Letter from New York 05 26 2016 Thoughts while overlooking Edgartown Harbor…

It is blissfully quiet this moment, except for the drone of the Harbor Patrol boat in Edgartown Harbor.  I am sitting, at this minute, on the veranda of my friends’ home overlooking that harbor.

View from the room

Yesterday, I arrived on Martha’s Vineyard.  I am here for awhile, that while yet undetermined. My friends, Jeffrey and Joyce, own the Edgartown Bookstore.  About six weeks ago, reading “All The Light We Cannot See,” a book I purchased last year at their bookstore, it occurred to me they might need some help at the beginning of the season.  So I volunteered.  And here I am.

Yesterday, I left the cottage and had a giddy thought.  If I should decide not to teach in the fall, after the Vineyard, there is no place I have to be for the rest of my life.  It was both liberating and frightening.  I felt like my head was filled with helium.  I have acknowledged, at last, I am adrift in the world and that the boundaries I am now setting are the ones of my own choosing and no one else’s.  

I took a picture of the rhododendron as I left the house.

IRhododendrens at cottage

As I also took a picture of the creek before I left.The creek on May 25th 2016

As I was sitting in my car on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, Jeffrey texted me: don’t eat!  They also own “Behind the Bookstore,” a restaurant that has a great reputation on the island.  We were treated to a tasting course of everything on the dinner menu and dinner service begins tonight.  It was all extraordinary, with the exception of the sweet pea gnocchi, which is still a work in progress.

The young chef is fresh out of Chez Panisse in Berkley, Alice Waters’ signature restaurant.

Tonight, after my first day in the bookstore, where I did my best to earn my keep, I am sipping a martini and looking at Edgartown harbor and thinking how fortunate I am to have this experience.

I am enjoying the moment.

Unbelievably but not perhaps unpredictably, Donald Trump has cinched the number of delegates he needs to be nominated.  I am appalled and don’t want to think about it.  So I am enjoying my view.

Let’s admit it.  I am scared to death if he wins the election.  Scarred to death.  He has no credible credentials to be President of the United States.  And I must decide if I will engage in this fall’s election to defeat him or stay on the sidelines and pray to all the gods in all the universes.  I suspect I will do my best to defeat him.

But Hillary!  As we were driving to “Behind The Bookstore” last night, Jeffrey said, and rightly, that there was no problem that the Clintons couldn’t make worse.

And it is so effing true.  They stumble into things and don’t claim responsibility and just manage to make things worse and worse and worse.  And the polls are showing that Hillary could lose to The Donald. 

Oh my! Lions and tigers and bears… Oh my!

I am going to focus on the moment right now.  I have to.  I am sitting on a veranda on Martha’s Vineyard, looking out on Edgartown Harbor, calm and peaceful.  The storm may be about to erupt on our heads but not tonight.  I will savor tonight because not to do so would be foolish.

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