the birds are different on long island

THE BIRDS ARE DIFFERENT ON LONG ISLAND. They sing different songs or chirp differently. They are really noisy. The rabbits are different, smaller, and there are more of them. And there are deer crossing the roads at night. The old houses were built in a way completely different from anything in Northern Europe that I’ve seen, and at different angles and locations. It has this random, strewn-about feel.

I don’t know anyone in the supermarkets, not one person. I am used to being surrounded by people of a common ancestral gene pool, the Estonians, the Finns. I can spot a German on sight, they just have that special Goethe feel to them. Here, they have all coalesced into something called “white people.”

It is funny to me that a bunch of religious fundamentalists crossed over from New England, bought up the land in a series of voluntary land deals and later nefarious political machinations (ie. get the Indians drunk and make them sign or, get the chief’s brother to sign, making him the new chief), and from these land deals all of this “property” was divided up into parcels and lots, so that some chump from Manhattan can roll in here with a bank account full of money made somewhere, and fix himself up with “a beautiful piece of waterfront property.” But all these “properties” are fictions. Only maps contained in county governments, or fences or lines of trees can demarcate them. The land is all connected, and in reality belongs to no one, no people, no government, and will outlast us all.

MORNING STROLL. The Presbyterian Church, formerly a Congregational church, previously a church of the Puritans, ie. religious fundamentalists who banned dancing, music, and anything else that might take your mind off of … Anyway, eventually they lightened up.

In the graveyard, the tomb of Abraham Woodhull, a spy in the service of General Washington during the American Revolution, gets a lot of visitors. A few graves down is William Jayne, who is actually my ancestor (long story). The details on this character are sketchy, but it seems he was a French Huguenot and the name was De Jeanne, and that he emigrated from Bristol. Some of his descendants were Loyalists who migrated to Canada, and added an ‘s’ to the name, and who much later married into a more recent immigrant family from Ireland. My great great grandmother was named Annabelle Jaynes though. We just happened to move to this community when I was a kid, and knew nothing of the connection.

Took a little walk through the adjacent nature preserve, some of which is the same, other parts of which are different. In general, it’s become a nicer, more walkable place than it was circa 1996 when I was walking around it a lot. Saw a friendly rabbit, a friendly chipmunk, and several very friendly grey squirrels.

DAY TWO. I’ve almost spoken in Estonian to several people while out walking. I have been trained to say, “Tere,” and “Aitäh.” “Morning” sounds odd to me. If I affect a more casual, genteel, semi-southern accent, I can pull it off. “Mornin’ to you.” I’ve been watching too much Yellowstone and 1923. I’m starting to talk like one of them cowboys in the bunkhouse. People talk to you here. A woman was coming down her driveway with the kind of cage one might keep a hamster or other furry animal in and said, “Hey, you want a guinea pig?” I told her no, but she should offer it to the next guy who walked by. I started to think about the Estonians and all of their weird things, like I don’t know you, so I won’t look at you/talk to you on the street, or I won’t respond to that, because there is no need. I don’t want to change them, just like I don’t want to change the Americans, but I think everybody needs to step back out of their little worlds for a moment and realize, not everyone in this world is like you or thinks like you.

There is diversity.

I keep looking for Wancura’s grave at the Caroline Church graveyard. Paul Wancura was the priest there for a long time, and I was an altar servant, called an acolyte, for years. In the graveyard, I saw the stone for Father Jim, who would also do services with Paul, and a woman who was in the choir, who did not live very long. So this is what is happening to the people I used to know — they are winding up six feet under. Wancura was found bound in his home on Shelter Island some years ago and later died from his wounds. They think it was a robbery, but the investigation ran dry. Later another altar servant accused him of sexually molesting him in the 1970s and 1980s. Paul Wancura was definitely an interesting guy. He reminded me a bit of Gene Wilder’s version of Willy Wonka, had he been an Episcopalian priest. He had these piercing blue eyes, wisps of white hair, liked to roll his ‘r’s even though I later found out he was born in Queens. I don’t know if he did it, but I am not going to say that he didn’t do it either. Maybe. It’s possible. Still haven’t found the old rascal’s grave. It’s around here, somewhere. One of these mornings I will find Wancura.

THE THIRD DAY. I finally got the chance to roll into Greenport, which is what I had been wanting to do for a while. As in the Setauket area, which is mid-island, I know nobody here. Even Aldo, who used to run the coffeehouse in town, and is known for his trademark white afro, and who used to play Alan Lomax recordings of Italian folk singers, sold the business a while ago. I don’t know where he is, but the coffee beans are still being roasted and the back terrace is full of customers.

