Second-guessing home

Another sign on Pleasant Street in Woodstock, Vermont made me stop and think. Didn't we start coming to Woodstock in Anno 2000?
    I couldn't remember at the time whether our son's first summer at the Killington Music Festival had been 2000 or 2001 (later I confirmed that it was 2001), but when I first noticed the sign, I felt a sort of personal historic attachment to it, as though it and we (my wife and I) had shared the years together. I felt especially connected to Woodstock. I felt that Woodstock had become a sort of summer home for us.
    At any rate, I did feel a little as though I were relatively home after returning from places we'd never been before: Baie-Saint-Paul (where we'd stopped for dinner on our way to La Malbaie, before it got too late to eat before going to sleep), Saguenay Fjord, Tadoussac,

Image from Francis H. Cabot's DVD presentation
on the maturation of his gardens at Quatre Vents
(pigeonnier is shown in the foreground, and across
the bay is the neighborhood and former municipality
of Pointe-au-Pic, where Cabot's great grandfather
George T. Bonner summered in the early 1900s)

La Malbaie, Les Quatre Vents. They had been unfamiliar places and we had driven many miles and spent quantities of money per day to visit. My head was buzzing from the 400-mile drive back (which included over an hours wait in the heat of sun and running automobiles and trucks at customs to re-enter the United States), and I felt the vacation fatigue that anyone would from staying in a hotel, waiting to be served in restaurants, eating more than usual, and struggling to comprehend a mostly foreign language.
    Yes, it was great to be back in Woodstock. I actually felt a tingle of excitement as we drove into town and approached The Woodstock Inn. The one night we'd already spent in Vermont before driving to Quebec hadn't included Woodstock. We'd stayed at an inn in Killington to which we had been planning to return after Quebec, but our bed had been too uncomfortable for my wife to sleep in, and I'm not sure how well I slept myself.

But however homelike Woodstock was feeling relative to Quebec, here we were for four more nights away from Siegfried. It felt to me as though we had already been away from our actual home long enough.

Mac's dating program

One of the more curious things we discovered in Woodstock, Vermont two weeks ago is that Mac's Market has a dating policy. My wife saw the announcement on the wall at the end of the cold foods display.
    She quickly found me in produce and beckoned me to come back and see it. I retraced my steps and took a look. How could I have missed it?
    I whipped out my camera and took a photograph.

    "I wonder why they have a dating policy," I said.
    My wife bent over to study the sign as I took off to try to find someone to ask.
    "Wait a second," my wife might have called after me.
    When she found me, I was already interviewing a customer, a well-dressed, professional-looking woman who might have come by on her way home from a law office or an architect's. Surely she would know.
    "What is this dating program that Mac has?" I asked her.
    The woman looked puzzled. "Dating program?"
    "Oh, did I say 'program'?" I said. "I meant policy. What do you know about the store's dating policy?"
    "Hmm," she said, "it's pretty much the usual, I think."
    "Wait a second," my wife said.
    "What do you mean," I said to the woman, "do other stores in town have dating programs—er, policies"?
    "Oh, I think so!" said the woman.
    "Gosh," I said. "What is it about Woodstock that its stores promote dating—what?—among their staff members? With customers?"
    The woman didn't seem to be following me.
    "Wait a second," my wife said.
    The woman had turned her attention to my wife. She looked ready for our conversation to be interrupted.

"What is it?" I said to my wife.
    "Excuse us," my wife said to the woman, and took a hold of my near elbow and pulled me back the way we had come.
    "Follow me," my wife said.
    "But—" I said, "I was about to get to the bottom of this."
    "No, you weren't," my wife said. "Just follow me."
    I followed her.
    Apparently she was taking me back to the dating sign.
    "Read the rest of it," my wife said.
    I looked at it again. "Yes," I said, "that's it. So what?"
    "Down here," she said, pointing to the lower half of the sign.
    I looked again. "Oh," I said.

Vacation's destination

Our son arrives later today, following his twelfth consecutive summer at the Killington Music Festival. Visiting him in Killington was the reason we went to Vermont two weeks ago, and the reason we have gone eight or so times in the years of his summer residency there.
    The summer that his wife and son came to Vermont with him (2002), we had lunch with her and our grandson at Bentley's Restaurant in Woodstock, a beautiful town of about three thousand east of Killington on U.S. Route 4. That might have been the first time we really visited Woodstock.

