Happy Days On The Cape

I am enjoying happy days in Wellfleet staying with a friend who is doing a gig at some summer psychology institute.  During the morning hours when she has been teaching I have been tootling around town by car with another old friend with whom I used to visit to get a reminder of the place I last saw twenty or thirty years ago.  The outstanding piece of history was still there where I had seen it all those many years ago in Truro’s old cemetery, the gravestone, small, slate, curious, easy to miss, from the eighteenth century of my direct ancestor Jedidiah Lombard.  He is descended of Thomas Lombard who settled in Dorchester in 1630, and then moved the family on to Barnstable, and then on to Truro. Friends in England have sent me photos of his ancestors’ graves in Tenterton in Kent, England.  As the expression goes, we go way back.  The weather has been unseasonably hot and muggy, so we sought out a largish pond whose water at first seemed might give me hypothermia, but then by the time I had swum out to the diving raft was refreshingly cool, clear enough to see the bottom.  Upon my return to our towels on the shore I was happy to see that two slim waisted, incredibly beautiful Italian boys, probably college students, had arrived in their chic, form fitting, swim trunks, with which they showed off to their advantage bums and baskets in that unselfconscious way of Italian males who know that they are exceedingly beautiful and desirable, and that God had made them that way from the start.  Last evening the psychology institute gave a drinks party to which I was also invited.  It took me back to the days of my academic career when such get-togethers were a commonplace for me.  I’ve lost the ability to circulate, I discover, really can’t think up any small talk, and thus grab people into a conversation about a book or political act that goes on to long.  I quickly lost my taste for it all, and noticed that though I had stood up well, I was getting definitely shaky after an hour and wished I had a cane, or could lean against a table.  Pretending that I had an important cellphone call to make I slipped out on to the spacious porch where a cool breeze made the place an alternative to the air conditioned interior.  I suddenly realized that there is a great virtue in being in your eighties; no one expects you to stand your ground at parties, slipping out to abject anonymity is okay.  The odd thing was a whole bunch came out one after another and we had a rump party at which we all got into an act of demonstrating athletic prowess, me standing up without holding on, some young charming woman, turning herself into a pretzel and then unfolding and bounding to her feet.  A good time was had by all.