This stuff is black and pungent. I don’t know if I like the taste or not, it’s almost of La Brea Tar Pits consistency, and yet there is a certain thrill about finishing off a cup, but it was piping hot, as they say, and satisfying. Aldo’s Coffee Company is my Rohelise Maja Pood ja Kohvik West. In my heart, I am a person who walks to a café everyday and works there. All across the island, I can see all these sod farms, and Latin American landscapers toiling so that someone’s lawn is extra green, and the contractors roaring up the exclusive roads and lanes to tend to someone’s mini “estate,” and I just think: what’s it all for?

So you can live and die like Gatsby?

In about the year 1942, my great grandparents opened a restaurant and bar in Northport now called Skippers, and my grandfather’s brothers John and Bob Petrone ran it mainly. Supposedly Jack Kerouac liked to get his drink at Gunther’s a few doors down, but I like to think that he popped in one day in 1958 or so and John Petrone (not my father, my great uncle) gave him a cold Schlitz. Then he went home and typed spontaneous prose and tinkered with Visions of Cody.

But if it hadn’t been for that ice cold beer.

Anyway, in Greenport there are also diners and restaurants, like Claudio’s, where you can get free wifi if you stand outside. In the 1960s, my mother was a model and there is a Pepsi advertisement from that era of her standing on the Greenport docks with some nice young man and holding this precious soft drink. And a decade ago we actually lived here for one school year. In the winter, it was all closed, and on frosty January mornings, I was the only soul in town, save for Aldo and a policeman who was also on a coffee run. Lunch cost me way too much money, and it seems Estonian prices have arrived to the US. Whatever became of the $6 dollar sandwich? The $2 espresso? Mine yesterday cost me $3.50, I think. Where is the inflation crazy train headed? I’m 44 now. When I am 66, will espressos cost me $10?

There’s a nice bookstore in town, but I didn’t go in because I was with my daughters, who are uninterested in books, and thankfully I did not share any Kerouac lore with them or else they might tie me to the stake or something. I like Greenport because it is for me a normal kind of place though. People sit on park benches and have conversations. By the ice cream parlor, in winter, I once saw some kids slipping around a frozen alley, as if they were playing hockey. And the old gruff fishermen types pull up in their boats with their gray beards, and their old-timey Eastern Long Island accents, a subset of New England Yankee English. It’s not all like that, of course, but it has character. There are also, among the boutiques festooned with Pride flags, older money boating types walking around, the kinds of people who wear white pants without any reservation and whose chief concern is where to get dinner, after which there might be some bellyaching about an aloof rude waitress or a steak that was not cooked to one’s liking.

Funny that I grew up in these kinds of places. Oh well.

FOURTH DAY. I think it’s the fourth day. I don’t remember much from yesterday actually. I went for a walk, got nice and hot in the sun. I like sweating. I enjoy that my shirt has various growing wet spots from perspiration. I do not aspire to live in a perfectly air-conditioned reality, where everything is comfortable and smells like Old Spice. The TV is always on here. Half of the commercials are for prescription drugs. Happy people are playing tennis, powered by whatever drug they got their doctor to give them, while the narrator details potential side effects, “Blablablab can lead to suicidal thoughts, even death.”

But they keep playing tennis and smiling.

“Ask your doctor about …”

One of them is called Wegovy, The commercial reminds me of the classic Coke commercial from 1970, “I’d like to buy the world a coke.” Wegovy, is a weight-loss medication, but the way it’s advertised makes it look like a social movement. It’s not just a drug. It’s a whole state of mind. It will make you dance and sing like Michael Jackson as the scarecrow in The Wiz. It will win you friends. It makes me wonder about the side effects in wildlife. One has heard of fish who are hooked on meth but what about on Wegovy? Fish weight loss?

“Try Ozempic …”

Other than prescription drugs, there are also a lot of radio stations. One can choose from 90s on 9, 2000s hits on 10, songs of the 2010s on 11. There’s a Bob Marley station, that also plays the songs of all his many sons, a Bruce Springsteen station, a Beatles station. Even a station for Pitbull. My favorite is usually Underground Garage, but yesterday I found myself cruising through suburbia and listening to Wreckx-N-Effect’s triumph from the summer of 1992, “Rump Shaker.” And turning up the volume. Rolling down the windows. Annoying people out walking dogs. Cyclists. Pedestrians. If only I had hydraulics. And subwoofers? I don’t really care what people think of me anymore. If you ask me, this world could use some more “Rump Shaker.”

“Now since you’ve got the body of the year, come and get the award/ Here’s a hint, it’s like a long sharp sword.”

Who knows where the time goes. Yesterday, I was in Port Jefferson. I used to work there in a music shop. In the late 1990s, it was a wild spot, full of bikers on Friday nights. Connecticut yuppies would come over on the ferry and splurge, dropping $20 (with tax) for the Chumbawumba album or OMC’s “How Bizarre.” DMX. Korn. Hanson. Backstreet Boys, and an album by a newer boyband named NSync.

