HOLLY NADLER
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Tips for O.B. travelers to Elle Aye, a new spelling I invented for Los Angeles:
First and most important, if you arrive on the West Coast without having left Martha’s Vineyard for one embarrassingly long year (not counting a quick Island Queen jaunt to the Christmas Tree Shop), then it’s easier, and your adjustment exceedingly less awkward, if you boldly and unflinchingly admit to yourself, and anyone who is remotely interested, that you’re a rube, plain and simple.
Okay, ready rubes? Keys will make you nervous.
Before you leave for your trip, you’re going to spend time hunting for the door key you haven’t used since you moved into your current residence. You know you can always dig up the spare key in that secret spot in the backyard, but you’d rather find one that hasn’t been wrapped in plastic and dirt. (Oh, here it is, under receipts and old snapshots in the hall drawer.) Once you’ve located a more suitable keychain than the raffia ribbon wrapped around it, you’ll be neurotic throughout the trip that you might lose the key and chain by, say, leaving it behind with a pouch of majool dates and your rusty, cherished Swiss Army knife.
And you will feel funny fiddling with one key after the next in the old brass lock of the heavy wood-paneled front door of your son’s blue-and-pink Art Deco building in the foothills of Los Feliz. One more key to go and then, a miracle occurs: From inside the corridor, a handsome young man with a mane of blond hair appears, clad in shorts and hiking boots and leading a jumbo-sized Jack Russell. He opens the door, and cheerfully waves you in.
“Oh, do I look honest to you?” you ask him.
He laughs. “As long as you don’t plan on murdering anyone.”
Fact is, we Islanders do look honest and downright harmless because, well, we are honest and harmless. It’s a trait you acquire when you live in a community where, for instance, you discover from a 3,0007-mile distance, and with your eye on your online banking balance, that you’ve got a wee problem, so you call Houston — i.e., Mary at the Oak Bluffs branch — who says to contact your friend Gwyn to pick up a check for you lodged in your post office box. So you talk to Paul at the post office to authorize the transaction, and your patootie is saved in the space of three-quarters of an hour. Who wouldn’t be honest and harmless and kindly disposed to everyone when you come from a place where it takes a village to raise a grownup?
But wow, what a rube you are!
When traveling to Elle Aye, don’t even try to spiff up like the Angelesas. All the most beautiful girls from around the world have been shipped here to succeed in the movie business, without once having auditioned for a high school play. Acting lessons? Who needs acting lessons when you’ve got lips like La Jolie’s and a plank of bare legs between calfskin boots and red miniskirt?
Forget it, rube! Enjoy your high comfort level as you clomp along in the black Uggs that have already carried you through three New England winters, and your gray polar fleece jacket with the reversible burgundy velvet.
You go, rube!
Finally, you’ll need to accustom yourself to an absence of grace with strangers. You’re an Oak Bluffs street maven. You smile at people wherever you go. In Elle Aye, if the street is dark and you intercept a woman with a baby stroller or an old Armenian lady lugging a plastic Ralph’s bag of groceries, you say “Hello,” out of courtesy.
Do not expect a returning smile or a reassuring reciprocal “Hello.” These people are now regarding you as a freak who reveals sociopathic traits by being friendly. Not only will they not respond, they’ll scoot away.
When at last, at trip’s end, your son drops you at Elle Aye Ex at 6:59 in the morning, you will have pledged to yourself not to resist a show of sadness. All your long life, your own melodramatic elders have burdened you with their grief at your leave-taking. But at the same time, you will realize, with a thunderbolt of guilt, that you’ve had a fulfilling and even over-filling visit, and it’s time to hit the bricks!
So you hug your son and exchange “I love you’s without a single sob, not even a hiccup. You grin and make a heart with your fingers over your chest just like that singer does, Taylor Swift. And then you wave as if you’re throwing on a backpack and hiking up to some Nepalese temple where a holy woman will touch a blue and green feather to your forehead, and you’ll be suddenly enlightened.
You’re heading home, you’ve bonded for the millionth time with your kid who is now, among other things, a stand-up comic, and you caught his hilarious act at the Palms Bar in West Hollywood. You’ve been dazzled by neon on rooftops and billboards and columns and whole buildings awash in light — purple, lime-green, orange and scarlet. You’ve had take-out Indian food, and pizza in the luxurious rear courtyard of a movie company, yourself sunk deep in plush cushions under a soft darkling sky, with a Roman urn of a fountain tinkling nearby, surrounded by walls of ancient eucalypti as tall as five-story buildings, with soft garden lights twinkling on, and hot-pink-flowered bougainvillea dangling over iron gates.
You can’t help thinking of that old Moody Blues song, “Nights in white satin, never reaching the end, letters are written never meaning to send. . . “
What an almighty rube you are!
Martha’s Vineyard Community Services is holding its annual Electronics Disposal Day on Saturday, April 7 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the community services campus, across the street from the regional high school. This is your opportunity to get rid of all those old and tired electronic and electrical appliances. It’s time to do some spring cleaning! Community Services will accept computers, monitors, televisions, printers, notebooks, copiers, scanners, air conditioners, stereo equipment, dehumidifiers, cell phones, microwaves, fax machines, all refrigerators, washers, dryers and ranges. Appliances small and large, working and non-working will be accepted. Drop off fees range from $1 to $35, with discounts for carloads. There is no charge for dropping off mice and keyboards. The items will be disposed of off-Island in an environmentally friendly way.
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