News and Events for Nantucket Island
They said that they were never coming back.
Again.
For thirty-eight years running.
They had their reasons. They weren’t rich. They told everyone that. They brought air mattresses for the kids, five frozen meals in a cooler, and a full tank of gas. The bikes were tied onto the car, the sleeping bags stored in roof carrier, and everything else packed around the kids. (Tim, your feet are going to be on the Hibachi).
One of my favorite books to read with my daughters way back in once upon a time land was Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Greg Heffley. The Wimpy Kid books are laugh-out-loud funny and completely relatable. The first book in the series introduced me to the dreaded “Cheese Touch,” a curse of sorts that is to be avoided at all costs. I fully understood that the cheese touch exists in reality. Sometimes the dice go cold. Sometimes they simply freeze up, even in a hot August on our beautiful island of Nantucket.
Now don’t let the history books fool you: the real British Invasion happened in the early 1960s, and there was nary a Redcoat to be found. The American music scene had been floating along with mediocre pop music for quite long enough, thank you. Exactly how much Fabian and Bobby Vinton can one nation stand, right? So the stars were aligned for a quantum shift. And here came the Beatles, just in time to fill that vacuum which nature abhors. The flood gates opened, the American population went gaga for everything British, and things were never the same.
There’s a scene at the start of the fantastic 1986 movie “Stand By Me” where Richard Dreyfuss is sitting in his car, trying to come to terms with the death of one of his childhood buddies. As this character looks up from the newspaper article that had delivered the bad news, he sees two kids who look about thirteen pedaling by on their bikes. We see the Dreyfuss character immediately taken back in time, back to that age, back with his neighborhood gang. It’s a poignant moment that starts this brilliant coming-of-age movie (based on the Stephen King novella The Body).
I can’t buy a decent bookcase. If I want, I can get one on Wayfair or from Ikea that looks like a bookcase, but the shelves won’t hold anything heavier than a take out meal. I can find one created by a craftsman made of walnut and sturdy enough to hold the Harvard Library in leatherbond, but the bill is roughly what you would pay for a used Toyota. And it won’t buy the groceries.
Yikes—it’s the second week of May and no Nantucket anglers have caught a striped bass yet! The first striper of 2023 showed up on May 3. I remember this well as my wonderful, crazy wife Beth landed it! She didn’t know that it was a big deal at the time. I certainly did. So here we are, us Nantucket fishing types, waiting in anticipation. Antici-paaaaaation…it’s keeping me waaaaaaaiting…
