say like the Cape Coddahs say

I grew up on Cape Cod, which is the easternmost land mass of the United States, a sand spit jutting out into the Atlantic. Technically it’s a peninsula, but a human-made canal makes it essentially an island. Like an island, it maintains an identity, culture, and dialect distinct from those on the mainland.


Some Cape Cod colloquialisms:

The rooftop porches on the old sea captains’ houses along Main Street, from whence one might anxiously watch for a ship to come into harbor, are called widows’ walks or widows’ watches.

Liquor stores, which like gas stations function as neighborhood community centers, are known as package stores or packies.

Chocolate sprinkles for your ice cream are called jimmies. Some say this is a racist reference (on the assumption that it dates from Jim Crow laws); others say it comes to us from the English slang “jim-jams”, meaning “trifles” or “knickknacks”. But there's no concrete evidence either way, so call them whatever you want.

A milkshake just means milk blended with something tasty. It doesn’t usually include ice cream.

Tonic means soda.

Wicked is an adverb: “That girl is wicked nice.” “Summer people are all wicked rich.”

Locals or year-rounders are permanent residents. Summer people spend Memorial Day through Labor Day there; they usually own property. Tourists are simply on vacation.

Eliminate prepositions such as in and on: “Down the cellar.” “Up the Cape.”


Accents: Take the Rs off the end of your words, add them to words ending in vowels, and you’re halfway there. You now drive around in a cah looking for beeah with Johanner. Cold, wet days are “rar.”




and now the sea shanty:


Cape Cod girls don’t got no combs
Heave away, haul away
They comb their hair with codfish bones
Heave away, haul away


Heave away me bonny bonny boys
Heave away, heave away
Heave away and don’t you make a noise
For we’re bound for Australia

possible futures for me

I spend a lot of time mulling over what I could do with myself in a permanent sort of way. Here are a few options I've come up with:

- I will find a suitable hippie lover and move to seaside Wellfleet, MA, where I will raise a bunch of kids in a ramshackle yet charming house. I'll give them a mix of Hebrew and nature-inspired names (Moses, Dune Clouds) and they'll be born knowing how to surf and play music, and will grow up to be kind of whittled-looking and have white-person dreds. For my part I'll work at something involving wool sweaters and boats, something hardcore and yet mystical, or else be an artist and collect driftwood. Our whole lives will be played out to a reggae beat.

OR

- I will get some suits and a job in a small yet bustling East Coast city, where I will proceed to work my way up to a management position and then to a relatively highly paid manager-of-management job. I'll join a gym, take taxis, and combat the pallor of cubicle lighting with the help of tanning salons. I will have a fat jock boyfriend named Mitch who wears white baseball hats. After years of vacuuming the beige rugs of my white-walled apartment in an apartment building I'll buy a condo in the suburbs and commute to work in a car that I'll owe lots of money on. I'll get my hair frosted regularly into stripes and read paperback novels with cartoon drawings of skinny young lasses with shopping bags on the covers and I will have achieved great success but sometimes I will get very drunk all by myself and wonder if I am dead yet or not.

OR

- I will sail around on a real, actual pirate ship, stealing cashmere goods and strawberry-shaped marzipan from leisure yachts. I'll shave my head and lose the use of one arm, which I will tell people was in a tremendous sword battle but actually happened when I slipped off the main mast for no good reason, just clumsiness, then denied the symptoms, then, when it was too late and gangrene appeared to be setting in, attempted to treat myself with topical antibiotics and a homemade Ace bandage. Also I won't swear but I'll say "Crap" a lot in a menacing voice. Eventually I will land on a small island where I can purchase a tract of land for myself, cash down and no questions asked, then live in what I will call a typical early-European wattle and daub hut but which will be more like a falling-down piece of crap type of house, but I'll refer to my possessions in archaic - or even, if I could muster it, Middle - English to sort of have a theme going, though I'll sometimes lie awake looking through the gaps in my roof at the stars or clouds or whatever and wonder if I am trying to be ironic and who is fooling who. But the climate will be tolerable for a small sustenance garden and I'll be fairly content, save for the lack of really good dental care.