Speaking of which, Justin Timberlake’s arrest for driving while intoxicated (DWI), what the English call drink driving, has already become something of local legend. The party with friends at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, a quaint old whaling village now overtaken by nouveau riche and big money people, a kind of Malibu East. The alleged single martini. The failed sobriety tests. The mug shot. It all makes me want to cruise out there listening to “Rump Shaker,” just so I can see the stop sign. The Timberlake DWI arrest will eventually have its own corner in the museum. “He looked good in the mug shot,” a friend acknowledged. “But those glassy eyes.”

I’m not sure if Sag Harbor really counts as the Hamptons. I suppose the entirety of the South Fork is now called that. I thought the Hamptons were the real Hamptons: Bridgehampton, Southampton, East Hampton, Westhampton, Westhampton Beach, Hampton Bays. Superfluoushampton. But when did Sag Harbor get factored in, Amagansett, or even Montauk? East Hampton’s Alec Baldwin is also in the news, still, for the Rust set shooting. This is an event that will take up several paragraphs of his obituary, hopefully many decades from now. In the Hamptons it’s sort of like, you can’t jump rope without knocking over a Baldwin or a Timberlake. Long Island is condensed. They are all out there, the celebrities, up to no good.

NOW I’M REALLY NOT SURE what day it is. I think it’s the sixth day. When we are driving around Setauket, we at times drive by the homes of the original settlers. These are modest wooden homes, some of them built in what was called the saltbox style. A little example below is the Jared Coffin House from Nantucket. The conditions for settlement here were more or less the same as they were in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. The indigenous people were Algonquians, the settlers were mostly from England.

This was the old way, but all of these homes have been out cornered by what I call the Gatsby lifestyle. The old-timers were subsistence farmers, fishermen, whalers, and religious zealots. The new-timers arrived here (mainly) from the city (New York) and wanted their own private estates, from which they could enjoy the countryside, and, if so desired, host outrageous back yard parties. In a way, that is the promise of suburbia, to make one feel like a wealthier person, even if you can barely afford the down payment. So the old way is now neighbored by the newer way. But we see value in these old houses that we don’t see in the newer structures. Vastly outnumbered. They are maintained as museums. They are treasured and restored.

Not sure where I was going with this.

One day I hiked out to Long Island Sound. At the end of the road, there is a private community where very wealthy people live, and beyond that, a small environmental monitoring station connected with the university that looks like a building from the Dharma Initiative. Then a wooded path that leads to a bridge, a trail through the wetlands that arrives at a beach of mostly round white pebbles and some sand. Pieces of boats (or whole boats) have washed up on this beach. On the way, I passed two fishermen whom I greeted. On the beach, I noticed a backpack, sunglasses, and t-shirt, and expected to find a corpse somewhere, but there was another man out on a sandbar harvesting driftwood. Two people meet on a distant beach. I started thinking about that scene from Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

“We walked on the beach for a long time. By now the sun was overpowering. It shattered into little pieces on the sand and water.”

When the driftwood harvester returned, he was toting a larger piece, about the size of a baseball bat or club, and did not even look at me. This was the first American who had not said hello. But it was hot, and I could see that, even if hydrated, one could start to see things on a hot beach. The sun was intense, almost punishing. It was fraught.

Yesterday I attended a farmer’s market, which had for sale certain Latin American food items, Italian foods like rice balls and caciocavallo, fish from Montauk, produce from the East End, homemade honey, and a variety of sweets. One slight trouble with the youngest is that she keeps trying to manipulate me into buying everything. “But I’ve never had a Pop-Tart.” “You’re not missing much, kid.” I did buy some fresh tomatoes, because the ones in the shop taste like water. I told the seller, “The ones in the shops suck.” Troubles that the old-timers knew nothing about. They grew them all themselves. No certified organic.

I have wondered what it means to be European or American. Today, I settled on the idea that a penniless, obscure poet in Europe still is seen as being someone, but in America, you really aren’t anyone unless you are enriching yourself from your labor. Your art has no worth if no one is willing to pay for it, but in Europe, we sort of agree that art has value, even if it’s written by an obscure drunkard. Money and art are not necessarily connected, though they might well be.

The first edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, now considered to be one of the most impressive novels ever in the English language, numbered 1,000 copies and was produced by Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in 1922.

YESTERDAY, parking lot city. Or just parking lots. Lots and lots of lots. That’s the dark side of Long Island. All of these parking lots used to be fields or this form of green jungle that grows over and into everything. I imagine those workers back in the 1970s or whenever. “Paved paradise and put in a parking lot.” But this was all made by human hand. None of these shopping centers materialized. They were erected by labor. Someone asphalted those fields, spurred on by spurious real estate speculators. The trade in land is probably the island’s biggest trade. Especially because it’s limited, and if it wasn’t for some people power efforts to preserve its remaining parts for wildlife, there would be condos and subdivisions here as far as the naked eye could see.

