On ice cream lines into the intersection, salted egg cereal, and what can be seen between the seats
July 16, 2021
Dear Eva,
Hello from the tail end of vacation! I have been looking forward to writing this letter to you the last day or two, pondering the possibilities of what to relay about this island-y week. It is a bit of a wonder to be able to carry on a conversation with you in this way, even during weeks like this one where our lives have not otherwise intersected. Whoever invented letter-writing was a genius! You and I have now been exchanging letters long enough and with enough regularity that the ongoing thread of letter-pairs feels like a sturdy thread, stitched underneath our everyday lives. I am so happy to have this added layer in my life, now and however long we carry on!
As you probably expect, this week has been a delight. Since our last vacation two years ago, we seem to have crossed over the threshold into a new kind of vacation mode, where our children are self-sufficient enough that we get a healthy mix of solo time, couples time, family time, and then big group time with the whole gang of 12 here. B and I also made the decision to rent bikes this year, which gave us an extra dose of independence while everyone else piled in the minivan. Nantucket Island is a very beautiful place; there is no denying that. But it does feel, particularly this year, like the little island is stretched to the brink. According to the Town of Nantucket website, the year-round population is about 11,000, and it swells to about 50,000 in July and August. This is excessive, and you can see it manifest in the cartoonishly heavy traffic backups and lines for ice cream that stretch across an intersection. I will state here for the record, I am sorry to be contributing to the chaos, Nantucket!
I feel like it is important to also acknowledge here that there is an element of Nantucket that downright disgusts me—the stuffy country club elitism that permeates much of the culture. I am not sure if this aspect of Nantucket has become more pronounced or if I have become more aware of it in adulthood. More likely, both. This may be a coincidence, but on the nightmarish flight here from our connection in New York (we sat on the runway here in Nantucket for two hours waiting for a gate), I had an interaction with a complete stranger that feels instructive about what it is that I detest about Nantucket. The short version of the story is this—before takeoff I texted B (who was a few rows back with the kids) to tell him that the woman behind me was being a “Karen” because she was endlessly protesting the flight attendant’s insistence that she put her cane in the overhead compartment. (The flight attendant also offered to come get the cane for her whenever she needed it; for example, if she needed to go to the bathroom during our 41-minute flight.) After a short back and forth with B about the topic, I suddenly realized, in my horror, that her loud protestations had turned from the flight attendant to me. The woman had apparently read my texts through the seats and was determined to make me pay. I kid you not: she proceeded to complain and cry (actual human tears) about this for the next hour, maybe longer. (The 41 minute flight was bookended by a 45 minute taxi at JFK and then the 2-hour taxi once we got to Nantucket Airport.) When I realized that ignoring it was only making her more upset, I turned around and apologized for having sent the text. This led to me getting a 5 minute lecture about how disappointed she was in me (she had been “admiring” me for reading and highlighting my book, and setting a good example for her children who do not like to read), and how she couldn’t believe I would do this “woman to woman, bringing another woman down.” Despite her appreciation for my apology, her husband then got in the game. He proceeded to loudly “demand to speak to someone” about the injustice, going from one flight attendant to the other lead flight attendant. By that point, the story had taken a new, more malicious shape—I had been “harassing his wife for being disabled” and “was posting on social media.” Amidst all of this, the quiet teenager next to me finally turned and offered me headphones if I wanted to drown it out. The flight attendant also mouthed an apology to me. It was, in a word, remarkable. While my initial assessment of this woman as a “Karen” may have not been founded on much, her behavior that followed her reading my texts revealed that my assessment was spot-on. And not surprisingly, she and her family did not see this connection. (Nor, I should note, did I point it out! I was trying very hard to diffuse the situation at any cost.)
I am now realizing that was not, in fact, a short story! But there is a lot more color to it that I can provide when we talk, if you’re intrigued. It was a nightmare, but eventually, like many non-serious nightmares, a funny story once I recovered from the shock. Welcome to Nantucket, indeed.
In other news, tomorrow is J’s 9th birthday and since he will be spending a good chunk of it on airplanes, we started in on a few celebratory events today. He woke up to warm, buttery morning buns smothered with sugar and cinnamon goo from a local bakery. We are currently waiting for family to return with takeout (burgers and fries), and then we’ll head down to town for one last grand finale of mint chip cookie dough ice cream in a homemade waffle cup worth waiting in a city-block-length line for. I think it will be a good Birthday Eve!
I have more tales to tell, though thankfully nothing as dramatic as the airplane incident, but I am going to close this letter and head down to join the gang waiting for food. I am excited to read your letter and hear about your week. Did you stick with your Dry July experiment? We decidedly did not, but that was never part of our vacation plan. I hope you are heading into a happy and relaxing July weekend! I miss our correspondence, and I look forward to catching up with your letter and in conversation soon.