OR

-I'll be accepted to a fairly prestigious doctoral program in which I'll study the origins, products, and sociopolitical structure of pretty much every group in the world. In addition to speaking several languages fluently I will have research skills which will enable me to find out pretty much any piece of information that ever existed. I will be so ensconsced in academia that I will forget that a world exists outside of academic institutions; this trait will evolve into a hard-to-take air of privilege easily understood as snobbery. My anxiety will run fairly high and edge toward panic, peaking when an opportunity arises to try to win a grant or award of some kind. My speech will consist of advanced vocabulary words and I will forsake my usual company for that of my classmates; however, my undergraduate education, having been rich in life skills such a using a Turkish toilet, facilitating consensus-based decision-making, and readily identifying the fiber content and dye process of indigenous craft products, yet poor in students-blowing-off-steam skills such as tapping a keg or sleeping with one's dormmates, will leave me unprepared for bonding with my fellow academics. Eventually, at the age of 57, I will graduate from college and find an adjunct position at a rural community college, where I will write several tomes which I'll require my students to read though each has the whiny, lecturing voice of someone seeking respect without really demanding it. Hard-pressed to find an audience for my increasingly unbearable work, I'll refer to my isolation as "obscurity", as though I am J.D. Salinger shielding myself from the demanding masses ravenous for a bit of my time. Then when I am 95 science will discover that the ingredients of ramen noodles, long my main source of nutrition, contain a preservative which will enable my soul and brain to die while my body lives on forever, uselessly pumping and circulating blood, and I will be displayed in the American Museum of Natural History as a curiosity.

OR

-I become America's Next Top Model

spinning my yarns

This week I'm working as an assistant to an artist friend as she prepares for an installation. My job is to hem the raw edges of printed banners and power-wash the silkscreens in an old warehouse bathroom with enormous windows propped up, the hard-hatted construction guys outside smoking and complaining of diarrhea from crappy Wawa coffee. On the way home I stop at Whole Foods, too cash-poor to buy much, and see what samples they've got out at the cheese counter. Hard French cheeses run through with dusty veins of mold, dank and aged.

And one time I was in that cave, one of a million on the limestone plateau of the Larzac, in the Languedoc (langue d'oc, as opposed to langue d'oil, precursor to the modern oui, differentiating the regions of the land by dialect, therefore "language of yes", or literally, "yes-tongue"), the southern French rock pocked and bubbled with holes. We were on someone's farm, a friend of a friend, drinking lemonade from small glasses on a rickety table outside, listening while they chattered fast and hard en francais, and then we walked inside, into what looked like a closet door and down a staircase. Down and down and down, like an optical illusion, because how could the next flight be this far down? and then down some more, and more, the steps worn stone now, and a single ancient electric line connecting a bare bulb or two, down and down, and then there we were, in the cave. A cheesemaking cave. The equipment still sat there, a hundred years old easily, and beyond that the ceilings vaulted out and up. Stalactites, stalagmites, I mean a real cave, drippy and cool, huge echoing chambers one after another interminably in the dark.

Did I mention the goats? It was a goat farm. Little mohair goats, running determinedly into the barn on their goaty hooves, two of them vying for top spot on a stack of hay bales. It was spring and there were babies, twins. Some had been rejected by their mothers and lay dwindling and tiny in the stalls, unhappy with the bottles of warm goat milk, surrogate rubber teats. I loved them, the babies and moms and the ones jumping on the hay and butting their horns together; I liked their creepy slit eyes and their ridiculous beautiful hair.

So it was part wool shop, this place, part of a collective where they sent out the mohair in bulk and got it back dyed and spun. Like a CSA, but of yarn. I touched every skein in the room before picking out an armload, each ball of which was marked MOHAIR DE FERMES DE FRANCE. There was an example sweater, red lace, and I was delirious with the possibilities and the shine of the soie, silk, spun into the fibers. Then we drove off in a rusty car to, I don't know, a concert held in an anarchist squat in some ruins, or we drank red table wine under a 60-watt light, or we wandered into someone's barn to play with the new puppies, wriggling and soft. And I'm knitting tonight in Philadelphia, broke and freckled, my cat asleep on the rug, watching CSI on the stolen internet. I'm knitting lace from the green French mohair, readying for winter, goats spun into scarves, people into stories, into memory and stone.