But the people need jobs and the people need movie theaters. The people need Apple stores and Trader Joes. We need all this stuff.

We need Italian restaurants. Yesterday, I was standing outside of one listening to Italian disco music when the owner exited and saw me and started speaking to me in Italian. How he identified me as a fellow Italian, I do not know. I am surprised by my ability to understand Italian, and to speak enough of it to make someone else think that I actually might be an Italian. He was from Catania. I told him that I was pugliese, from Apulia, which is not exactly a lie. Sono italiano vero.

He said it’s hot here, almost as hot as it is in Sicily.

I’m still baffled by this. Long Island is full of Italian-looking people. It’s not like I was wearing a shirt with the tricolore on it. No lo so.

It is nice to be able to meet a random person somewhere and talk to them. In Estonia, I endure a lot of social isolation because of their odd “We don’t know each other” philosophy, and also all of the jigsaw zigzagging personal boundaries, walls and fortifications. Topics that are off limits, just ’cause, even as we gladly disrobe and get naked together, but never talk about it, because there’s no need. I don’t think I am stereotyping people. I’ve done multiple jobs for people in Estonia for which I never received a response when the relationship ended. I only determined we were no longer working together when I didn’t hear back from them for several weeks. Even when I was let go from one gig, I never was formally terminated, but rather received a rather vaguely worded missive that could be interpreted as saying that, but not specifically. Had I grown up there, I might be more adroit, more talented in the ways of telepathy, and sensing the wuwei of needs and un-needs, so that every word would be well placed, a sort of piece of a mosaic of the blanket of time, flowing efficiently in the world, Tao of the Baltic Finns, Japanese zen garden of perfectly placed utterances.

I don’t know, man. I need to disengage from all that now and again. Like Bobby Dylan once sang, “It ain’t me, babe.”

I’VE HAD SOME interesting dialogues with people about life recently and realized that some people see it as a horizontal experience, moving roughly from left to right, with dates studded into the timeline, so that you can “move forward” and “not look back.” It’s a road, maybe one of those big “avenues” they have out Riverhead way, that go on and on past the horseradish stands and sod farms. You are on the road and you are moving forward and not moving backward. “You need to move on,” they say. But move on toward what? Where is this movement? “Just leave it behind.” “Behind where?” “In the past.” “But where is the past?” Exactly.

I walk past my old bus stop here, remember things, I look at my old back yard, remember other things. Where are those things? In the past? I somehow cannot bring myself to fully believe it. I understand that it wasn’t last week, or next week, but I don’t locate it in a region of time known as “the past.” The past is only in my mind. It sort of coexists in my mind with all my other experiences and memories. If anything, I think of it as another floor of a house that it is being built upwards. I can go down to that other level to retrieve something and return. I’m not moving backwards by going there, nor am I moving on by going away. It’s all sort of existing at the same time. Just different stages are being revealed to me providing new perspectives. Also, when does the past end and now begin? What are the turning points? We create our own narratives and structure our stories.

After this is written, I could decide that it now belongs to the past.

I know, this is starting to sound like that Spaceballs sketch.

“We’re in Now Now.”

But Mel Brooks is a smart guy, a very smart guy.

Yesterday I visited a farm that was set up by an accountant and his wife. They opened it 10 years ago. It was their dream, move to “the country,” raise sheep. He was doing, and probably still is, the books for clients to keep the enterprise going, but it’s still open. They sold a variety of locally sourced foods, as well as Italian fare. You can buy orecchiette pugliesi there, but also mackerel skin balm. There are a lot of Italians out east, there’s a kind of fusion lifestyle going on. A lot of the vineyards are run like little Sicilian feudal manor houses. At this farm, we got a macchiato and an espresso, which the wind somewhat hilariously knocked over when I sat it down in its paper cup. This is why we need ceramic cups to protect our espressos. Take note. The owner didn’t recognize me, but I was proud of him. The dream is still being fulfilled. I was there 10 years ago. In the past. Why would he remember who I was? But I was there. Or here. And now? Now Now.

At the beach, some people were windsurfing. You can wade out into the bay and only get waist deep. Horseflies bite your legs, but hang on and die by the half-dozen. Dragonflies buzz around, winds roll over the wetlands. There’s an old cemetery over there where they used to bury the slaves, mostly Africans and Native Americans. New York gradually abolished slavery in the first few decades of the 19th century, and full emancipation happened on July 4, 1827. Down that long road is the old manor house that belonged to some Anglo family. Originally this area was granted to them by King Charles III’s predecessor, King Charles II at the end of the 17th century. They got the land from the king. Their property rights were established before the United States. Now there are city people here with second homes. Locals used to call them “cidiots.”

