High and Dry
Not having Internet access is a bummer, and knowing that it might be just my fault - that it might be the old laptop, something I ought to have tested for before we left New York, and not some local problem (although the dial tone does sound odd) - hardly makes it easier for me to quash the desire to get back home right away in order to get to the bottom of the problem. Perhaps it will prove easier than I think to get beyond my childish disappointment. I'll be home in a few days, and I can live without my email just as well as the world can live without my entries. Actually, I can check my mail on the public computer in the lobby, and even write posts. What I can't do is upload Kathleen's photographs. And of course I can't write at length, because one is asked to keep one's computer time to fifteen minutes. If I'd brought my Iomegamini stick, I just might try to take advantage of a USB port, but I didn't, so it seems best to adopt the course that I've arrived at, which is to write as if I could post, and then backdate everything. As long as the backdating is discreetly noted, I can't see that it makes much difference in the long run.
The Prof warned me that St Croix was no Bermuda. I knew that as well as one can know something in advance of experience, but what I've found out is that I have desire to leave "the property," as the staff refer to the Buccaneer campus. Kathleen plans to go into Christiansted to do a little shopping (there's apparently an important bead shop), but she won't mind, she says, if I stay here. What we saw on the drive from the airport was almost depressing. This island needs a Board of Trade! There is the additional discomfort of getting into a van and bouncing around on roads through neighborhoods that I can hardly see because I can no longer crane my neck to raise the window line. My lack of curiosity about the island is almost surprising, but clearly I've bracketed St Croix with Yonkers and White Plains, the nightmare towns of my childhood, places to which I thought I might be deported for bad behavior. It is all - the Buccaneer aside - extremely drab. You have to be in love with the climate to bear it, and I am not in love with the climate.
Which is not to say that it's unpleasant to sit on the beachside terrace, enjoying a martini - but only one, and Chardonnay after that (my new regime) - and a club sandwich as only places like this know how to make. The people-watching is engaging, because there are lots of families and one can play the Darwinian game of seeing who takes after whom and wondering if the relation between the man and the boy at the next table doesn't have "step" in it somewhere. I devoted a lot of attention to a family consisting (as I saw it) of a forty-something couple with four children, three girls (one of whom may grow up to be a supermodel) and then a boy, by the name of Cooper, and the mother's parents. The dad, I surmised, was a guy from an ordinary middle-class background who'd done well both at sports and academically and gone on to succeed at a serious corporation, managing a division perhaps, and taking his family out of its background forever. The father-in-law, I guessed, might own a car dealership or a major insurance agency, but his son-in-law was working on a larger scale. When I was hrough, Kathleen asked what other people must conjecture about us. Something as wildly wrong as what I'd just outlined, I replied.
