem to be having about as good a time as
the wedding folks, then grab the CJ and
head back.
Back at the party some folks want to hit up the Yellow Kittens,
Steve wants to stay and enjoy what they have, I finally head into town with
some dude Ryan who was obscurely connected to the event and who'd been bitching about people wasting the beer foam earlier. Eventually most of the wedding shows up at Kittens, and after last call Ryan, Nadine and I drive over to Nermoe's for late night. At... some point I
pass out. Which is mostly a not-lie.
End up getting the 3pm boat back Sunday. Amazing time everyone, and my apologies again for threatening to
murder the groom. I only meant it in the most
loving way possible.
Been awhile since my last post, mostly because nothing of tremendous mental consequence has gone down. Around The World was fun, hiked Black Mountain again with TD, Isaac, and Erin, grad school got real. Taking the GMAT was a blast, now just gotta write the actual applications. Looking forward to it in a weird way -- kinda curious at how well I'll be able to demolish the essays.
It's the day after Christmas out here on Block Island right now and the weather is just unbelievable. It's not that it's hot, in that really creepy way that happens from time to time when it's like 75 in January and you're outside in a tank top and you realize the world really is gonna end, and the end is gonna feel a lot like New Jersey in August.
But Nathaniel, his fiancee Kara, Jess Brown and I got a bonfire going on Mansion last night and we barely even needed it.
Well, okay, I needed it. To -- as Na Na said texting me earlier in the night -- stand around something on fire with a couple beers.
Just jogged down here to Grace's Cove before dinner. Every time I'm out here is still surprises me how much this place is so... amazingly home.
So back in 1996 or so I was spending the summer out on Block Island, and got to know a random dude who was out there for his first summer, guy who called himself "Doc". No idea what his real name was or what he was doing out there, but we got to be buddies because (A) he had the same year CJ7 as me, only with a rope around the front bumper, and (B) one day when me and Kriegel kicked off a massive all-town water battle with most people on the island under 25, Doc got really into it, rigging up a waterballoon launcher on the rollbar of his Jeep.
Anyway, turns out back then Doc spent a good two weeks hitting on this chick Jessica at the Block Island Grocery, but as the girl had just gotten dumped recently she blew him off. So he focused his efforts instead on another new girl to the island named Mona, and he and Mona ended up dating for a few months.
And then Big Dave happened. Big Dave -- known as such because he was both named Dave and pretty big -- was one of my best friends at the time; we'd spent most of the prior three summers driving around listening to s#%&y music and getting into trouble together. And though I didn't know it at the time, Dave was also doing... certain things with and to Doc's girl Mona that Doc really wasn't happy about when he found out.
From what I remember when Doc found out he went into a fit, caused a huge scene downtown, and while he didn't want to fight Dave, he did quit his job and leave the island. Coincidentally, Big Dave is also the guy in the "Sara's Wedding" post just
beneath this one who's wearing sunglasses and looking big. He was
actually at the wedding this past Sunday with his wife Mona (yeah, they got married) -- they'd just left their
three-year-old daughter at home with the sitter. As for Doc, after he left I knew heard anything about the guy again.
Until three nights ago. I'm sitting at home checking the Sox score when Isaac IMs me with a link to a post in the "Missed Connections" section on Craigslist.
For those not in the know, apparently Missed Connections is a place on Craigslist where people write things like "Hi there! You were the girl in the red 'Make-A-Wish' t-shirt who got off the Red Line at Park Street yesterday, I was the guy standing behind you for three stops just silently checking out your a#%, let me know if you felt the spark I'm sure was there!"
Anyway, here's the post Isaac sent (click to enlarge):
So I email the girl who posted it, turns out it was written by the same Jessica, Doc's first choice from the Block Island grocery store back in the day, the one who'd turned him down before he went for Mona. She's somehow realized ten years later that Doc was "The One" and has posted the same listing in 40 different cities in the US looking for the guy.
