Honeymoon

Pictured at left is our little Vortex grill transported to Chincoteague Island so that Lady Rio could whip up on some steaks. And indeed she did. This was on Monday night, our second night there, and soon after these roaring charcoal flames got going storm clouds brewed and in about an hour the overbearing 100 degree days collapsed into the gentle mid-'80s and stayed there.

On the night of July 3rd when the Island was celebrating the 4th, we walked a few blocks from our cottage to a nearly deserted park by the water and watched from our seats on a picnic table three different neighborhoods set off fireworks. Two other couples of varying ages and horniness sat at scattered picnic tables and the cool breezes felt like silk.

Usually fireworks strike me as the clowns of holiday entertainment. Something that everybody is supposed to enjoy and be enthralled by, but for me - and I think a lot of other people, a big old bag of whiff. But on this night with Everly beside me catcalling spanish sailors and taking big wet slurps from her 40 I was able to relax and be spellbound by the upward spiraling electric spiderwebs in the sky.

Once again I was reminded on this trip that apparently if I bike, swim in the ocean and lay around reading on the beach all day I can feel very healthy. My legs felt like vibrating meat tuning forks. Of course at that point it was the final night of our trip, I'd had my last swim while the suave white-haired gentleman set up in a mini-tent behind me played Brazilian and classical music on an acoustic guitar, and the next morning we'd be rolling back to Baltimore praying the car tires would make it.

Luckily there were two flea/antique markets to hit on the way to cushion our return to savage civilization. The first held mainly bootleg versions of bad mainstream dvds, used mom jeans and a tattooist(!) - "good place to get hepatitis," my beloved remarked - but the second, "Blue Crow", had some very cool books at a booth that was going out of business. A beautiful hardback of Breakfast of Champions in pristine, colorful unfaded jacket, a first complete English translation of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia-Sexualis, a couple of Freemasonry books (hello wackos) and a first edition of Capote's In Cold Blood.



It was a Chincoteague trip of many firsts. My first marriage and honeymoon, of course, and that was splendid - almost as special as seeing a Kid Rock Kid shaped like a '50s rocketship, the kitchen sink bulky baroque kind that was always after Buck Rogers, wearing a Confederate flag bikini. Or as sweet and tender as the elderly gent who looked like Tiny Tim if Tiny Tim had pursued accounting and occasionally had a glass of some sort of juice in the morning along with his fistful of uppers, downers, screamers, marrow pellets, paw paw beans and Ladybugs, having the time of his life with a neon green surfboard.

Of all the treasured keepsakes I have from this physical and emotional journey - the speaking oyster shell, close up photos of a glossy ibis and a snowy egret getting it on, the bloodied cloth Mennonite cap found next to a dented rolling pin in the Mister Whippie parking lot, I think the scarification along the back of my legs that were exposed below my bermuda shorts caused by Everly beating me with wire hangers whenever I tried to turn the air conditioner above 62 degrees will always be my favorite. Like a gory severed head rolling down a thirty foot stone Aztec pyramid, my altered legs will assure a decent crop is harvested by our love.

I will never forget the sweet little girl who was staying in the cottage across from ours with her aunt. Each morning when the black squirrel was cavorting in the willows, the circus of butterflies caught once again in the spell of the Russian Sage bush, my muffled sobbing on the back porch would attract the attention of the youngster as she created internet portals for her various C.E.O. friends from the Cartoon Network.

"Why do you cry so, Mr. Borgnine?" she would softly ask me, having once seen "McHale's Navy" on her grumpy old grandfather's television and now confusing me with the classic old character actor who was built from tubers.

"I'm not crying Portia," I would say, "it's just my allergies. And please stop pressing against the porch screen, Miss Everly will hear you and my allergies might just get far worse. Here, please be a dear child and take this balled up old note to the sheriff at T's Corner, I think he'll understand."

(To be continued.)