Delaware Days

Years ago, I lived in a beach town. Back then, even though I was a restless 20-something, I kind of liked the slower pace of the off-season. Nobody missed the bumper to bumper and towel to towel traffic on the roads and on the beach, and with the exception of mini-golf, I never went to the tourist traps down on the strip that were closed from September to May, anyway. It was easy to adapt to shorter hours for restaurants and other businesses, and it was nice to have the town to ourselves for a few months.

This week, we are at the beach in Delaware for Thanksgiving. Our place is on the first block from the beach, snugged between all the lights and bustle of Coastal Highway and the low dunes that protect the wide and sandy shore. At this time of year, it's very quiet here, and it's easy to forget all the commerce that is just up the street and around the corner. Easier still to forget, because so much is closed for the season or operating on limited hours.

Today was a little frustrating because it seems that the schedule around here is for many places to close on Tuesday, which seemed strange to us. When we finally found a place to have lunch (a whole two blocks away instead of one, but we still passed at least 6 places that were closed) we discussed the phenomena. "Maybe it's their day of worship around here," suggested Treat, "since it's clearly their day of rest."

"Yeah," I agreed, "maybe to them it's Sunday, Monday, Deweysday, Wednesday!"

Aptly Named

To make the best of our rainy afternoon at the beach, we decided to run a few errands and check out an outlet mall. The hour we gave ourselves to browse the deals was plenty, maybe even a bit generous, and I was empty-handed when I bumped into Treat. "There's nothing I want here," I sighed, aware of my privilege, but disappointed nevertheless. "I really want to go to that thrift store you saw across the street!"

And that's what I suggested when we all assembled a few minutes later. Our group was game, so we piled back into the car and headed over to the run-down textured concrete strip mall that must have been marvelous back in the early 80s when it was built. "Just because it's called the Treasure Chest doesn't mean it's going to be good," Treat cautioned us as we approached the shabby store front.

"I think it's going to be great!" I said, throwing any notion of managing expectations aside. "We are all going to find a treasure!"

The entryway was decorated with an assortment of holiday items, both quirky and sad. After pausing there briefly, the five of us separated to hunt around on our own. The place was not enormous at all, especially in comparison to the second hand places near us, but in the narrow furniture room my brother and I found a few mid-century early-American side tables that were eerily similar to those our parents had when we were kids. "Wouldn't it be funny if these actually were Mom and Dad's transported here by some twist of fate?" Bill said as I opened the hinged lid on one of them.

Back in the main section of the store, I found Heidi who was trying on a packable down vest from LL Bean. "That's exactly like the one I have at home!" I said. It fit perfectly, and at 20 bucks it was an amazing deal.

Meanwhile, Treat found a cream colored silk jacket that was cut somewhere in between a Members Only and plain old jean jacket, and Bill and Emily scored some cute little cocktail glasses and a jigger. Everyone was in line to pay, and although I was empty-handed, I had no regrets. Even so, I went back over to the sporting goods and tool shelf to pass the time until we left. As my eye passed over the 40 year-old jigsaw and hand sander, a flash of red caught my attention. I leaned over and pulled out a brand new bow saw. "Look at this!" I showed Treat. "It's only five dollars!" 

It fit my hand like it was made for me, and so I took my treasure over to Heidi as she approached the register, so that she could buy it for me. 

The Menu We Deserve

It was getting dark as we rolled into Rehoboth last night.  “What should we have for dinner?” I had asked my brother when we were about 30 minutes out from our ocean front destination. We exchanged ideas and settled on some kind of seafood, since it was, after all, the beach. 

“Let’s see what they have that looks good,” my brother suggested wisely, and I agreed. 

“But I do kind of want potatoes,” I told him. 

“Maybe we could do some sort of olive and garlic and tomato roasted fish on sliced potatoes,” he mused, and that’s what we were shooting for when we pulled into the seafood market a mile or so from our rental house. Inside, there was a fair selection of fresh fish in the case, and we opted for swordfish. 

As the guy behind the counter was cutting and wrapping our selection, we explored the small grocery section where we found a small container of green olives, some pesto, and a jar of puttanesca sauce. With no potatoes to be found, we opted for a bag of enormous pasta rings (called 'calamari'), but I grabbed a bag of Mediterranean herb flavored potato chips on our way to the register. 

"The flavor profile, is right," I told my brother, "and maybe we can do a little potato chip crust or topping on the fish." 

Once we got settled into our beach house, we got cooking and before too long we were dining on potato-crusted seared swordfish served on a bed of artisanal pasta with green olives and puttanesca sauce with basil green beans on the side.

Even though it was not exactly what we had planned, it was delicious, and we congratulated ourselves for preparing such a meal with limited resources. "It might have been better that what we were planning," noted my brother. 

"Having to cook with what we could find turned out great," I agreed. "What's that line from the Batman movie? They weren't the ingredients we needed, but..."

"They were the ingredients we deserved!" finished my brother.

I'd like to think so.

Options

In this hot market, homes for sale in my neighborhood come across my news and mail feeds all the time. Sometimes I click the link out of curiosity, but most of the time I scroll on past. I don't know what it was about the place I saw yesterday that made me go even farther than usual. 

It could have been the price, which seemed almost suspiciously below market, or it might have been the address, just up the hill and back into the neighborhood, or perhaps it was the size of the backyard, very spacious, or maybe the quirky style that came through in the 59 photos. 

