HOLLY NADLER

508-274-9239

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

Hello, I’m back, and I feel as if the Island is one big Cheers bar where everybody knows your name. What a relief, after spending over two months in Palm Desert and Los Angeles where, if you smile at a stranger on the street, your target whips out a walkie-talkie and suddenly you’re surrounded by two social workers, three cops, and an agent from Homeland Security, as they determine whether you, The Grinning Fool, should be sent to a psych unit, jail or Guantanamo for observation.

For my homecoming, the first Oak Bluffs citizen I ran into at the post office was town eminence grise, Bert Combra, whom I’ve known for 33 years. Then, outside on Kennebec, I encountered Audrey Moreis of daRosa’s fame. Both Herb and Audrey gave me such a warm welcome that I felt like Sally Field at the Academy Awards. What a great treat it is to go from being a random snow bird to a member of a small community.

Now granted there’s pleasure in being surrounded by violet bougainvillea, sitting outdoors as you dip your spoon into the grapefruit you just plucked in that grassy space between your mother’s condo and the pool. But, call me a born again New Englander, I get more of a happy jolt from the sight of crocuses poking up through frozen ground than I do from all the unnatural summer flowers growing out there in the California winter. Maybe it’s a Yankee guilt trip — you have to endure a long cold season before you deserve those first early buds.

For those of us who rarely make it off-Island for more than an afternoon jaunt to Falmouth, the sped-up, techno-charged real world can really throw you. My own Waterloo is the west coast highway system. Let’s face it, here on the Vineyard you can find your way from point A to point B blindfolded (well, to be honest, many of us have been confused driving north on County Road late at night and, coming to the four-way stop, deciding we’ve been cruising down Barnes, making a right on County, thinking it was Wing . . . c’mon, ‘fess up).

Okay, so last week my sister, Cindy Mascott (many of you remember her from her couple of years working as the first recreational therapist at Windemere), decided to spend some quality time together by visiting four California missions in three days. We were looking for happiness, grace and sisterly love, and discovered we were barely able to survive each other. So much for the spiritual nourishment of ancient chapels. The moral of the exercise is that the peace that passeth all understanding has to come from within. Well, duh.

Also, our last chapel, at the mission of San Juan Capistrano, was rocketed off its foundation by hundreds of school kids (seriously, it was probably a bigger threat to the mission than the 1812 earthquake), so 20 minutes of soul-stirring reflection were out of the question.

Anyway, the crisis of real world logistics came when Cindy and I got back on I-5 South headed for a hotel in San Diego. My sister handed me the page of Map Quest directions she’d pulled from her computer. I was fine with the hour or so we spent on I-5 (“Yeah, we’re fine, fine, still on Five,” but then all hell broke loose when we had to get off at the Sea World exit towards Tocolote Road. At the bottom of the ramp, a sign pointed left to Tocolote Road and, of course, I told Cindy to turn left. “No, that can’t be correct, that’s in the wrong direction,” she replied, and promptly turned right, away from the blasted Tocolote (why mention Tocolote at all it if we’re not intended to head toward it?). A fight ensued, as only fights can between a driver and the shot-gun-riding navigator, especially this navigator, who family members have learned to distrust for fear of being led down one-way roads to brick walls, T-Junctions and cul de sacs.

So Cindy seemed to have the right idea, but Map Quest confused the heck out of me when it gave us two different sets of directions for hanging a right onto a ramp and merging onto West Mission Bay Road, It turned out that two separate ramps did indeed spill out on two separate occasions onto West Mission Bay Road. Somehow we negotiated this double set of identical directions, although I could feel my brain synapses pinging like the forlorn bleats on our cell phones before the battery gives out.

And then, once we’d gained our second entree onto West Mission Bay Road, Cindy asked, “Now what?”

There was more?! Couldn’t we arrive at a strategically-placed rest stop for the Map Quest-challenged rustic to take a few deep breaths, maybe even pop into a quiet chapel where school kids were verboten? At this point, I threw the page of directions on the dashboard and collapsed into a fit of hysterical giggles. Thankfully, Cindy saw a sign for our hotel and made her way without the benefit of sage advice from her older sister.

Here’s a lineup of ongoing events at the Oak Bluffs library: On the third Tuesday of the month, the teen poetry group meets at 4:30 p.m. (Naturally, p.m.; have you ever known a teen to wake up at four in the morning for anything other than a tonsillectomy?) On the third Wednesday of the month, the morning poetry group meets from 10:30 a.m. to noon. On the fourth Wednesday of the month, the library hosts its book discussion group at 10:30 a.m. The last Saturday at the library at 1:30 p.m., the teen advisory council meets.