Your friend,
Sarah
Wednesday July 14 – Friday July 16 2021
Dear Sarah,
I was just sitting down to start my letter to you when I recalled that I had started making notes for this week’s letter as soon as I opened your letter last week! Will the notes feel stale? Written all of a week ago?
When I read your letter last week, I then thought about your letter of the week before, how you were cutting up text, and how it resonated for you as a reminder of how little each individual word matters. I was flashing back upon reading Austin Kleon’s newsletter of July 9 (I’m back onto his newsletters after some time off!) in which he was reflecting on a book by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing, in which he writes about how each sentence is the most important thing because the whole is only made up of sentences. Kleon sums it up: “For the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece you’re working on right now, and the piece you’re working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence you’re working on right now.” (There was a larger context about the difference between being ambitious with one’s job, versus one’s career.) I think perhaps you and Klinkenborg and Kleon are on the same page, in a way. You said, Any preciousness I might have felt about the project was further avoided when I started cutting up the text into small bits for collage. … The disaggregation of the text, the physical act of cutting it apart, it was a visceral reminder of how little each individual word matters. Somehow… maybe cutting it apart also made it clear for you that each sentence could stand on its own? Each sentence becoming a thing in its own right. Maybe it’s a shift in thinking about what a unit of writing actually is, or can be. A parallel to how our lives are made up of minutes and hours rather than only months and years — how you live your hours is how you live your life.
It made me think about the act of building, and what we choose to build with; bricks or wood or concrete or other kinds of materials; buildings can be made of the cheapest, ugliest materials (so many of these buildings these days!) and buildings can be made with glossy glazed brick or even Heath ceramic tiles — there is a spectrum of quality with which a building can be made (the spectrum sometimes even evident within a single building). There is a building in Southern California, now called the Norton Simon Museum, earlier known as the Pasadena Art Museum, that was completed in 1969, and whose exterior features custom 5” x 15” tile designed by Edith Heath. The building itself is a complete unit, and at the same time it is clad in thousands of individual 5” x 15” Heath tiles, with layered glaze variations throughout; each tile matters, is a part of the holistic, undulating tile exterior. Not many buildings can be clad in Heath tiles, but at least one gorgeous building can be!
I mentioned Dry 21 in my letter last week. It feels long during the summer months, not gonna lie. We’re about nine days in as of this writing (eleven as of Friday). Since it’s not January I am eating sweet treats, and I just unearthed a chocolate bar I’d acquired as part of my birthday-tapas celebration, but then tucked away: a chocolate bar by Fossa, crafted in Singapore, in the flavor of salted egg cereal. Ingredients: cocoa butter, milk powder, sugar, salted duck egg yolk, cereal, butter, curry leaves, chilli, sea salt. Delicious chocolate, in beautiful packaging. A special occasion all on its own. (Perhaps that is why I didn’t eat it during my birthday celebration, when there were multiple treats to be enjoyed?) It was a good close to a flavorful and veggie-rich Wednesday, in which I ate a robust kale salad at lunch and fresh green beans at dinner alongside pesto pasta. A berry smoothie stood in for a more potent beverage during a happy hour chat with a friend. Still to be nibbled from the CSA: beets and their greens, kohlrabi greens from last week, fresh corn (eaten as of Thursday night), zucchini (ditto). Next week we’ll receive our honey share.
* Trigger Warning: The next two paragraphs of this letter discuss WORK in some form, so if you want to skip them while you are still on vacation you may scroll to the end!
You worked last week from a rocking chair! That particular detail put me right there with you in the purgatory of remote work-while-traveling. I am remembering a time I awkwardly conducted a call with a foundation funder and work colleagues from the guest bedroom of my sister-in-law’s house, a lovely room but not set up for work meetings — I crouched around a file cabinet-as-desktop so I could take the call in privacy, mid-visit in a mixed work-travel scenario. I still shudder to think about it!
I am starting to join you in vacation mindset even though my vacation is still a full week away; this is the time when I start to say, just five more days, and I can program my work duties into that specific and very tangible time frame before I will theoretically throw all duties and looming stacks of paper to the wind for an eight- to ten-day respite, depending on how I treat the opening weekend. Work seems more doable when I look at it just a week at a time, and there is a lesson to be had here, which is that I must figure out how not to let the looming weight of the future press upon me as though it will happen concurrently with the present. The future will happen when it happens! Future work doesn’t need to get done alongside today’s work or even tomorrow’s work, so why bother thinking about it? STOP THINKING ABOUT IT, EVA!
* End Trigger Warning!
I hope you are having the loveliest vacation full of fun, sun, ice cream, swimming, and all other goodies! I have no desire for the time to rush past but I will look forward to talking with you next week!
Until then!
Your friend,
Eva
P.S. I laughed out loud about this part of your Cugino’s review: Even the gluten-free options received a bit of light praise. Hahaha! I am glad you enjoyed the glutenous options and that you broke our unwritten rule of not editing your letter after reading mine! Tonight is going to be pizza night in these here parts… even if not from the fabled Cugino’s!