Another Year, and I Feel Vine

June 1, 2013

This weekend, the missus and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. We’ve been married for brgzuflught years, and… what’s that? You didn’t catch the number? Oh, well, it’s not important. Let’s just say it was a little while ago.

We could also say that the last ice age ended a little while and a smidgen ago, or that the sun coalesced from a cloud of hot cosmic gas two or three little whiles ago. But we won’t do that. Will we? No. We won’t.

As we often do at anniversary time, we decided to get away for the weekend. In the past, we’ve gone to more or less ‘down to earth’ places — Maine; Providence, Rhode Island; the movies — but this time we decided to hit another New England spot that we’d never gotten the chance to see: Martha’s Vineyard.

“I figured it was a bunch of people with polo mallets and stiff haircuts drinking out of highball glasses and wearing white at the appropriate times, but never at the non-appropriate times, whenever the hell those are, respectively.”

Now, I didn’t know much about what happens on Martha’s Vineyard. I figured it was a bunch of people with polo mallets and stiff haircuts drinking out of highball glasses and wearing white at the appropriate times, but never at the non-appropriate times, whenever the hell those are, respectively. And it totally is that, in some places on the island. Those are not the places I’m allowed to go, or to be seen near, or to reference by name here, lest the inhabitants look sternly down their noses at me in contempt. So I won’t.

We were, however, allowed entry into quite a fair number of Martha’s Vineyard locales, and they weren’t quite so posh as to turn us away completely. Sit us in a corner, perhaps. Throw a presumably stylish and high thread count sheet over us, sure. But we still got to eat, or drink, or shop as we liked, so long as we didn’t scare the fancy folk.

But the clearest hint that I may not be a ‘Vineyard person’ was that I couldn’t even figure out how to describe it. People asked me if we were going away this weekend, and where, and I didn’t know what to tell them.

“We’ll be at the Vineyard.” ?

That sounds a little too polo-mallet for my non-blue blood.

“We’ll be on the Vineyard.” ?

It is an island, after all. And frankly, I’m not sure I saw any grape vines anywhere we went. But syntactically, this sentence makes no sense to me. Unlike:

“We’ll be in the Vineyard.”

That sounds more like a weekend I would have — possibly including sleeping there, among the sauvignons and burgundies and Concords or whatever. I don’t really know from grapes. But they do look pretty comfy after a long day of wine sipping.

So I don’t know how to describe it — at least, not without breaking the rules of grammar or sounding like a Kennedy’s poor suburbanite illegitimate cousin. But it’s been a great trip. We’ve had a nice ferry ride over. A romantic dinner and evening at the hotel. And tomorrow, we’ll visit an alpaca farm and a brewery.

Those are two different places, by the way. They’re not actually brewing beer next to alpacas, and serving pints in soft wool coozies or something.

At least, they’re not yet. I’ll talk to them both tomorrow; maybe we can work something out. Meanwhile, it’s anniversary weekend. I’m checking out — from the Vineyard. G’night.