Also turns out she's already found him. Someone had already read the post, recognized the name, and gotten her in touch with him, and they're apparently now scheduled to meet up. Alls ended wells.
God damn if the internet doesn't just continue to kick ass.
And Big Dave? Well, he's gotta live with Mona now. Forever.
David Benioff: City of Thieves: A Novel Only partway through this but looking forward to finishing it as soon as I remember to buy an extra lightbulb for my reading lamp. The tale is being related to an American writer by his Russian grandfather, about being trapped starving in his hometown in Russian in the year the Germans were invading. The grandfather found himself imprisoned as a young man by the Russian militia for stealing a flask off a dead German pilot, and being then set on a mission to find eggs for the Commandant's daughter's wedding cake. Was just speaking recently with a friend who only reads nonfiction. Seems like all the nonfiction in the world about the Second World War could not begin to capture the sense of how it felt to be there at the time, with the world collapsing around you and yet desperately in love with your future executioner's engaged daughter. (****)
Dennis Lehane: The Given Day: A Novel Usually Lehane's books are just very entertaining detective stories, though a few -- Shutter Island in particular -- stand out as more. This one so far seems like it's clearly going to fall in the "more" category, with a tale that looks like it's going big places. Chubby, happy, stupid Babe Ruth just joined and then failed to prevent the ruin of a negro baseball game while killing time waiting for the train, and that was just the prologue. Note: it's been almost six months and I have yet to finish this. (***)
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Took a surprisingly short amount of time to get into this one and cranked through it once into it. Which is surprising given that I don't relate wholly to a massively pudgy, socially outcast, fatally romantic Dominican kid named Oscar Wao.
But damn if the book's narrator didn't suck you into the world of Oscar, his family and the weight of the Dominican curse (fuku) that he carried on his back. Not to mention that the narrator was easily as much of a geek as Oscar, and loaded the pages with references to Final Fantasy, Starblazers, Warcraft, and all that other great gags that only true nerds would catch onto. I'm sure I missed dozens.
What kicked this one up to five stars, though, was simply the writing of the last third of the novel. By the time he was most of the way through his story -- particularly the crushing tale of Oscar's grandfather's family -- Junot Díaz's typing was on fire, and the last chapter's flash-forward rush was just devastating. (*****)
Chuck Palahniuk: Choke: A Novel The story of a man addicted to sex whose dying mother thinks he's everyone but himself and who earns his keep by faking choking in a restaurant for purposes of getting saved by people who then spend their lives looking out for his well-being.
Brilliantly funny yet subtly sad, looking forward now to checking out more Palaniuk. (***)
Scott Smith: A Simple Plan Much like his newer book The Ruins -- though containing actual chapters -- Smith's "A Simple Plan" just never stops getting worse, yet stays highly entertaining.
Ostensibly it's the story of the narrator, his slower brother, and his brother's buddy who together happen across a downed plane containing a dead pilot and $4.4 million in cash out in the forest, and decide on the simple plan: take the money and hide it for six months, and if no one comes looking for it, keep it and disappear.
The plan turns out not be so simple, and circumstances go from there. One of the best thrillers I've read. (****)
Yann Martel: Life of Pi Finally got around to finishing something, thank god. Reading five books at the same time when you have very little time to read essentially means you finish nothing for ages, then finish a bunch all at once, but after getting halfway through this I couldn't stop until it was over.
"Life of Pi" is at the outset the story of a confused Indian lad named Piscine (after a local pool), though nicknamed Pi for short. Pi's the son of a local zookeeper and a highly confused individual when it comes to religion. With the greatest of intentions he takes up Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism all at once, much to the consternation of his parents and local Christian, Islamic, and Hindu priests.
