HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

I want to be a part of it, Oak Bluffs, Oak Bluffs!

After a summer away, it’s so good to be back and, of course, that’s easy to say with these blue skies and dappled gold light through the still-leafy trees. Jack and I actually returned in much less auspicious weather, the day before Mr. Earl bore down with his hissy fit. Yet surely I wasn’t the only one who knew, with whatever few psychic cells inhabit my soul, that old Earl was going to fizzle out on us.

First of all, there were those weather channel interns who were told to pull up their socks and get fitted for rain slickers out on the beach. “Try to make it look like your eyelashes are getting curled back by gale force winds,” their directors certainly told them. Instead these poor young recruits nattered on about so-so breakers that would have made a surfer sneer, and they ginned up commentary on the scary drizzle. I remember one young news guy, after a shrill couple of minutes describing the sea and sky, dropping his Halloween 13 tone for a moment, and saying in a normal voice, “To tell you the truth, it doesn’t look that bad.”

I did lose my son to the storm, however. Charlie was on Island from Los Angeles for four days to attend Nic Korba and Mary Pietrocarlo’s wedding at the Sailing Camp. Charlie spent the night of Earl with his dad, Marty, in the woods of Oak Bluffs. Marty takes these storm alerts seriously, and vowed to sit tight, even as the skies cleared, birds began tweeting again and angels wreathed the soft pink clouds with harps and celestial clarinets sounding the All Clear. Out of filial devotion, Charlie stayed with him.

When your only child lives thousands of miles away and comes visiting, a few hours spent on another part of the Island may seem like nothing, but do you know what that is in mom years?

So many of us enjoyed the always spectacular Tivoli Day last Saturday. It was, as most of you know, the kind of soft-lit September afternoon that 19th century poets waxed lyrical about.

Circuit avenue was one joyous pedestrian mall of live music, bazaar items gaily flung over outdoor tables, unicycles, dogs on parade, and kids skipping down the center of the street. You can refer in my hymnal, on page 131, to my rant about why Circuit can’t be like this every day of the year, car-free and people-centered, but if you’ve known me for even a short time, you’re probably tired of hearing about it.

There were two highlights to my experience of Tivoli Day: I was sitting down when the Macklin boy, about eight years old, mom the talented author of the children’s book about the Flying Horses, dad one of the top investigators for C.S.I. Cape and Islands, stood eight inches away from me and stared into my eyes. It was a little disconcerting, but here was the explanation: His parents, his sister, and he himself all have round, blue eyes. He wanted to know, with his face in my face, why my eyes were speckled, filled with tiny dots, and rimmed with layers of brown, black and blue (this last accent derived from contact lenses).

I couldn’t explain my messy irises, but I said to his parents, “Oh man, he’s going to be a detective too!” They agreed. Vehemently.

The other highlight was a conversation with John Kelly of Oak Bluffs and Hartford, Conn. We got to talking about speaking French, and he mentioned language labs back in high school days. Language labs! We both conceded that we hadn’t thought about language labs in, oh, 40 years, but we recalled how traumatically tedious they were: You signed in for your weekly stint, you stepped into a tight cubicle, strapped on headphones and some disembodied female voice declined verbs for you. You were obliged, between the speaker’s prompts, to come up with verb declensions of your own. From a high vantage point, a flesh-and-blood teacher loomed over you and all the other harried students, making sure your mouth was moving. Unless she stared at you directly, which indicated she had switched on your station to find out if you were mouthing the lyrics to Louie Louie, you learned to put your brain on zombie while you wagged your lips without actually saying anything remotely French or verb-promoting or even recognizable in any Earth language, which made Louie Louie perfect.

So the other day at Reliable I ran into Brie McLean, recently retired French teacher at the high school. Before we could exchange any words of loving greeting, I cried, “Zut alors!, Brie, tell me they don’t have language labs any more!”

“They don’t,” she reassured me, and we exchanged looks of relief like two UNICEF workers who have spent the past 36 hours suppressing an outbreak of Ebola in a small Indonesian village.

On to other matters: At the Oak Bluffs School, Sept. 24 is the last day for string lesson sign-up. Then on Oct. 4, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Edgartown School, folks can pick up instruments lent by the Johnson String Company and the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society scholarship fund.

For those with artistic ambitions, the Martha’s Vineyard Cultural Council will be handing out grants again during its annual meeting in November. The council will be offering a workshop in grant-writing on Sept. 29, 6 p.m. at the Howes House in West Tisbury, across from Alley’s. Way cool.