“I want to eat at those wooden chairs,” our son said. “It looks inviting,” I agreed.
At 20, he was always looking forward to his next meal. It had been his idea to meet in Italy for a week. He had planned our destinations, gotten leave, and flown in from his European navy base. I’d traveled around the globe when I was single, but my last trip to Europe had been with the three of us when he was a baby.
Huddled in the cabin on our sleeping bags, drinking hot chocolate while a thunderstorm raged outside, we heard a call on the VHF radio. One of our students reported they were dragging their anchor and wanted our help.
I stopped laughing from the joke Dave had been telling, stashed my cup, and grabbed my hat and my foul weather gear jacket. Everyone else did the same thing.
I was eating an ice cream cone by myself in the shade of the gazebo, the cold creaminess on my tongue in direct contrast to the humid air on my arms. Gusts of warm wind came off the Miles River and over the grass lawn, reaching my face. It was my weekly Wednesday downtime, after sailing into St. Michaels with a flotilla of students and fellow instructors. Teaching sailing was a great summer job for us college students in the late ‘80s.
Peanuts, sausage, beer, and wet hair. Inwardly I groaned. This was my fifth meal of the day.
I had woken up that morning in a Soviet hotel in post-Soviet Russia in a small town in the Leningrad Oblast called Pikalyovo.
She knelt on the seat of her chair, hanging over the back. Blank face. Steady, penetrating gaze. Feeling her eyes on me, I looked up at the solemn child. Our eyes met.
I smiled. She didn't smile back. I paused, then gave a small wave. Her gaze never wavered.
The boys, looking almost like twins, bounced along the row in time with the music, huge grins on their faces. Their father smiled, patting them on the shoulder.
I was startled at first to see the boys so excited about a Grateful Dead cover band.
I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by power strips and wire fragments, frustrated that we were on our second crew of electricians trying to recreate the masterpiece of under cabinet power and lighting that had worked perfectly the first time around. More frustrating still, we were rebuilding a kitchen that had been only 8 years old before a tree crashed through our house.
I’m swaying to the sound of the “Grateful Dead cover band,” as my husband jokingly referred to it earlier in the day. The stage in Manteo, NC, is in front of Roanoke Sound – with the water and the breeze adding to my mellow mood.
In Cádiz, I stumbled into a neighborhood celebration not meant for tourists but for each other—where generations gathered in song, color, and joy. Years later, in Santa Fe and again at a wedding, I found that same spirit of belonging: communities keeping tradition alive not as performance, but as love passed forward.
What makes the Hospice Cup Shore Party unlike any other party on the Bay?
It took me years to put it into words.