kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Place in the Sun It might be time to go back to Monhegan. Oh, not literally. Let me explain. When I was young, and my parents were young, and poor enough to be working for the churchmice, they still somehow managed to take us on family vacations. Granted, such vacations were generally camping ones (I still shudder at the sight of a pup tent) and centered around things like state parks and museums. Cheap--and fascinating to my history-buff folks. And often these vacations were punctuated with side-trips to visit my dad’s antique-collecting friends, and mum’s quilting friends, and side trips to military bases for groceries from the Commissary and so on. They usually involved getting up at the crack of dawn to drive early and avoid traffic. My parents were rather vigilant, even in those safer days—it was rare that my sister and I got to make side-trips of our own. I think I was eight, which would make my sister twelve, when we went to Monhegan Island. Monhegan Island is a pretty little island off the coast of Maine, reachable by ferry. Somehow it was determined that my sister and I wanted to go, while my mom gets seasick and for my dad it would have been a busman’s holiday—he was in the Coast Guard—and so we were allowed to go alone. Put the two kids on a ferry, let them go to a tiny little island and walk around, and come back on the ferry—no big deal. I’m not sure any parent –or any sane parent—would permit that today, or should, especially as we were the cutest pair of little blonde girls ever, but back then, No Big Deal. The day dawned mizzly, misty and wet—dank with cold in a way that only the seacoast in New England seems to get, the kind of cold that knaws into your bones. At eight, I’m sure that I barely noticed it, but in memory, my joints creak. My sister and I went up the gangway into the ferry, and set off—armed with a point and shoot camera, a bag lunch, and me in my mother’s windbreaker that came down to my knees. It continued to rain and drizzle. It was cold on deck, so we went down into a small room (panelled with that tacky faux wood finish) and sat out the ride. Periodically, the captain would get on the loudspeaker to announce where we were and what we were passing, like an airline pilot would today—and each time, he said “Don’t worry, folks, the sun always shines over Monhegan”. My sister and I shivered at the thought of a day spent in the rain and cold. But he was right, because when we pulled up to the dock on Monhegan, and emerged on deck—we walked up into sunshine. It was the kind of achingly clear day that might now only occur in memory—when everything looks washed clean and shining, when the delicately spiky New England houses sit a little more proudly on crooked foundations, when even a dirt road seems like the ultimate in transport. My sister and I walked around the island, look at flowers, sat in the sun, had cookies in the one hotel’s dining room feeling like big grownup girls. All too soon we were back on the ferry, riding for the dock on the mainland and our parents, riding back into the drizzle and the rain, the fog and the raw and the cold. I’ve told this story a number of times in my life. I usually say, in an astonished tone of voice, “The captain was right! Because the SUN SHONE LIKE HONEY….” It’s become a metaphor for me of the One Sacred Space in your soul that is preserved, unchanging and magical throughout time. The place you go in your heart when you’ve got nowhere else to go, and it’s a good thing. The sun ALWAYS shines in Monhegan. Ferry captains don’t lie. It’s become, in a small way, part of the foundation of my existence, a certitude that even if times change and people change and life changes and grows, that somewhere there is a tiny island out in the sea with rickety white New England houses dreaming under perpetual sun. Sometimes folks will argue with me about this. “Well, did you ever go back?” they say, and “How do you know the sun always shines there unless you’ve been there for a while?” They’re missing the point. I would never, ever go back. To do that is to reduce the magical to the mundane, to try to prove the existence of a ghost or an impossibility. If I ever did, under some strange circumstance, go back, I’d check the weather report carefully, believe you me. Besides, although I haven’t been on a boat for at least 20 years, I’m fairly sure that with age has come the onset of my mother’s seasickness. Entering stage left, puking, into the Land of Perpetual Sun seems somehow not quite right. “You could check it on the Weather Channel”, they say. “You don’t have to go there, just look at www.weather.com or something.” You know, I could do that; I haven’t, but I could. But seeing the words on the screen –“Monhegan, rainy and cold today, highs in the 60’s” –I’m not sure if I would believe it. It would have to be lies, all lies, because Monhegan lies under sun the way film noir movies always take place in darkness and in rain. Monhegan and rain just don’t belong in the same sentence. Ferry and rain, yes. Monhegan, no. Somewhere in time and in sunlight, two little girls are playing grownup, sitting in the dining room at a hotel on an island off the coast of Maine, eating gingerbread and cookies. They have ridden into the heart of a coruscating miracle—a day of sun plucked out of a mizzly gray darkness. Like all good captains, the ferry captain has told a simple and magical truth—the sun always shines over Monhegan. Like a perfect prayer, like the wind, like the small blue flowers in the grass, like the gray weathered dock and the white houses—out there, somewhere—lies—in the middle of the sea--- Amen. 6:32 p.m. - 2002-08-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||