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Editor, Rushin'January 12, 2006 Part of my deal is that I have to act as if those who pay the piper don't get to call the tune so even though I'd committed to get a job to New York by tomorrow and even though it was gonna be close, I kept my Thursday morning breakfast appointment with my writers' group (today that meant Wendy) and didn't blow off my hair's 10:30 appointment with the hairdresser. Blowing off the horses, whom I feed and turn out at lunchtime, was emphatically not an option, but I did defer much of the midday routine till later. Express Mail deadline out of Vineyard Haven is 4 p.m. I made it with a half hour to spare. Go, girl, go! OK, fairly extensive notes followed by e-mail -- they're in New York already, though the copyedited manuscript won't be there till tomorrow -- but given a choice between cleaning up your style sheets and mailing your invoice to Big Conglomerate, Attention: Accounts Payable, what would you do? Me too. All signs indicate that I did the right thing. Talking writerly talk at Mocha Mott's, over coffee and a breakfast burrito, did its usual energizing thing. Heading up-island to my hairdresser's, I saw the blank space left by the bulldozing of Doug Parker's On the Vineyard gallery. Fortunately I'd been warned, so I didn't drive into a tree. It was a wonderful gallery, a barely converted barn; thanks to Doug, the art was outstanding and the atmosphere unpretentious. Doug died several years ago of stomach cancer -- I don't think he reached 60 -- and the gallery hasn't been a gallery since. He left it to a conservation organization, which I guess ordered the bulldozing. Funny thing about those conservation groups: they mostly don't know what's worth conserving, or how to conserve it. I headed up the hill by the Mai Fane farmhouse (Mai Fane is long gone, and so is her farm; the property now belongs to the Martha's Vineyard Land Bank, and Allie and I ride round it a lot), reflecting: Maybe it was good that the barn was gone because every time I drove by it I remembered the gallery, and Doug, and how they weren't there anymore. It's getting really old, remembering everything and everyone that isn't around anymore. As usual I got to the hairdresser's one minute late. She's very tolerant. Luckily I'm a quickie; I've got wash-cut-and-wear hair, as long as I don't get any idea about "having a hairstyle." My hair's gonna do what it's gonna do. About 10 years ago I stopped arguing with it. My hairdresser's a working single mother with two kids. She's been knocking herself out applying for various "affordable" housing properties, filling out forms, arranging financing, entering those town-sponsored lotteries. One lottery was held last night. Three properties were up for grabs; she came in 12th. Something I didn't know: For each lottery, you have to fill out all the forms again, even if none of the information has changed. Have I said recently how intensely I don't like those affordable-housing creeps? We vented. I said the writing biz included an awful lot of the same. I stopped by the West Tisbury post office on the way home, picked up mail, and had just opened Uhura Mazda's door when a woman came around the back. She looked sort of familiar but I didn't have a name to put on the face. "Are horses really your therapy?" she asked. (A barnmate from Crow Hollow gave me a bumper sticker that says "Horses Are My Therapy." This is pretty true, so I put it on Uhura's bumper.) "Yeah, pretty much," I said. She looked at the malamutt riding shotgun and said, "He looks like Bear!" "That's 'cause he's Bear's son," I said. Turned out Bear, a gorgeous woolly Malamute and Rhodry's dad, used to come visiting her golden retriever. So we talked about Bear, and horses. She's 65 and still asks for a horse every birthday; once some horses got loose in her neighborhood, and she told Joanie, the animal control officer, that if they were there more than half an hour they were hers. I said my grandmother was still riding when she was 80. I told her a very short version of my story and said "Don't give up." Have I said lately that sometimes I really hate this place, but sometimes I really love living here? Went home, finished job, got it to post office on time. Went to barn, got a short ride in; Nina the barn rat, who lives next door, showed up and did most of the chores I hadn't done at noon. There's a press release in today's Martha's Vineyard Times. A guy I know very vaguely is offering a 10-week course in folk guitar "because there isn't enough music in the world." Over the last two years I've been teaching myself chords on a friend's guitar and then forgetting them because all the songs I want to play have some impossible bar chord that my fingers can't manage. I need music in my life, but at long last I've decided that the Island Community Chorus is not it. Maybe a new door is opening. For a whole lot of reasons I think it's gonna be a good year.
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