emlocke

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  • What we wanted was Spring Break and what we got was an educational field trip

    Wind and rain chased us from the beach before lunchtime this afternoon. My dad and I had to escape the house or we were both going to go haywire in different directions, or head-to-head. We drove down to the Cape Cod National Seashore Visitor Center in Eastham.

    We saw this exhibit the first summer we came to the Cape and it hadn’t changed a whole lot since then. They have the standard maritime exhibits in the one-room museum: an old boat (still smells like sailor), sand under a microscope (one of the lenses was broken off), stuffed birds under glass (gross aaand gross).

    I could practically see the little me pacing through the aisles, impatiently forcing myself to read every word of every plaque to stretch out my attention span as long as possible, but not retaining much besides the dim lighting and enormous, low-resolution photo murals on the walls.

    Being a kid at a museum is so hard, and not just because you have to crane your neck just to see or read anything. If someone had told me ten or twelve years ago that, one day, I would relish a leisurely walk through a museum, I would have rolled my eyes, but it’s true. Historical and art exhibits are both so much more engaging to the older, more patient, more thoughtful, more experienced, more fully formed me.

    Even in a dry, sort of dilapidated exhibit, I found a lot to look at and I notice my personal interests away from the seashore reflected clearly by the displays that attracted me at the Seashore Museum.

    There’s a section devoted to the U.S. Life Saving Service (the U.S. Coast Guard of today) which won the heart of my hero complex. Crewmen patrolled the beach all night, every night, watching for wrecks offshore. If the water was too rough to launch a rescue boat, the Life Savers would shoot a zipline from a miniature cannon out to the sinking vessel. Stranded passengers would secure the line to their boat and ride to shore one at a time in a breeches buoy. The line was shot over with a wooden tag with instructions written in three languages—a little like bottles of shampoo and mass transit advisories.

    They have a display of vintage Cape Cod Cranberries labels. I also pressed my nose against the Cape Cod architecture exhibit, which showed the floor plans of a Cape-style home as the residents expanded it. I just wanted to play house inside the scale model.

    Well, what I wanted to do was go to the beach. But this was nice, too.

  • Happy.

    Will: Now you look like you’re posing for a picture.
    Emily: I’m aware of that but now I can’t stop laughing.

  • Halfway between Ryder Beach and Fisher Beach

    My dad and my brother and I went off on an amateur art history scavenger hunt down the Cape Cod Bay beach this afternoon to find the house where Edward Hopper and his wife spent summers painting, journaling, and sailing from the 1930s until the artist’s death in 1967.

    We surmised that the big bay window that takes up the whole north side of the house had been added in the last fifty years, but here is a portrait of Edward Hopper, his wife Jo in the background, showing the window as is in 1960. A great perspective for Hopper’s naturally lit, moody dunescapes.

  • This is not the last word. This isn’t it either.

    I used to fear the unknowable, unimaginable depths of the ocean. Whale watching with my dad and my brother, I looked eagerly over the ship’s railing for the splashes and spouts that revealed a whale at the surface, but I didn’t dare imagine the rest of their bodies any deeper down than the bottom of the boat. If I pictured their rubbery forms, propelling through the sea and at one with it at the same time, almost invisible against the dark blue water, I could imagine the mass of the ocean swallowing me down and my vision would blur at the edges. I held very tightly on to my camera.

    At some point, I came to appreciate the ocean for its vastness. It became an acceptable fact, something trustworthy, instead of a knowledge to be conquered only by absolute comprehension. All I need to know is: “How big is the ocean?” “Big.” And, “What would I do if I got sucked out to sea and I had to survive through the night and a whale came and—” “That’s probably, almost definitely never going to happen.”

    The ocean just is. And there’s not much more to know. Its size, its tides, its smells, its creatures. It’s power is astounding, and yet, it is mostly predictable, reliable, knowable.

    Alan Dugan was born in Brooklyn and eventually migrated to the outer Cape among the other artists and writers who colonized here in Truro. He founded and taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

    Note: The Sea Grinds Things Up
    It’s going on now
    as these words appear
    to you or are heard by you.
    A wave slaps down, flat,
    Water runs up the beach,
    then wheels and slides back down, leaving a ridge
    of sea-foam, weed, and shells.
    One thinks: I must
    break out of this
    horrible cycle, but
    the ocean doesn’t; it
    continues through the thought.
    A wave breaks, some
    of its water runs up
    the beach and down
    again, leaving a ridge
    of scum and skeletal debris.
    One thinks: I must break out of this
    cycle of life and death,
    but the ocean doesn’t; it
    goes past the thought.
    A wave breaks on the sand,
    water planes up the beach
    and wheels back down,
    hissing and leaving a ridge
    of anything it can leave.
    One thinks: I must
    run out the life
    part of this cycle
    then the death part
    of this cycle
    after the last world,
    but this is not the last
    word unless you think
    of this cycle as some
    perpetual inventory
    of the sea. Remember:
    this is just one sea
    on one beach on one
    planet in one
    solar system in one
    galaxy. After that
    the scale increases,
    so this is not the last word,
    and nothing else is talking back.
    It’s a lonely situation.
    —Alan Dugan, 1983

  • I fell asleep on the deck

    . . . with a pillow, a bed sheet, Unaccustomed Earth, and the bay breeze rustling the dune grass . . .