Whatever it was, I made an appointment to meet a realtor and see the place in advance of the open houses today and tomorrow. "There's a lot of interest," she told me on the phone. "They are expecting to open offers Tuesday, and I expect it to be gone by then. Are you pre-approved?"

I was not, of course, since we're not actually in the market for a house, but she assured me she could connect me with a lender and have us pre-approved by Monday, if we "fell in love with the place."

So off we went in the middle of packing for the beach to meet her at noon. A tiny 2 bedroom bungalow had been stretched out and added onto in the most peculiar way. Both bedrooms had been turned into little offices, and the attic had been expanded to an a master suite that overlooked the kitchen like a loft. There was also a mini-loft above the added great room that housed a pinball and slot machine and opened onto the upstairs deck. 

But the decks! They were like the Swiss Family Robinson built them-- multi levels with wooden steps connecting them. At the ground floor of the house there was a sunken hot tub flanked by four seats salvaged from a baseball stadium and a tiki bar. Sliding glass doors led into a small space between the kitchen and one of the bedroom-cum-offices, and a trio of spiky potted plants hid a full-sized porcelain urinal. A hand-lettered sign read Fully plumbed! Move the washer and dryer here or maybe a butler's pantry!

After the mirrored backsplash, pressed tin ceiling in the kitchen, and cork floor, tile floor, and hardwood floor all leading off from the kitchen, I was not sorry we had come to see the place, but it was definitely a hard no.

"But you should get pre-approved!" the realtor said, so that you can move on the place you do love."

Maybe.

T'is Better

 Is it better to give or to receive? I asked the students for the question of the day. As we enter the season of gratitude and gift-giving, I was curious about where they stood. Plus, the moral of the folktale we had read together about about Anansi the Spider was What goes around comes around, and I wondered if they would make a connection.

They did not disappoint me: by a margin of 52 to 24, these kids professed a preference for giving. Though I was careful to respect either position taken and argued in good faith, I would have been dismayed if the results had gone the other way. Some of their reasoning also touched upon the theme of our story. "If you give, some people may give back to you, or even to others, and it will probably come back to you," said one young writer. "I like to be a part of that," she added.

Even the kids who said they would rather receive did not have onerous reasons. "I don't have much to give," wrote one. "Especially since I'm just a kid."

"But you can give friendship or help or volunteer time," one of his classmates reminded him.

"Yeah," he admitted. "Can I change my answer?"

Undocumented

I have a recurring dream that I am at the airport to catch some international flight and I realize that I have forgotten my passport. Beyond that, the details change: sometimes I'm trying to fly to Paris, sometimes London, sometimes other places, and I always try to make it home to get my passport, by car or taxi or even bus, but the dream changes before I do. 

Last night I had a dream where in the dream I actually dreamed I forgot my passport, and so I remembered it for the trip. I'd like to think that's progress.

I actually had a real experience that might be partially responsible for the dream. When I was in high school in Switzerland a lot of us took the 3 AM train to Zurich at the end of the fall term. The timing was right to make our mid-morning flights to the States, or Libya, or Tehran, or Algeria, or Nigeria, or, in my case, Saudi Arabia. A train full of teenagers in the middle of the night was pretty much a big party-- there was no sleeping, of course, and a lot of moving from one compartment to another, and some drinking, and we all were pretty bleary-eyed by the time the train pulled into the Zurich Bahnhof. 

I got my plane ticket and passport out and set them on the small table beneath the window in the six-seat compartment, and pulled my orange backpack from the overhead rack. Shouldering the pack, I turned and followed my friends through the sliding door, into the narrow corridor, and down the folding stairs onto the platform. It was only when I reached in my pocket for the 5 franc coin I needed to pay for the airport shuttle bus on the other side of the station that I realized what I had left behind. I waved good-bye to my friends (they had planes to catch!) and ran back to the track we had come in on, but the train was gone. 

What followed was a lot of me explaining my plight in English to people who spoke German. I finally ended up in a stuffy office within a cavernous luggage storeroom. A very stern looking man frowned at me as he punched the buttons on a putty-colored phone and held the receiver to his ear. He spoke at length, in German of course, to the person on the other end, as I fidgeted with my watch and wondered what I would do if I missed my flight home. "

Zey haff it," he told me when he hung up, "and zey are sending it on ze next train." 

"What time?" I asked him, pointing at my watch. 

"Drießig minuten" he answered.Thirty minutes.

It was tense, but I made the plane, and I had almost forgotten about the whole ordeal when we landed. My dad, who worked for the airline, used his badge to meet me on the tarmac, and as we walked toward the terminal he said, "What happened to your passport?"

I stared at him, speechless for a moment. "I left it on the train! How did you know?" I asked.

He just squeezed the back of my neck and shook his head. I was so tired, I let it drop. And to this day, I have no idea if he really knew what I had done, or if it was just a lucky vote of no confidence.

Kid Stuff

Recently I have taken to calling my students “Kid” as a casual alternative to using their given names. It is friendlier to the gender sensitive than Dude! or Girl! and for the most part they tolerate it, I think, especially since I keep my tone light and friendly. 

 “Kid!” I said today to a chatty young man, “get your assignment done! 

 “I will, Grandma,” he answered cheekily. 

“Grandma!” I said, shaking my head at this guy who borrows sporting equipment from me every day at lunch. 

He laughed, unabashed. 

“I guess you can forget about using Grandma’s football tomorrow,” I threatened. 

His eyes widened. “Sorry miss,” he apologized. 

Now that’s more like it!