Reflections in August

Every August my family (the extended one that includes cousins, aunts, uncles - the people who Christmas cards are grouped together on the mantle) returns to Woods Hole, a town at the base of Cape Cod known for oceanography and ferry rides to Martha's Vineyard. For my first 23 years I would always make the trek whether it be a long weekend from Dartmouth's summer session to an entire month break right before the back to school deals started appearing and hastily read book reports needed to be completed. But for the last six years I haven't been able to make it. My summers have been causalities to grad school, weddings, and the perpetual hobgoblins of work. Last weekend I returned.

It seemed … well uh … smaller. The driveway whose cracks we used as starting points for our "big wheel" races wasn't the steep terror of doom. The paths through the bushes around the tennis court weren't the complex labyrinths for "Kick the Can" or "Capture the Flag". The porch that clings to the side of the house wasn't the endless boardwalk of my memories. Raiding the cookie cabinet did not require getting a chair and having two brothers posted for look out duty.

Not to say that the place was small. The Lower House (there are two) was built in three sections and is covered in Cape Cod gray shingles. It was originally an inn for mariners, but the many years of New England salt air have warped the hallways that link the small rooms. The place creeks and moans when foot steps scamper through its halls back from the journey across two sections to the lone shower for the "boys" (male cousins out number female 8 to 3). It sits atop a grassy hill that cascades to the sea. Hurricanes have eaten into the coast and devoured the rocky pier, but there is still plenty of space for my cousins to hit golf balls into a hula-hoop.

There is always competition. Tennis games of my youth were not settled by score, but by who would fling their racket at their partner first. There were intense matches of card games from "Down the tubes", and "Oh Hell", to the back breaking "Hearts". This year a couple of cousins decided that we would have an Olympics by dividing us into three teams and having us compete in running, swimming, basketball free throws, shooting at coke cans, golf using a tennis ball, round the world version of tennis, and a concluding water balloon toss which disintegrated into an all out war. Although my team, the Lobsters, did not fare as well as the others I was sure that Ginny was well armed with balloons to go after her fiancé, my brother.

Sunday was the Falmouth Foot race, which goes past our driveway and continues seven miles along the coast and winds up near a Dairy Cream (which undoes whatever calories the race burned of). Each of the cousins wore a bright yellow team Gunny jersey (perhaps some sort of Tour de France thing) and sneaked in the race after the Kenyan blur had passed, but before too many people wearing "I love Budweiser" shirts had stumbled through. I finished towards the end but ahead of my two 6'4'' teenage cousins who have not yet figured out how to run at that height.

I have been running more recently. I am now up to doing 7.7 miles four times a week. Granted these are nine and half-minute miles, which is like being a Zen master of second gear. But I have gotten to the point past being out of breath where I can arrive to work in a sea of endorphins.

It is a long way from my seven-minute miles that I could run forever in high school. I feel that I have become the guy on the side of the road who the younger me briefly glances at before he strides on by. I know that I run not only in part to catch him (another part is that I got a little too successful at stealing cookies), but to keep an honest pace. Because further back the road there is an older me trying to catch up.

Side Routes

There is no non stop between Hangzhou and San Francisco - you either go to Hong Kong or the Shanghai to Tokyo and then SF. Twelve hours of flying, but only two movies not including the animated fasten your seat-belt videos which I think had the same cast as Gobots (I kept waiting for Ultra Man to jump out when the overhead oxygen supply fell). I did the Shanghai route which meant I spent the night in Shanghai and then flew out the next morning. The hotel which was booked here in California was across the street from the baggage claim. I made my way there despite a Chinese roper who was determined to get me to his hotel at a much better price.

As I checked in and went to my room on the third floor, I noticed that there was a bar at the end of the hall. A little tired from my trip I went to the bar for a good night drink. The staff quickly sat me down in a booth. A waitress came into the booth lit a candle and looked up at me from waist level"

"Do you want something to drink?"

I quickly looked at the drink menu and feeling a little patriotic ( or possible to get rid of the smelly tofu, a food that violates some primal taboo) I said "I will have a Budweiser".

The waitress smiled and then asked the second question "Do you want a girl?"

Now this was a little tougher question. I know my company has a lousy 401k program, but I did not think this was part of the overall compensation plan. I was not really in a hurry to join the viral frequent flyer club. I said "no."

I did finish my beer in the place and was impressed with its mood. I could see a little into other booths where business men had two girls a piece. Cigarette smoke poured over the top of the paper walled booths and sank into the carpet. A Mandarin version of "House of the Rising Sun." played on the stereo. It was hypnotic. After settling up for my beer I went down the hall smiling, and wondering about the house in New Orleans.

When I told a few people after I got back to San Francisco, they mentioned that I should have at least gotten a price check. Asked about group rates. Dollars to RMB currency conversion. Perhaps it was a moment that I will look back to and pause. But that was the point of the following weekend.

After getting back to San Francisco and spending just enough time to mess with my body clock, I got on a plane to Philadelphia for the wedding of a girl who got away. Equal parts plump and perky, she was a fellow intern at Bellcore specializing in the psychology of user interfaces. At her heart she is a conversational babbler (a property I also hold) which follows the principle that if you say enough eventual you will stumble into the truth.

I blew it.

That hot New Jersey summer she was dating a cartoonist who she left behind at Carleton. I didn't feel that I should have made my "move" which usually comes across as slightly less subtle than the inflated male frigate bird. There is a point when looking back at the horizon where nobility collides with stupidity.

Halfway through that summer, she struck a conversation with some one waiting for the bus. A graduate student a Rutgers specializing in molecular biology. He was on the periphery - only occasionally joining the intern pack for important discussions on whether "Batman" was a better movie than "Dick Tracy" - nowhere to be seen into our trips to Harlem and the Jersey shore.

The summer eventually ended. She went back to the cartoonist. I went to New Hampshire. The cartoonist wanted to draw someone else. The grad student didn't like grad school and went to Minnesota (where she was) to probably get as far as away from mitochondria as he could. It was their wedding.

There were five interns in our mini group, but she was the only one with whom I have kept in touch. As a group we all tried to guess where we would be in ten years - the cotton candy dreams of youth. So many possibilities. I was going to be a work-a-holic computer programmer. She was not going to get married until she was 35.

The wedding lasted an hour. The reception had a good music battle between her mom's music (see Chill, Big) and the Greatest Hits of the Eighties. And even though I loved dancing once again to "Come on Aileen", the whole thing stung just a little.

Perhaps both things (the hotel and the wedding) feel like the missed exit signs that in the rear view mirror - slightly larger than they appear. Frost's little side routes. I too will wonder.