    As Dusk Began To Settle In by Ed Ruscha.

  • Compromise is the divide between adaptation and resistance

    If I travel in the morning and arrive home mid-afternoon, and if I lie down on the couch in the living room with a book and use either the air conditioner or two strategically arranged fleece blankets, depending on the season, to keep my body at just the right temperature, I can pretty much guarantee that I will be sound asleep by the time my mom gets home from the grocery store with the instant oatmeal and the flavored carbonated water that she is stocking just for me. I don’t usually come to until all the groceries are unloaded and she’s already putting them away.

    If I travel for longer than forty minutes in the family mini-van, if I listen only to the white noise of the highway beneath the wheels, and I let the cold-blooded creature inside my mammalian body succumb to the hyper-controlled environment, I can pretty much guarantee that, as determinedly as I resist, I will fall asleep in such a position that I wake up with a drool splotch in a highly unlikely spot, such as mid-calf on the back of my jeans. I will be unresponsive for half an hour at a time, then I will stun other passengers by bursting straight into a conversation through most of which I slept.

    For the three years I attended Mount Holyoke College, I could pretty much guarantee that I would start my period within six hours of moving into my dorm room at the beginning of each semester. As far as I know, my cycle never coincided with the other women with whom I lived in such close proximity.

    If I express distaste for a new pop song the first time I hear it, if I comment on weak metaphors and lazy rhyming, if I sulk in protest when I hear it, I can pretty much guarantee that within two weeks, I will know all the words to that song and have a favorite line and press ‘forward’ on my iPod with the secret hope of shuffling to it. I keep an untitled playlist that I think of as “Songs I Love to Hate,” and in the same moment as I denounce a song, I make a mental note to download it.

  • Clocks and chandeliers

    My brother told me that he’s interested in clocks. He said it as though it’s something innate that he discovered about himself, maybe even that surprised him, that he couldn’t control. It’s been there all along, but it’s just bubbled up to the surface all of a sudden.

    I told him that I’m interested in chandeliers. I don’t think that it’s an innate thing that I’m drawn to chandeliers specifically, but I’m intrinsically attracted to their sparkliness and structural grace.

    Those elements are embodied by the thirty-three starburst chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera. The eleven that hang in the lobby have been sent off on holiday in Vienna. They will be repaired and refurbished, all expenses paid by Swarovski.

    My brother and I take off tomorrow for a beach holiday, though I don’t expect to encounter many chandeliers—or clocks—on the Cape.

  • Syndicated television will unite the masses

    When I stay at work so late that the cleaning service bustles through, I never know what to say to the woman who collects our trash and dusts over the office. Her name ends with “-rina,” I think, but starts with something I couldn’t understand when she told me one evening last year. After she discovered me at my desk after hours a few nights in a row when I introduced myself officially.

    Now, we have the same rudimentary small talk whenever we meet. “How was your weekend?” “It’s so hot.” “Your desk, it’s clear! And the floor! I will vacuum!” “No, no! It’s Friday! Let’s both get out of here!” We often
    exchange fatigued sighs and empathetic grins.

    “It’s been one of those days,” I told her tonight, blotting perspiration from my temple, an effect of the heat as much as of the long day itself. She chuckled and said, “for me, too. What a day.” She snapped open a fresh garbage bag and her bangs puffed up in the air it expelled.

    Gloria was the housekeeper in my dorm my senior year at Mount Holyoke. She put a name tag and a collage on the door of the supply closet on the first floor, the same we tacked photos and postcards outside our rooms. She had pictures of kittens torn out of a calendar, macaroni art by her daughter, a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign.

    We used to watch ER re-runs on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings. The show started at 10, so I usually got back from my 8:30 class as the opening credits were rolling. Gloria took her break in the common room, watching Luka (I liked the Dr. Ross episodes) and eating Ritz crackers and peanut butter out of an insulated lunch bag. I invited myself to join her a few weeks into the semester. While we watched, I’d finish my second cup of coffee and skim my Indian Art reading. During commercials, she would dust here and there or make a phone call.

    Except for a stray remark about an absurd medical condition and the occasional question about the plot or “wait, what did she say?” we didn’t speak much. She knew where I grew up and what I majored in. She told me a few basic biographical facts about her daughter and showed me a picture from her First Communion.

    I wish I’d thought to leave a picture of Goran Visnjic on Gloria’s door at the end of the semester—when I came back to school in the spring, my class schedule interfered with ER in syndication. And I wish “-rina” could take an ER break with me.

  • Karaoke on a school night

    That would make a good name for a cover band, if I were the type to make up names for bands I never intend to start.

  • Toasting every day is puffer than I thought


    From ffffound.

    Visually represented here are three of my favorite pastimes: playing on words and literary devices (spoonerism, in this case) typography, and talking about feelings.