Approximately 30% through the tale Pi's father decides to sell of much of the zoo's livestock to take the remaining animals along with his family to Canada via a freighter -- a freighter which then proceeds to rapidly sink halfway across the Pacific, stranding Pi in a lifeboat alone with an injured zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and... a fully grown Bengal tiger named Richard Jenkins. The rest of the story concerns Pi's survival asea with this group, and goes some pretty damn surprising places -- places that I've never seen described before, some wonderfully funny, some darker than "The Terror" (the other book I'm taking for-freaking-ever to finish).
I'm sucker for killer endings, and damn if the last thirty pages are so aren't the definition of a fast read. The last page -- and especially Pi's final words -- are simply heartbreaking, though undoubtedly truer than anything I've read in ages.
Here's to the world in which there lives a Richard Jenkins. (*****)
Dan Simmons: The Terror: A Novel Just started it, so far there are two ships in the 1800's locked into ice while trying to cross the northwest passage through the artic. And something's out there. Not bad so far. (****)
Dennis Lehane: Darkness, Take My Hand Having started with A Prayer For Rain, actually the fifth in the series, I'd gone back to the first Kenzie/Gennaro novel set in modern Boston, then moved on to this one.
Like the others, the book focuses on a wisecracking Boston private eye raised in Dorchester who, along with his hot but equally intelligent partner Angie and unstoppable juggernaut of a buddy Bubba, jumps into cases that are way over their head.
Unlike the cliche this setup sounds like, however, this Lehane series inevitably ends up being far darker than its setup would have you believe, with an ending involving dual serial killers that's pretty much unbelievable in its violence. Like the movie Gone, Baby, Gone (which I needn't read, as I believe the movie did a good enough job), and Lehane's own Mystic River, people are frequently more than they seem, but usually for the worse.
While I can't say any of the series will leave you walking away with a smile on your face, damn if they aren't pageturners. Looking forward to the third one, which is allegedly on the more comedic side. (***)
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (audio) Not sure if you can really call this a novel, more a novella, On Chesil Beach is the second Ian McEwan book I've read, after the terrific Saturday.
The story is straightforward and pretty damn simple: two kids in England in the 60's from different backgrounds find themselves in a room in a hotel on the English shore on the first night of their honeymoon, wondering how the hell to get it on. He's really into the idea, she... not so much.
From there the book covers only the next two hours or so (or more, maybe), as well as the events in their lives leading up to that night, but it's McEwan's wording and painting of what's going on inside both of their heads that makes the book so killer. You get to know both of these two people -- we all know people in many ways like these two -- and it's how the drama of the night plays out in the big and evn more little ways that sucks you in.
This isn't the most action-packed thing you'll ever read -- hell, it'd probably even make a shitty dramatic movie -- but somehow the thing gets into you with its mood, laying you out with an ending you somehow knew was coming from the first line. (*****)
David Anthony Durham: Acacia: Book One: The War With the Mein (Acacia) Been awhile since I found the time or geek factor to read a good fantasy novel, probably not since reading the LOTR trilogy in '97 and not really even enjoying it that much. Loved books like the Dragonlance serieses back in high school, though, so when EW recommended this as a terrific start to a trilogy, figured I'd give it a shot.
Acadia is the island capital of a massive empire on a world much like ours, an empire which has ruled the Known World for a thousand years. Like many empires, however, (I'm guessing here), its foundation is rotten, built on a tithe of slaves send to a faraway unknown people in return for an addictive heroin/weed-like powder known as "Mist".
Without getting too much into the politics of it all, the king of the world is assassinated early on, his four children are scattered to the four corners of the world, his kingdom conquered by cursed Norseish conquerors, and the book focuses mainly on who the heirs grow up to become and how the family is reunited.
Actually pretty damn riveting stuff, Durham describes clearly how each of the children is molded by the new lives they're thrown into in a nature/nurture argument that -- much like most of the characters and their choices in the book -- never becomes a picture painted in clear black or white.
Not a perfect book -- I never got a sense of the countryside or the people of the lands outside of the royal main characters, and a few more small, comic details would have been welcome -- it was still a great read, with a damn strong ending that makes April '09 still too far away. (***)
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