Off The Island!

Sometimes I tend to think of Manhattan as an Elba or Robelin Island ... although it's very easy to get off, I so often stay here for months on end. Well the end of this spell happens tomorrow. [I'm ignoring a couple of trips to Brooklyn.] It's graduation weekend for Cori, the lovely young lady in the photo with her younger brother in what seem to be really quintessenstially teenage poses. So I'll head up the New England Thruway to Cape Cod. There comes a moment after crossing the canal bridge when I REALLY know I'm on the Cape ... it's when I notice that the trees are all short as compared to the trees along the previous roadway. The sandy soil of the Cape cannot grow tall tree, not really tall.

I've been thinking about global warming A LOT, and wonder if it will be 50 or 100 years or less ... before sea levels rise and most of Cape Cod will have disappeared. If I remember right, it doesn't get more than 300 feet above sea level anywhere and most is very near sea level indeed. So one must enjoy now. Some of us seem to carry around a doomsday awareness, the sort that says "Savor the moment because it is all you know you have." I think I've had that awareness for a long time. Maybe it goes back to the death from tuberculosis of Uncle Shortie [only six foot in a family of brothers all a bit taller] when I was three or four. His casket was brought from the sanatrium and sat overnight in our living room before it was taken to Kentucky the next day for burial. I don't know if I saw his body, possibly not but I really don't know because it was usual in Protestant funerals to have open caskets, and my parents weren't the sort ot "shield" children from that kind of fact of life.

Well, this sounds pretty dour and it's not "nice" to be dour. Actually at the moment I'm rejoicing about tomorrow's trip even if rain or thunderstorms are forecast. It will be nice event in any case.