CAAF: Toolahroolah, MVY. Howdy, Indiana.

My companions at Martha’s Vineyard, Hortense and Boozy, used to work together as editors at a publishing house in New York. One of their work jokes was a video concept called “Girls in Publishing Gone Wild,” which would feature scintillating footage of girls who wear glasses unbuttoning their cardigans and struggling to extricate themselves from their turtlenecks as buds of crumpled Kleenex emerged provocatively from their shirt cuffs.
Our weekend together had a similar quality. We drank a lot of tea, and stayed up late watching Room With A View and eating candy-colored macaroons from Chelsea. At the beach, we clambered around talking about Enid Blyton and Isabella Blow. We visited three bookstores, and my souvenirs from the trip are roughed-up copies of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and a book called The Sea-Horse and Its Relatives. The latter, written by two Australian museum curators and published in 1958, reads like something a character in Wodehouse might write. A chapter called “Interesting Habits” begins, “What is the most remarkable member of the Animal Kingdom? Few would disagree with awarding the palm to the female of the human species, but of all the marine creatures, as Sir J. Arthur Thomson has written, Sea-horses … ‘are the most “kenspeckle” creatures of the sea, and this is saying a good deal …'” Indeed.
This weekend I’m traveling again, this time to the Wienerschnitzel family reunion. This is a reunion of my mom’s umpteen brothers and sisters held biennially on my grandfather’s farm in southern Indiana. Lots of croquet and volleyball, and gathering in the living room to hear my musical cousin pound out “House of the Rising Sun” on the piano. As the finale, the uncles, who will have been drinking beer in the barn all afternoon, will troop out to a distant field and set off fireworks for the delight of the crowd that is watching, amid fragrant clouds of bug spray, on the lawn — a display that always marks for me the official close of summer.