Mingling With the Tourists

All right, so you all know from the name of this blog that I live on Cape Cod.

No, I do not live in a lighthouse, nor do I comb my hair with cod fish bones or whatever that song says. In many ways life on Cape Cod is quite suburban.

My son Ben says that he thinks the Cape is bipolar: busy and full of life all summer, long, dark and depressed in the winter. I don't think I'd go that far, well, maybe by February into March I would. It can get pretty dicey here right about then. There have been times that spring still hasn't arrived at the end of April and I think there is no way I can handle one more gray day. Then, June comes, the sun comes back, and so do the summer people.

It's not always easy to live someplace that swells with people and humidity for several weeks of the year. Going to mail a letter or pick up some burger for dinner becomes a crowd and car dodging experience that makes one want to just hibernate. Yesterday on my way to church a man was behind me who had honked his horn at the driver in front of him at my town's one four corner stop, and once behind me he honked when I didn't dart out in front of oncoming cars quite quickly enough for him. Apparently I was supposed to risk life and limb so he could go get his coffee ASAP. I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw the license plate on the car in back of me. New York. I wondered what this guy was like when he wasn't on vacation, he seemed so relaxed now.

Today my friend Judy wanted to go have coffee "in town" and it became clear to me why it's so much easier to spend my days (especially the cloudy ones when THEY aren't at the beach) safely ensconced in front of my computer working at home.

We went to the most popular coffee place, a place I am ambivalent about in some ways because of their dedication to shooing teens away, but it's one of the very few places to go in town where you can hang out and talk over a cup of coffee.

At 11 on a cloudy morning in July, the place was jammed with summer people. When you live in a vacation destination you get to know (mostly) on sight who's a local and who's not. The guy in the pink shorts with embroidered fish bones on them? Um, thinking he's not local. There are some obvious clues of course: fanny packs, maps, Cape Cod anything - t-shirt, sweatshirt, visor (visors are a big giveaway), and a passel of kids clamoring for frozen hot chocolate and ice cream.

Judy and I finally got a table after standing for about five minutes, and managed, through raised voices to catch up above the clamour. About thirty minutes in however this very assertive woman came over and asked us if she and her "very nice" friend could share our table. This is New England, we're not used to sharing our space. Not graciously anyway. But share we did. I told Judy, after we'd departed that it would have been a lot more fun if it had been a very handsome man who wanted to join us.

It really wasn't so bad out there in the land of tourists on this overcast day. We did some shopping and most folks were pretty cordial. Traffic was heavy, and people tended to turn or stop without warning, but all in all it wasn't too terrible. You just have to learn to navigate around them and time your missions. For instance - never, ever under any circumstances try to go to a movie on a rainy day. You'll stand in line forever, the theater will be so crowded that you'll be jammed into a seat next to someone with a predilection for rustling candy wrappers and munching loudly on stale popcorn. We locals only take in matinees when it's gloriously sunny outdoors.

For all my whining about living here, it is home. The people who live here are creative and quite interesting. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes...not so much. But I love living in a place where it's fine to be gay, it's fine to be an artist, it's fine to just be yourself. You just have to make sure that you know the rules of the road, and realize that from mid-June until Labor Day, most of the other people don't.