Countdown: Three Weeks, Five Days

There was a brief moment when I feared this recent getaway to New York would never come off. I was planning to take advantage of a hiatus in parenting duties, a hiatus provided by my kid's trip to San Diego with other members of the Kealing Middle School band. But then her trip was canceled due to swine flu, thus endangering my trip to see Mike for a weekend of fun.

Fortunately, friends agreed to take Jesse off my hands. I pitied them for the glum kid I was about to dump on them. The band trip, a trip where very little music would be played but much shrieking and giggling on buses and hotel rooms would take place, was the only bright spot in her year. And here it had been canceled.

And just as suddenly as the trip was off, it was on. My mum was quite peeved that the swine flu had mutated from World Wide Panic to Big Fat Yawn. But I was thrilled. If Jesse's trip was back on, then so was mine. And I was ready. Mike was going to take me to Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, for the weekend. I had already learned last summer that I liked being near an ocean, a real ocean, with waves big enough to make, you know, noise. The Gulf just kind of sits there and quietly simmers. And it's not cold, beautifully cold like the Atlantic. Touch the waters off of Galveston and you get a nasty burn.

But I'm getting ahead of my behind. After the resumption of the trip and my flight up to JFK, but before Mike and I drove from the Wee Cottage to Montauk, I spent a few hours in Cold Spring Harbor, checking up on Shoe String Harbor (the house we're buying) and getting a brisk walk in. But it's hard to get much exercise walking around the north shore of Long Island, because you're constantly being stopped in your tracks. Now these are azaleas:


Austin is blessed with more rainfall than much of the rest of Texas, and because of this, you can convince yourself that the place is green. But then you go somewhere really green and you find yourself suddenly not bragging about those arthritic live oaks you were once so fond of. And this time of year, Long Island is not just green, it's purple, white, red, pink.

I swore that I would not commit to planting anything more than a few basils when I got to the new house, but when I looked across to our future neighbors' house and saw the color in their yard, I got that helpless feeling all over again. Maybe Mike will have me planting hyndrangeas after all.

After the survey of house and the 'hood, I enjoyed a brief spell of looking at ranges again, which I promise not to dwell on here. Though I really do want to go on about range-top BTUs and the benefits of twin convection fans until I'm blue in the face and the reader is just blue. But I'm nervous talking about such things. Many years ago, before the Interwebs and email, I belonged to a group that self-published personal essays every month. Think of it as an early form of blogging. One month, I contributed a post about how heart-broken I was to be leaving our house in Wales. The next month, one of the other members roundly criticized me for my self pity. At least I had a house. I got the impression she thought that people who had comfortable surroundings should at least have the decency not to mention it. So I'm not mentioning it. But if you want any gumbo off of the beauty I plan to install in my kitchen, you'll have to stroke her stainless steel brow admiringly. Dr. Seuss, great chronicler of the domestic, would have understood my love for a solid, serious looking stove: We shall take her home. We shall call her Mabel. You will have to love her, if you eat at our table.

Once we got to Montauk and had settled into our comfortable digs, we went for a long stroll on the beach. It gave us a chance to talk about Hell's Teenager and the forthcoming year: setting up a new house, getting our kid to walk herself to school every morning (she can get lost just going next door), getting me into the plastic surgeon's for a spot of reconstruction. Fortunately we're at an age where we allow ourselves not to commit to any plan, since we can't ever really remember what the plan is.

And while we walked, we watched these Martians play around on boards in the water. The odd rubber skin gives their species away.

Later we popped over to a grocery store for the basics of any self-catering holiday: granola, OJ. We asked the cashier where she'd go for dinner. A smiling Jamaican lady, she advised us to steer clear of the Sushi-fusion place next door. "Try de Dock," she said. We drove a couple of miles to the other side of the penninsula, where the Montauk wharf looks out over the Long Island Sound.

Walking up to The Dock, I couldn't help but be excited. We had a local recommendation and the place was going for a kind of Mad Max by the Sea feel. The restaurant's porch featured several long chains, looping from from tree to tree, festooned with objects which I gather had been found floating somewhere nearby. And there were various minatory signs up on the walls, the biggest one warning parents not to let their children run wild. You could tell by the spit on the floor, the ranks of gin bottles at the bar, and the smoke curling around the crevices, that 'running wild' was strictly an option for the adults, who didn't want any competition.

To drive home the point about kids, I guess, there was this little guy, hanging on the porch.

And I guess this is what Montauk sailors think of as the ideal trophy wives. These ladies peer down at you as you approach The Dock, hoping for a nice meal.

And the meal was, as I say, more than nice. Mike had the fried shrimp and I the seafood linguine, which was very fresh with scallops big as potatoes, served in the Italian style, which is a little too ubiquitous on Long Island, but it's so well done, you hate to complain.


After the meal, we went for walk, first on the docks, among trawlers with huge spools of nets, then along the Long Island Sound, where we caught the tail end of a sunset.

In 3 weeks, we'll be together again.