“It’s much nicer here than it is in New York,” someone said to me. She had two small dogs and was wearing a flower-print dress. Honestly, she was right. It is nicer out here than it is there. Ethan Hawke might have pulled up just after that, with Julia Roberts. Maybe they did.

I picked up a book at the local bookstore. I try to support independent book shops. This one was an easy find, Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake. I like Murakami. Once you go Murakami, reading “normal prose” is just boring. I also have JD Salinger’s Nine Stories here, but I am just not getting into it. This is a third attempt. There are these great authors out there that do nothing for me, and yet it looks interesting, and maybe the stars will align, or something will click into place, and I will enjoy it. Maybe learn something. I feel fiction is my future. I need to study. You don’t get good just picking up your guitar and playing. You need mentors, practice, an idea bank of licks, tricks. That’s how you do it.

FIRST TRIP TO THE CITY. In New York, they call it the city. I don’t think I have ever heard anyone refer to it seriously as the Big Apple or whatever nicknames it has. And even “New York City” sounds kind of off. In Turn, that excellent series about the Culper Spy Ring, which was based partially here in Setauket on Long Island, they called it “York City.” This is probably true. A lot of the small details in that show were remarkably accurate. We went into the city. The one called New York.

To get into the city, you have to take the Long Island Rail Road. A 12 year old counts as an adult on the Long Island Rail Road. In Estonia, I think, I can get a discounted ticket on a youth up to age 16. But on Long Island, once you are 12, you pay the adult fare. The distance from Stony Brook to Pennsylvania Station and the distance from Viljandi to Tallinn, at least in terms of transit time, are roughly similar. But a ticket from Viljandi to Tallinn can cost me about €10. For two adult tickets yesterday, during peak rush hour, I paid $40. New Yorkers have no other options. They could carpool I guess, or drive to some other station. There is something called the Hampton Jitney, which busses people to the city from out east, but really, it’s a racket. You pay what they say, and I don’t think prices will change. So pay up.

As you pass from Suffolk County into Nassau County, the settlements become more crowded, but even as you glide into the nexus of Jamaica Station in Queens, you can still see some foliage. The Native Americans in the west of Long Island were Lenape. the ones in the eastern part were related to tribes up in New England. The Lenape word for beaver, yamecah, is the root of Jamaica in Queens. It has no relation to the Taino word Xaymaca that inspired the name for the Caribbean island. My daughter was a little confused by this. “Jamaica? But I though that was somewhere else.”

“The island of nonchalant dreadheads,” I said. This is some kind of youth slang that means “cool people.” She is saying all of these weird things these days about sigmas and “ris” which means “charisma.” Originally, I thought she was saying “gris,” the French word for gray. In my day, if something was cool, it was totally mint. Dude.

Finally, you get into the city, after passing through a kind of wasteland of railroad tracks and sprawl and a tunnel under the East River. Every form of mankind is marching back and forth through the train station. There are people everywhere. Sometimes people accost you to ask for money. A lot of the desperate or homeless people are younger, which is surprising, to see a young indigent. Manhattan is hot and humid, dense, crowded, but people in general are friendly and approachable. It’s an exhausting city. I mean just a day in it and you wonder how people can live and breathe that kind of stimulation day in and day out, wake up to car horns, hear the subways rumbling and rattling.

New York decriminalized marijuana for recreational purposes in 2021, and so every block or so, one encounters a cloud of pungent second-hand weed. “It stinks like weed,” I told my daughter. “How do you know what weed smells like,” she asked. “I just know,” I said. We traveled by taxi, because the TV news is saturated with reports of petty thefts on the subway, and I thought it might be affordable. It wasn’t so bad, but for the same amount of money it takes to travel from Stony Brook to Penn Station, a taxi driver will drive you from Soho up to Central Park. In the taxis, they have tiny mounted screens conveying news of Justin Timberlake’s arrest and showing his mugshot over and over again. The one with the glassy eyes. The one from Sag Harbor.

There are, at least, good-looking people in New York. People are in shape from walking all those streets. Women wear colorful dresses. Every block, it seems, offers up new surprises and discoveries. Vintage t-shirt shops (a Beastie Boys Ill Communication shirt from 1994 now goes for $150), the Harry Potter Store where wands sell for $42, and you can get a “Butter Beer”, which is like a butterscotch root beer topped off with foam, for just $7, a steal. It made me think about JK Rowling, and how much money has been made off of her ideas. All she had were some ideas, and committed them to paper. From these we get plush owls, Hufflepuff t-shirts. Something is kind of amazing about it, and yet disappointing. What do we seek through acquiring this toy or shirt? To be closer to the idea! We want a little material piece of her.

