Welcome to Cape Cod
Every so often, a "stroke of the obvious" befalls a soul. 'Tis my time for such a glaring epiphany... After penning 200+ posts for this blog (each ending with the non de plume "CapeCodAlan"), it finally dawned on me that virtually none of you out there are truly familiar with vintage Cape Cod. Let's see if we can't remedy that, (and in doing so, take a quick break from "backyard birding").
Wow... Where to begin? (When in doubt, borrow from a master...) In the opening of Steinbeck's "Cannery Row", the author described the town as "...a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. He then went on to further depict it as another series of nouns which I can't use in that we want to keep this bit of the blogosphere strictly rated "G". Still, an accurate description of "Old Cape Cod" would probably be akin to that of "Cannery Row". (Apologies go out to Patti Page.) Personally, I like to think of "classic" Cape Cod as the place where the best of intentions go to die.
Still, that hardly offers real insight for the uninitiated... Hmmm... Perhaps another angle... The old rule was that one could not call himself a Cape Codder unless his kin had been here for at least four generations, and he had a minimum of a peck of beach sand in his bloodstream.
Nope... Empty definitions just don't cut it either - a story is in order... (This won't be easy - while I have literally hundreds of such tales, I can relate but a few in this forum. Here goes...) Years ago, local contractors, friends, (and real Cape Codders) Rocky and Marc got into a slight game of trading practical jokes. While that might sound silly enough to those of you outside of the confines of the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges and fettered with post-1980's political correctness, it was hardly silly to those of us on this peninsula. Existentialism a la askew humor is our stock in trade. Anyway, weeks after the "Joke War" began I stopped by Rocky's, and there attached to the peak of the west-facing, exterior wall of his house was the naked bottom half of a female mannequin. More to the point, Marc had somehow managed to affix the partial model such that it looked for all the world like Superwoman had been flying about "au naturel" and hit the wall head on. Yup, the legs and tail section were on the horizontal... When I asked Rocky if he wanted help lowering the 50% figure, he was hysterically incredulous...
Are you kidding??? No way! That's a work of art! I'm going to leave it up there!
Rocky's poor neighbors... If they hadn't understood that they were living near an authentic Cape Codder before the nudie Superwoman crash, they certainly did afterwards.
And so it goes... Adult "Children of the Clam" claim such bizarre accomplishments as being thrown out of a police station for drunken and comical conduct. We earn our PhDs in physics, and then become commercial fishermen. We buy a restaurant, and then actually get banned from the joint by our own employees. The stories go on and on and on...
Anyway, thankfully, I have escaped the insanity as the "grillin' in the Winter" picture below clearly shows.
See you by the feeders,
CapeCodAlan