I made a huge mistake this week, electing to work on a project at “home” rather than in town over the past two days.
As a result, the depression that’s dogged me for so many months is back in full force this morning.
Reading the local paper, which was in an appropriately sodden state after sitting outside all night, sent me into an even deeper black mood. Even the inclusion of a photo of my granddaughter at a magic show couldn’t cheer me up.
One of my friends is retiring later this year and can’t wait to live here full-time. She’s bought into the whole Cape mystique of a slower pace, foggy mornings and beach roses – in other words, a vacation spot.
The thing about vacations that make them special, though, is having family and friends around to share leisure activities. Being a divorced retiree with kids who live out of state is a little different – correction, a LOT different – lifestyle than the one many people remember from happy Summer days gone by. I hope she won’t be disappointed.
I’ve been told that one of the reasons the Cape has so many dysfunctional residents is that people come here to escape from their problems, associating the place with some cheerful past moments. When they find that their problems not only don’t disappear but get worse, they bottom out.
Unconsciously, I did the same thing, equating the Cape to occasional but intensely memorable visits to my grandmother’s house in Plymouth during the Summer.
Impressions from those visits are deeply embedded – having a chance to see my Irish/Italian cousins, whom I adored and even hero-worshipped for their self-confidence and sun-baked perfect looks, eating my grandmother’s exquisite old country cooking, gathering more periwinkles than we could possibly eat, meandering down the boardwalk to go swimming at a pristine beach, walking down a little street and a “secret”, cedar-lined sandy path with the other kids to buy hot donuts – I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
That connection, of course, will never, ever happen again, so I’ve been in “make do” mode, especially since the job I took when I moved here took a sharp turn south, ending in a layoff less than a year after I relocated.
I try to see the good in things – my many photos on Flickr being evidence of that – but I still can’t shake that underlying feeling of discontent, isolation and displacement, of being bogged down by the amount of “stuff” I’ve accumulated and of being separated from people with whom I have more in common than a shared area code.
The connection with the rest of the world is pretty tenuous here, depending on high speed cable and a couple of relatively dinky bridges. I visited yesterday with two off-Cape friends, and it didn’t occur to me until last night that they must have thought me a babbling idiot, my share of the conversations verging on the hysterical.
There’s a calendar in this room with a slogan in huge letters: QUITTING IS WINNING! The message resonates, in a stomach-churning kind of way. I wonder where I can find a job, an affordable home and a cedar-lined path to a Mom and Pop donut shop, some place not too far from a pristine bathing beach.
But rather than fueling optimism, as in days gone by, the harsh juxtaposition of imagination with reality extinguishes it, like the slow buildup of carbon monoxide in an underground mine.