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“Well, this is not a boat accident! And it wasn’t any propeller, and it wasn’t any coral reef, and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper! It was a shark!”

July 5, 2014

Arthur passed by closest to Nantucket but dropped on us inches of rain and heavy winds. My deck is covered in oak leaf clusters, one of the heavy clay pots fell and broke and the chimney candle holder which had been clamped to the deck also fell but luckily didn’t break. Later I’ll have to clean up all the debris on the deck and the ground. I’m waiting for the sun before I venture outside. It is still cloudy, damp and chilly. I lost electricity last night for all of ten minutes, but the timing was bad. Gracie was just coming up the steep deck stairs when it went dark, and I heard her trip, but she was fine when I checked her.

When I was a kid, I got fifty cents allowance every week. It seemed like a king’s ransom. My father, the only ant in a family of grasshoppers, wanted me to save it for a rainy day. I never did. Sometimes I’d buy a new book for 49 cents, no tax back then, or I’d shop Woolworth’s for something I didn’t know I needed. On the way home, if I had money left, I’d stop for a vanilla coke, ten cents. Wealth was counted in pennies.

Nobody I knew worked summers during high school except for my friend Maryalyce. She had bought an old car, a really old car with the start button on the floor, and needed insurance and gas money so she worked weekends and summers. We were college roommates one year, the only year Maryalyce lived away from home, and she worked long hours as a waitress to pay for school. The muscles on her right arm were huge from carrying heavy trays one handedly. I talked to her not so long ago and she is still working. I wasn’t surprised. She didn’t seem surprised that I wasn’t.

My sister baked sugar cookies for the 4th using the cutters I had sent her. One cutter was a woman with her leg bitten off, another was a surf board with bite marks and a missing piece and the third was the shark who was responsible. My sister used red sprinkles around the bite marks on the missing leg and on the shark’s teeth. She said a couple of the woman’s arms had broken off but that was okay. The shark probably got those too. One cookie lost its head. It was like Hooper finding Ben Gardner’s boat. When Ben’s head appeared, Hopper and the rest of us jumped. It is still one of the scariest scenes in Jaws. I love the headless cookie.

I watched Independence Day for the umpteenth time last night, but I still had to watch. It is one of my July 4th traditions not at all dependent on the weather.

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“There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.”

July 11, 2013

Last night I re-entered the world. I went to my first Wednesday play of the season. We always have dinner at a friend’s house first so I bought a few appies then drove, a new adventure for me, to Harwich, had dinner then went on to Chatham. Wouldn’t you know it but this play had three acts so I sat far too long. By the time I got home, at close to 11, I was exhausted and the house was stifling. I closed windows and put the air on. Gracie was panting, a barometer of sorts about the heat and humidity. It was close to 12 before it was cool enough to go to bed. I slept until 9:30 and am still tired. That first foray into the world has exhausted me.

We have a breeze and we have rain, not a lot of rain but rain nonetheless. The breeze is enough that the chimes hanging from the trees are making a sweet sound. I have all the windows and doors opened. Gracie loves it as she can come and go as she pleases. Even if I could muster the energy, l’d go nowhere today as the roads must be clogged with tourists looking for something to do. This is the summer of the tourist. Cars are everywhere. I’m guessing people have a bit more money to spend, and the cape is a great spot not too far away and one with all sorts of accommodations and restaurants and then there’s the ocean, the beautiful ocean which surrounds the cape.

I didn’t get my first job until the summer just after I’d graduated from high school. Back then none of us worked summers. Until I moved to the cape, I lived in a town which didn’t offer a lot of jobs for a teenager even if you wanted one. Parents never pushed. We just had to live on the paltry allowance they gave us. We managed.

The summer after high school I worked in Woolworth’s in down-town Hyannis which was a huge store. It had front and back entrances and a long counter for food. I remember the menu slots on the wall and the plastic menus with pictures of the food. I usually took my break at that counter. Working there was an okay job as I worked all sorts of places in the store and wasn’t bored. I worked the jewelry counter, the register, the pet corner and the souvenir section. The only problem was it didn’t pay a lot, but I could understand why as it didn’t take a whole of expertise or talent to work there. The pet section kept me the busiest as I had to change cages and feed the animals every day. There were fish, birds, hamsters and Guinea pigs. Little kids used to come to see the animals and watch the fish. The register was an okay spot to work. I could make change which made me a valuable employee. The souvenirs were mostly from China and included shells, fake driftwood, small boats and t-shorts. People bought a lot of souvenirs. I worked there until Labor Day which gave me a few weeks off before I had to go to college. All in all, it wasn’t a bad first job.