I have been reading JD Salinger’s Nine Stories. I finally got going with it. It almost works as a novel, it could be called “New York” and it would somehow work. I think my favorite story so far is “The Laughing Man,” because it feels autobiographical, and I like the idea of the little boys in The Comanche Club going camping in the Palisades in 1928, or playing baseball in Central Park with their counsellor’s girlfriend, “Mary Hudson” in her beaver skin coat. The story about the two little girls who played tennis, “Before the War with the Eskimos” is also full of old New York feeling. I can actually see how Salinger influenced Wes Anderson, I think he’s borrowed heavily from his narrative style. That makes me feel good, that everyone is influenced by something else. Salinger even has a character named “Tannenbaum” in Nine Stories.

At the Strand Bookstore, I did see a copy of Franny and Zooey on sale for $9. Maybe I’ll borrow it from the library instead. Reading about Salinger is intriguing me, how he got tired of all the “celebrity writer” fuss. But he also seems to have been a bit of a control freak. The fact that one of his short stories, “Hapworth 16, 1924” remains unpublished is also interesting. It did appear in The New Yorker in 1965, but has not been reproduced. I like the idea of writers whose work is passed around like Samizdat in the old USSR. Hey, I also want to read it.

BEFORE YOU GO OUT EAST, as they say, people warn you about the traffic. Fish-shaped Long Island splits into two forks at its eastern end, and the southern one of these forks, the South Fork, is the premier destination for monied and cultured people from all over the world, but largely who arrived there from New York. Because of them, and people who want to be like them, including at times me, there is a lot of traffic, as people wait patiently to access the collective “Hamptons.”

There are tricks though to get through this traffic. If you drive out to Riverhead, you can take some back roads that will land you just outside the Shinnecock Canal, which separates the South Fork from the rest of Long Island which means that, actually, the South Fork is an island on its own, as it is completely surrounded by water. From here you begin to pass businesses with names like “Dream Hampton” and “Bottle Hampton.” There are golf courses and lobster factories, and many convertibles. The traffic yesterday though was manageable, or not as scary as it was made out to be. Only that long ride into Sag Harbor took time, as all vehicles descend on the nexus of Main Street, Ferry Road, Bay Street, and Division Street, which later turns into Hampton Street. My father had some business to do out there, so I got dropped off in Sag Harbor for about two hours. Originally, it was just supposed to be for an hour, but his time estimates, like my own, are always off. “I’ll be right there,” means that it could take him hours.

Places like Sag Harbor, where there are t-shirt shops, fashion boutiques, diners, book stores, etc., were a setting of my childhood. The greatest reward was to get a book, maybe a Calvin and Hobbes collection. Yesterday in the book shop I saw an original copy of John Lennon’s nonsense book, A Spaniard in the Works from 1965.

It was in these shops where you could also meet “real Europeans” working, mostly Irish who would come and work in these restaurants and stores over the summers in the 1980s and 1990s. Probably, they are still here.

I went to Sag Harbor looking for ideas, which is a really odd way to work. Usually ideas come to you, but I started a fictional website based roughly around the East End a few years ago, and I intend to get a few more story ideas together for it. It’s a personal project. But how do you even get ideas? You just have to wander around. Up and down the Main drag, pausing to visit the hotel where Justin Timberlake drank his fateful martini before the DWI arrest heard around the world. I passed the Sag Harbor Police Department too. Imagined Justin Timberlake locked up in there, getting his picture taken. It’s not that I’m a fan, I just know that even in Tahiti, they know that this happened, and that it happened in this old town. But what’s so special about it?

At an establishment called SagTown Coffee, I finally got a cappuccino, which cost me north of eight euros, making the six euro Jamaican blue mountain coffee at the Green House in Viljandi seem like a deal. What is going on with these prices? They’re ridiculous. There are, of course, good-looking or at least interesting-seeming people wandering the streets here. Men must wear polo shirts, or at least something with a crisp collar. Women are obligated to wear a straw hat and billowing white dress. All dogs must be small and kept on a short leash. Names like “Rupert” or “Albert” are appropriate for Sag Harbor summer dogs.

And there’s the Bay Street Theatre, advertising its Summer Gala with Neal Patrick Harris. Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker will be in attendance. It’s kind of odd to me that these names are known everywhere, and if the police bust one of these special “stars” here, everyone will know about it. Yet the theatre itself is smaller than Ugala or Vanemuine. It’s a little theatre by the docks. How, and why, did American, or even New York culture, take over the world?

I did start to get ideas, maybe not long after I ventured into a store that promised THC gummies for free. Well, of course I was going to take advantage of that offer. All I had to do was hand over my email address. There were four pouches in front of me, “Leisure,” “Calm,” “Sleepy”, and one other I can’t remember. Maybe “Party”? I chose “Leisure.” “I’ve never had a gummy before,” I told the seller. “Take half,” she said. “And if you are okay with that, eat the other half in an hour.” I did as prescribed. After the first half, I felt fine. Then, an hour later, I swallowed the second half. After that, things got a little weird.

