HOLLY NADLER

508-693-3880

(sunporch@vineyard.net)

A secret, insidious syndrome affects a majority of Islanders, and I think it’s about time we brought it out of the closet and gave it a name.

If you harbor this mental disorder, you’ll recognize the symptoms: A friend calls, or you see a notice in the paper about a coming event that sounds fun or interesting or self-helping or all of the above. You agree to do it. At this early point, you actually are eager to attend.

Then the day dawns and you start to consider the approaching activity in a new light, the light of hesitation. This pause, if you will, marks the first stage of the disorder which invariably sets in six to eight hours before showtime. As the hours elapse, your reluctance deepens. You begin to dwell on how very urgently you adore being home. You find yourself obsessively drawn to putting up a sweet potato chowder in your slow cooker. Grey’s Anatomy is on. In fact, how could you ever have made plans on a Grey’s night? A first-class blunder if ever there were one!

Further, one of your cats has been droopy all day and you are terrifically averse to leaving her alone. And finally, is that a drizzle developing? The temperature’s going to be falling back into the 30s tonight, and only a fool would venture out into freezing wet, pinpricking-skin air.

So that’s all she wrote, folks. Recoil to Couch.

Recoil to Couch sounds a little like that old tombstone slogan: Called Home. We could also name the syndrome Advanced Inertia. Insta-Indolence. Do Not Resuscitate From Sofa. We could always organize a support group called Slugs Anonymous, but what force on earth could blast us out of our domiciles to meetings?

This classic poop-out took place a couple of weeks ago when my friend Gwyn McAllister and I decided to attend a Thursday lecture at the library featuring a Scots dowser, necromancer, and professor of the geopathic landscape, Patrick MacManaway. A couple of hours before we were due to leave, Gwyn and I contacted each other with the tell-tale dialogue of the House-Leaving Challenged: “Do you want to do the library thingie-lecture tonight?” “I don’t know, do you?” “I don’t know, do you?”

Finally, mostly because Gwyn is younger, more outgoing, and ate her Wheaties that morning, she ended up applying a little more pressure to go than I was advancing to remain in stasis.

And you know what? It was great. The lecture room was packed with interested folks; an unheard of turn-out for Recoil to Couch crowd. After giving us a magical mystical tour of electro-magnetic forces, Stonehenge, the Oracle of Delphi and invisible Dragon lines, the speaker got down to the brass tacks of improving the energy fields and happiness quotient of our domiciles and gardens.

And that might explain our reluctance to venture out at night into the great agora: Our energy fields are fine! No dragons under our houses! You could build a Stongehenge on the Vineyard and the druids would come! We stay home because home is groovy, but what kind of irony is it that we had to leave the house to discover this important fact?

For all the friends and well-wishers of Raymond Skladzien who suffered a fall in his home, he’s doing great at Whitehall Rehab, 730 Del Prado Circle, South, Boca Raton, FL 33433. So send him letters, cards, and rare coins, and tell him you’re looking forward to seeing him back in Oak Bluffs.