 

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“O’ how full of briers is this working-day world.”

July 20, 2012

Most mornings I’m finished with writing Coffee by now and have gotten on with my day, but not this morning. I woke up late, had three cups of coffee and just took my time reading the papers. It has to do with the weather. Today is cool. It will be in the mid-70’s and will stay cool for the next couple of days. Today is also dark. The sun is hidden behind a cloudy sky. I think it’s a wonderful day.

I had to figure the day of the week when I woke up. Usually I have a Wednesday play which helps give definition to the week, but I didn’t have one this week so I am a bit discombobulated. Because I watch the Red Sox most nights, I don’t have favorite shows on certain nights to help me keep track. I guess in the long run it doesn’t really matter what day it is.

When I was in college, I worked every summer at the post office in Hyannis. Back then Hyannis was a sectional center which meant all the mail was filtered through there so they hired a lot of summer temps. I was a mail sorter. I sat on this weird stool which was tilted toward the mail sorting boxes, and I wore a rubber thumb to help me sort one envelope at a time. I had my own rubber thumb given to me when I first started, and I was warned not to lose it. That should have given me a hint about working in the post office, but it didn’t. At first they had me working the general mail which just meant sorting the mail into states or cities. It was the easiest board, as they called the sorting stations, to work. I had such a good memory that I was also sent to work the Boston station board sorting into towns around the city. I worked Massachusetts which divided the general mail into cities and towns, and I worked Illinois and Ohio. I never did understand why we broke those last two into towns. Working in the PO was about the most boring job I ever had, just sitting and sorting from noon to nine. Once in a while I’d get to cancel the mail and I always enjoyed that, especially the postcards as they were so thin a bunch would slide through the canceling machine all at once. Whenever I’d find a postcard all filled out and stamped but without an address, I’d sent it to a friend. None of them ever mentioned those odd people who sent them postcards. The best time of the night was when we had to tie out for the 9 o’clock pick-up. That meant every piece of first class mail had to go on trucks to Boston. We literally tied each bundle from each slot on the boards using two elastics and then each bundle got an identifying destination on a paper wedged under the elastics. That was hectic emptying all the boards, but it was the only time I had fun working there.

The last time I worked in the PO was the summer before my senior year in college. At the end of that summer, I was actually offered a full-time job starting after Labor Day. I didn’t laugh or snort or breakout in hysterical laughter. I just said no thank you.

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“Good-bye–my paper’s out so nearly, I’ve only room for, Yours sincerely.”

April 17, 2011

It rained during the night, and the wind was fierce. One pine tree swayed so much I thought it would snap. When I woke up a couple of hours ago, it was still damp and cloudy. Now the wind has disappeared, the sun is shining, and the day is getting warmer. It’s a pretty Sunday morning.

Today is Palm Sunday. I remember my mother and a father had an old wooden crucifix over their bed and stuck behind it all year were palm fronds. Every Palm Sunday my mother would change the fronds after she’d come back from mass. The old ones were so dry their ends were like needles, and I remember being stabbed by a palm frond as I helped my mother.

I never worked when I was in high school, but I did babysit for extra money. It was easy. Once the kids were in bed, I could watch TV or read and get paid for doing it. It was so long ago, though, I don’t remember how much I got an hour, but I remember it was good money easily earned. My first real job was the summer after I’d graduated from high school and it was at Woolworth’s in Hyannis, and I didn’t like it much. I earned minimum wage and cleaned mice and hamster cages, worked the register and did whatever else I was told. The store was right on Main Street and was huge. It had a large souvenir section, and tourists could buy shells and star fish and snow globes from China. The store is gone now, replaced by a couple of different stores.

Every summer after that until I went to Ghana and every Christmas vacation during college I worked at the Hyannis post office. It was a great job for really good money. Christmas time I worked noon to midnight while summers I worked noon to nine. The job had little pressure, and all I did was sort mail or run letters through the stamping machine. We could chat and smoke as we worked. I was what was called a seasonal. Hyannis was, back then, a really busy post office, and all the cape mail was sent from there to Boston. Years later, Buzzards Bay became the hub and Hyannis became just another post office. I stopped in there last summer to get stamps, and it looked just about the same. People were chatting and sorting mail just as they had well over forty years ago. Only the smoke was missing.

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