How were they weird? When I went back to SagTown Coffee, I started seeing people I knew. Just out of the corner of my eye. A man with white hair walked in. I thought it was Richard Denny, the artist. “Richard, is that you?” Oh, that’s right. He’s not in Sag Harbor. Then I looked the other direction, and saw Priit Võigemast, the actor, drinking an eight-euro cappuccino, in his sunglasses. Only to realize again, Wait, but Priit Võigemast isn’t in Sag Harbor. Then Jõeste walked in.

But she wasn’t there either.

That’s when I realized that I was stoned.

Outside the café, I saw an older man with a younger woman. He was traveling with a small entourage. By voice alone, I realized it was Billy Joel, the piano man. This, at least, was not a hallucination. I know this because a woman with a child came in the café after and she said to her son, “Today’s your lucky day, kid. You just met Billy Joel!” So it was really him. I actually tried to get a photo of him, to show to my friends, but only caught him as he walked away. He likes Sag Harbor, they say, almost as much as he likes Cold Spring Harbor. Maybe more.

Anyway, I did get ideas for two short stories yesterday, after getting stuck in Sag Harbor for two hours. There isn’t much to Sag Harbor other than Main Street and some businesses on adjacent streets. These side streets are nice to walk, and I like to go up alleyways and try to find ways in which the streets and lanes connect to each other. Sometimes you find an outlet, but sometimes you need to turn back. I wonder about the people sleeping upstairs. I wonder who they are, what their lives are like, and what it’s like to live there full time.

In the off season, Sag Harbor is nothing like this. The almost carnival atmosphere subsides. I usually would drive to Sag Harbor, when we lived in Orient a decade ago, by taking the ferry from Greenport to Shelter Island, and then the ferry from Shelter Island to Sag Harbor. That’s my secret in-and-out to the Hamptons. I remember taking the kids there in March or so and forcing them to visit Montauk and them being sort of unimpressed, and then getting pizza in Sag Harbor.

We felt like the only people in town.

A FEW DAYS AGO, my father had some car trouble and managed to navigate it into the parking lot of Paul J. Gelinas Junior High School, my alma mater (class of ‘95). I hadn’t really been there in a while, though I drive by it sometimes when I am here. Those three years went by fast, from ’92 to ’95, but often when I remember things from living here, they take place in this time window. Like coming home that spring and learning the Branch Davidians had set fire to their own compound. Or coming down the driveway two years later and learning about the Oklahoma City Bombing from my mother. Also the music, like seeing a classmate of mine slip the cassette of The Cranberries, Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? into her Walkman. And of course coming home one sunny afternoon 30 years ago, only to have Kurt Loder on MTV News inform me that Cobain had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That was a rather sad day.

Also when River Phoenix died.

Halloween 1993.

When I was in that parking lot I had a memory of an older classmate, who shall remain unnamed, getting into a heated dispute with a security guard in front of the school and taking a swing at him. This must have been at the end of school in 1994, so exactly 30 years before my father’s car trouble. I could see him clear as day, and he looked like he was going to land a punch on the guard before he grabbed him. Gelinas was something else. I don’t think any of us even knew who Paul J. Gelinas was. The very name Gelinas reminds me though of body odor, braces, football, stink bombs, and “the trails.” There was also a certain teacher who had been accused of inappropriate behavior, and we were all sequestered in a classroom one day and asked to write down anything we had noticed about his conduct and one classmate raised his hand and asked for more paper.

One thing that I wanted to discuss before I forget it though has nothing to do with junior high school. It’s just about American English. Other than the dropping of the r, or non-rhotic New York, Long Island, and New England English (my father asked me to get him a “peipa towel” (paper towel), I have noticed that people here have a certain cadence to when they talk, which adds the emphasis to the end of the sentence. So that you can say, “First, I went to THE MALL, to do some shopping, then I went TO THE STORE to pick up some groceries. I bought SOME BANANAS, some ICE CREAM, had to get some more BUTTER, you know we’re always out of butter, then I had to go to the GAS STATION … And so on. I don’t think British people speak like this, in this sing-songy way. I have no idea who started it, or how it happened. Why do they TALK THAT WAY? Did I used to talk that way?

There are other weird expressions I’ve been hearing left and right, but don’t actually know what they mean, and don’t remember them. But then I try to come up with my own expressions, and I people don’t know what I mean either. There are a lot of maritime references in English. My cousin yesterday said something along the lines of, “I couldn’t fathom it.” And I remark constantly about the need to “bail” or “bail someone/something out.” This might have to do with prison and bailiffs, but it my mind, it’s the motion the water makes when it is being removed from a sinking boat with a pail.

