The Jobless Goddess

   My husband and I couldn’t have more different taste in movies. And a few other things. But for the sake of brevity, we’ll stick to movies here. He likes action – the more guns, knives, tanks, ropes and leaps off tall buildings in the film, the better he likes it. My youngest son is still at home and he feels pretty much the same way. This means I’m out numbered. There’s no one joining me while I watch Driving Miss Daisy on the family television. Something like that causes the menfolk to go upstairs to the “other” television where they can sit in an overstuffed chair or even lay on the spare bed and watch the blood flow to their heart’s content. Not me.    There are a few tough-guy movies I like but that’s generally because really good-looking men are in them. I’ll watch Denzel Washington recite the alphabet just to get a good look at him. And back in the day, I would never have missed an Al Pacino movie. I even had a giant poster of him with the photo taken...

   I don’t know about you, but I am at my best in crisis mode, hence the newspaper jobs. I love a good deadline. The tighter, the better. There’s nothing quite like knowing that you have to sit at the keyboard and come up with 1,000 carefully executed words before you can pay your rent. It’s quite inspiring. The obvious lack of a weekly deadline in my life has really taken its toll. When you begin to feel like wearing anything with a zipper is an effort, you know there’s a problem.    The whole winter vibe on Martha’s Vineyard is not real conducive to deadlines. There’s a little thing here called “Vineyard Time” or “Island time.”   It’s similar to Eastern Standard Time only it goes by much, much slower. And the people who follow it might come by and fix your roof after they’ve gone clamming if the weather is good, or just after they’ve looked for some sea glass or caught some blue fish. Or, in my husband’s case, after they’ve searched every beach on the I...

That crazy ol pond I drive past to go to the grocery store.

Here's wishing for a day filled with love & happiness!

    Ahh, St. Valentine’ s Day.    Supposedly Claudius the Cruel ordered St. Valentine to be beaten and beheaded on February 14 around 270 AD. It seems Valentine, a Roman Catholic priest, continued to celebrate marriages after Ol’ Claudius had forbidden engagements and marriages, seeing them as a threat to his recruitment of Roman soldiers.    That’s quite a little history for a day that has come to mean roses and Whitman Samplers.    I remember all those years I didn’t have a Valentine to think about. I didn’t have to write a schmoopy message inside a rose-covered card. I didn’t have to come up with boxers or bow ties covered with hearts. I only had to make sure my kids had Valentine’s Day cards and a giant Hershey’s kiss or one of those orange flavored chocolate balls they used to love.    Nowadays though, I’m right in there with everybody else. My husband gave me my box of chocolates two days early and I’m pretty sure that...

Look closely and you'll see Tom Turkey and a few of his friends.

   Everybody knows Martha’s Vineyard is a beautiful and peaceful place. No surprises there. What came as a surprise when I arrived is the enormous number of wild turkeys living here. I don’t mean geeky guys in double knit pants. I mean live gangs of large birds strutting around like they own the place. It’s amazing to see.    We had 40 of them in the front yard one morning last fall. It was all I could do not to grab a loaf of bread and feed them like ducks on a pond. They aren’t pretty birds but they command your attention. I wish I had a dollar for every time I had to keep the car idling while they passed in front of me. Believe me, they don’t appear to be in a hurry. And they’re loud.     One of the first things that came to mind when I noticed the turkey population for the first time was how all my old neighbors in Upstate New York would react to them. Bows and shotguns would have been grabbed and a fine meal had by all. Not here. On the I...

   I try not to be a crybaby but last night I found myself tearing up over Snooki’s show. I think I’m in trouble. I knew I might be headed down the wrong path when I felt the same way over a Folger’s commercial at Christmastime. You know the one with the son who comes home in time for the holidays and sees his little sister first? That’s it.    Who’s the Svengali who decided to pull on our emotional heartstrings with his voyeuristically styled productions? It’s like watching surgery. You want to turn away but something compels you to look again.   Somebody’s making a bazillion dollars on this and we keep looking.    And then we get embarrassed and never admit we watch it.    “Oh, that crap. I never watch that stuff,” everybody says. Right.    For me it all started with Little People, Big World. I was captivated by a few aspects, one of which was the Roloff family pumpkin farm in Oregon and the really cool open floor pla...