Cape Escape

This is the third of five entries about my Boston vacation. To start at the beginning, go here.

One thing I had in mind for this vacation was to make a day trip to Cape Cod. This occurred to me when Debbi and company and I drove up to Napa a few weeks back, taking 2 hours each way to get there. I decided if we could do that, then I could certainly do a day trip to the Cape, where my family and I spent so much time vacationing when I was younger. My folks still vacation there in the summer, splitting time at the cottage they rent, but I haven't been in five or six years.

I suggested this to Dad, and suggested that he might want to come along, now that he's retired. He was game, which is good since that meant we could take his car! (Well, okay, that's not the only reason. The company was nice, too!) We set out on Wednesday morning, once I managed to roust myself out of bed. Once we crossed the Cape Cod Canal, we took the scenic route into Orleans where we stopped for lunch at Cooke's, a fast food joint we've patronized for years. I think their food has gone downhill, though.

I didn't really have anything particular in mind for this trip. I just wanted to hit some old familiar places, and generally have a look around. We drove to the beach, and parked for free since it's still the off-season, so we got to walk around and remark on how blue the water seemed. And Dad would know, since he's been there much more recently than I.

We hit some of the used bookstores on the Cape, though the two main ones we went to seem to have fallen into disarray. Pity. In Wellfleet, driving back from the bookstore I suggested we stop and walk over a footbridge over the stream running into the harbor, which we'd never walked before. There was a nice network of pedestrian footpaths on the other side, which made for a pleasant outing.

For some reason, I wanted to drive further out and see the sand dunes, which is kind of silly since it's not like we don't have sand dunes on the west coast. But whatever. Since we went that far, we also drove through Provincetown, and though we didn't stop in the town itself (I didn't feel like it at the time, but in retrospect I kind of wish I'd chosen differently) we did stop by one of the breakwaters near the very end of the Cape and walked around for a bit. Pretty up there.

After a short excursion to Chatham (which was entirely fogged in, unlike everywhere else we went, which was partly sunny), the town my parents first stayed in when they started coming to the Cape, we had dinner at the Binnacle Tavern (which I think has changed its name to something else with "Binnacle" in it). Their menu had changed since he was last there, but - after some grousing - once our food arrived my Dad decided that the place was still quite good after all. And their dessert menu was the same; I had a dessert which was coffee ice cream in a merengue shell covered with praline sauce and almond slices. Mmm.

We'd been on the Cape for about nine hours, and decided it was time to head home. The sun set on our way, and we got home around 9:30, exhausted but happy.

As I said above, my Dad is now retired. I've rarely mentioned him in my journal at his request, since while he was working he didn't want to be discussed publicly, but he says I can write about him now. I'm not about to give you his life story (after all, I don't give you anyone else's...), but I thought I'd mention a little something about him.

Like me, Dad read comic books and science fiction when he was young. He doesn't read many comics today, and only the occasional SF book. He does have a fondness for old pulp magazines, though. Particularly The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes. He's enjoyed Alan Moore's comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for instance (the second series of which starts in a few months).

Dad says he can't understand people who fear that they won't have enough to do in retirement. He seems not to lack for things to do, although he does seem to fill a lot of his time browsing the Web and sending e-mail. On the other hand, he's boning up on his math to work on understanding General Relativity Theory. Well, everyone needs a hobby!

I made my annual trips into downtown Boston and to Harvard Square for shopping, and to walk through the Boston Common and Public Garden. I also stopped in two of the old graveyards in Boston, where folks such as Paul Revere and John Adams are buried, as well as Ben Franklin's parents and siblings. (Franklin himself is buried in Philadelphia; I saw his grave in December.)

Shopping in Boston has gotten frustrating. The used bookstores seem to have gone downhill as far as science fiction and comic books go. Avenue Victor Hugo's SF selection was terribly disappointing, and The Million Year Picnic's back issue selection is only a pale shadow of what it was back in the early 80s. The only things I picked up on my two expeditions were four used CDs from two branches of Newbury Comics (Transatlantic's SMPT:e, Spock's Beard's Day For Night, Seal's Human Being, and Dexter Gordon's Doin' Allright). Full price CDs are ridiculous these days - almost everything is $14 or more. I think I've paid more than $12 for a single CD maybe five times in my life (not counting imports). I buy most of my CDs used now, or on sale.

Well, I had a good walk, anyway. It was hot, though!

Thursday I dropped in at my old high school to visit some teachers. They're doing some major construction on it - building a new wing, and then they plan to remodel the old wings, and build a field house and a swimming pool! Yeesh! In three years I won't recognize the place.

I met with most of the teachers I'd planned to drop in on. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, one of my best-liked teachers, who taught me history for three years, passed away about a decade ago. My other history teacher is still around, but I wasn't able to track him down this time around.

My chemistry teacher is still there, and I chatted with him for a while. I also dropped in on the computer science teacher, who was in an office with his two cohorts. The school system orders their computers mainly from Apple, and they asked me whether I'd seen the new eMac (I've seen one, but not used it) and asked me about further support for education for Mac OS X (I told them I couldn't tell them anything which hasn't been publicly announced, and truth to tell I'm not really sure what we've announced!). Folks seemed to be generally impressed that I work at Apple, though they might be equally pleased that I didn't grow up to become an axe murderer or something! I mean, you never know.

I rounded out my visit with a lengthy chat with an English teacher, whom I'd actually had for two film-related courses. Though I feel like I wasn't able to fully appreciate the film-making class he taught at the time, I did get a lot out of the film criticism class I took from him. He introduced me to North by Northwest - one of my favorite films, as long-time readers know - and the dissection of that film had a lot to do with how I interpret dramatic presentations today (for better or for worse). For his part, he's made some tough and practical decisions in his life lately which all seemed pretty level-headed to me.

I think what strikes me as most profound now about the visit is being treated by the teachers as an adult and an equal. Intellectually, it makes sense, since I am and adult, and at the same stage of my life that many of them were at when they were teaching me. But breaking past that student-teacher barrier is a strange thing. I don't think it's something most people ever consider doing. I wonder if that's why many people don't go back to visit their old teachers when they're adults?

One of my classmates is now a teacher at the high school herself (indeed, my aforementioned chemistry teacher attended the school himself, back in the 60s), and I'm sure she has an interesting perspective on the changes over time. She's also one of the organizers of our upcoming class reunion. I should shoot her an e-mail and find out what's up with that...