I only think of these things because sometimes, when speaking English with Estonians, I have had to explain the meanings of words or expressions. What do you mean fathom? What does it mean to bail on someone? And then I have to explain the intricacies of 19th century sailing so that they can understand the metaphors. I don’t know, maybe the same things exist in Estonian and I just don’t know yet.

Anyway, I keep staring at the clouds in this photo. Maybe Cobain’s face is hidden in them, staring down on Paul J. Gelinas Junior High School, along with Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Dolores O’Riordan, and ODB. And all the others who didn’t make it. Did I miss anyone?

EARLY MORNING NORTHPORT. Here’s Main Street at 8 am. Residents were jogging shirtless, or walking their dogs. A cluster of old men in the park by the harbor were talking about Netanyahu, Hezbollah, and the phrase, “from the river to the sea.” Even here, the war in Israel and Gaza is inescapable, and I see it, beyond its horrors, as a kind of mass psychosis, something everyone argues about, the way we used to argue about the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. But there is no war at the harbor, just lobster traps. Why don’t people talk about lobster?

In 1942, my great grandparents Salvatore and Rosaria Petrone, immigrants from San Giorgio Albanese, a small Arbereshe mountain village in Calabria, opened up a restaurant on the corner here named Skipper’s. According to my late aunt Loretta, their daughter, great grandma Rose served mostly Italian food to a clientele of rough and tumble working class types on their beer guzzling lunch breaks. In those days, Northport was more a salt of the earth, blue collar town.

According to Pete Gunther, the son of the founder of nearby Gunther’s Tap Room, he would have to throw drunken workers from the local sand and gravel operation out daily for fighting. None of that now, but there is a nice Danish bakery where you can get free refills on your vanilla hazelnut coffee, plus addictive scones. Plus some pretty people.

I interviewed the late Gunther years ago about another resident, Jack Kerouac, who settled in Northport in 1958 and stayed off and on until 1964 with his mother, Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque. Kerouac was born to Quebecois parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He spoke Quebecois French as his first language. Neighbors in Northport recall hearing loud disputes in French between Ti Jean and his mother. At his father’s death, he was pledged to care for his mother, and being a dutiful Catholic son, could never fully move out. He was an interesting and conflicted character, but talented writer who developed his own style called spontaneous prose. Some at the time dismissed Kerouac, and some do, but he has left us with many wonderful impressionistic memories of mid-20th century America. And even if his friends didn’t like being turned into characters, or the notoriety that came with it, they have achieved a kind of literary immortality thanks to Kerouac.

Who else would care of the lives of such people as the Beats today?

Anyway, this morning, I visited Kerouac’s three residences. He lived in three homes in Northport from 1958 to 1964, and was a frequent visitor to Gunther’s Tap Room. Pete Gunther told me bluntly that he was a drunk, and that he had gifted him an autographed copy of some book, perhaps Tristessa or The Subterraneans, which he could make no sense of and tossed into the garbage. Mid-century mainstream America did not actually care for degenerates like Jack Kerouac, and even my dear grandmother, who moved into Northport around the same time that Jack did, did not necessarily have a good opinion of him, until I told her, a devoted Roman Catholic, that Kerouac had been educated by French nuns and that’s why he wrote so well. At this, she acknowledged that he might have been just okay. He may have strayed from the path, but he was still a Catholic, and thus one of us.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. The deluxe ‘big toy’ playground they installed when I was in first grade is long gone, as is the smaller, even newer one they built near the library. The old metal 1970s ones have similarly disappeared. But the building is the same. There’s Mrs. Marangiello’s kindergarten. Mrs. Vreeland’s third grade. I was kind of a smart ass, but in third grade, I got glasses, which shut me up for a while. I remember Vreeland came over and whispered in my ear, ‘you look like a real student.’

That was a heady year. At its end, the Tiananmen Square uprising. And we were watching 21 Jump Street. In art class, we learned about Vincent Van Gogh, who terrified me. I think kids were listening to REM and The B52s. And hair metal du jour. And the Beastie Boys. Guns n Roses. Something called ‘NWA.’ Yes, even third graders. Especially third graders. George HW Bush was elected president. One girl said she thought he was ‘so cute.’

Lots of stories in those halls. If you were bad, Vreeland would throw you in the hall with your desk. There was martial law. But some people really liked Vreeland. One day, I was by the window and it was snowing outside. A girl came to the window and told me to say hi to Mrs. Vreeland. She said that her name was Jacqueline. She wrote it on the window glass. That was the first time I ever met a Jacqueline. Whenever I meet a Jacqueline to this day, I think of that girl at the window. I never saw her again. Who was she?