Front yard of the Woodstock Inn

This year, as you may know from my posts earlier this week about our sojourn among the baleines, the bohemians, and the botanics, we also went to Quebec.
    I had a comfortable feeling, when we arrived back in Woodstock on Sunday the 22nd, that we had come back home, and I would be sad to leave on Thursday. I would miss Woodstock.
    We went to Bentley's on Monday, even though we'd discovered the previous evening that its menu was severely limited because of a recent fire. From where we sat for lunch, I pointed toward a table below, where the mirrors came together in the corner. "That's where we had lunch in 2002."

Le Manoir Richelieu, terrace of
Restaurant Bellerive

During our few days in Woodstock I realized that, now, not only was I going to miss Woodstock, but I was also going to miss La Malbaie, just as we were both of us already missing home.
    In fact, after we collected Siegfried at the kennel the following Thursday afternoon and entered our house with him, my wife exclaimed, "It is so good to be home!"

Going on vacation seems to be a way of acquiring more places that, if you're lucky, will feel like home to you. And maybe no one would ever go on vacation if they thought they wouldn't be able to return to home soon.

Little bursts

One of the short stories that comprise Elizabeth Strout's 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge, is titled, "A Little Burst."

Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really. [pp. 68-69]

    I read the story Thursday, on our return flight from vacation in Vermont and Quebec.

Here are some of the little bursts I experienced while away from home:

When we entered Terminal A at Logan Airport for our return flight, I recognized the first person I saw, the tall African "porter" who eight days earlier had managed the airport's courtesy wheel chair for my wife upon our arrival from Raleigh-Durham.
    "I know you!" I said. "Do you recognize us?"
    He didn't seem to recognize me, but when my wife appeared through the door behind me, he threw up his hands in greeting. He obtained a wheel chair and got my wife seated, then put one of our carry-ons under the seat and pulled the other as he pushed my wife toward the head of a line in the Delta baggage check. I tagged along, pulling our two larger bags.
    He then proceeded to shepherd us through security, down a floor in the elevator, and on to our departure gate.
    Before taking his leave, he pressed his palms together in front of his face and bowed his head, then squeezed both of my wife's hands. I stuck in a hand to get some squeeze and to leave a five in one of his. What a dear, courtly man.
    After I finished reading Strout's short story, this regal man's being my wife's porter again was the first little burst I remembered from our vacation.

In Tadoussac, after our return from a whale-watching cruise the preceding Friday on the St. Lawrence River and up the Saguenay Fjord, we had lunch at the Cafe Boheme. Our desserts were so délicieux that, having failed to take a picture of them on our plates, I re-visited the dessert cabinet. Camera out, I looked up to discover myself being smiled upon bemusedly by one of the young women who attended customers.
    Such a smile! Such loveliness to discover beholding me! Such desserts!

A sort of caramel-filled mousse cupcake

"Croustillant au Chocolat"

At the Woodstock Inn on Monday, I had written a note to my sister who was convalescing from surgery to mend a broken hip, and I needed a postage stamp. The concierge told me I could purchase one in their gift shop.
    The woman behind the counter there told me they just sold the last one.
    "But," said the man she had been talking with when we entered, "I'm just off to the post office to buy some."
    "Where is the post office," I said, holding up my envelope.
    "Oh, I can take care of that for you," he said.
    "Great," I said. I handed him the envelope and pulled change out of my pocket. "How much is a stamp these days?"
    "Oh, never mind that," he said. "It's on me."

Our first evening in Woodstock, Vermont (the preceding Sunday), I was passing its Norman Williams Public Library and thought I saw a light on, so I started up the steps.
    "Not open," called out the observant man I'd seen piling up branches around the big tree in front of the library.
    "Ah," I said, "will it be open tomorrow?"
    "Nine o'clock," he said, with a reader's confidence.

During our light dinner last Saturday on the sidewalk at Café Chez-Nous in La Malbaie, Quebec, a tiny chartreuse insect landed in my wife's water glass—fallen, I assumed, from the tree under which we were situated. I offered to rescue it with a spoon, but my wife waved me off.
    Moments later, the little creature had rescued itself by swimming to the edge, ascending the wall, and perching uncertainly on the glass's rim, where it proceeded to circle for some minutes, seeming to try to figure out its next step.
    I'm reminded now of Robert Frost's poem, "A Considerable Speck," which ends with the lines:

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

    I offered the bug my paper napkin, and, after considerable hesitation, he walked onto it.
    I was about to carry him to a flowering plant along the sidewalk when the waitress returned and the little fellow seemed to fly or jump onto her.
    I still hope he made it safely from there to the bosom of what served for home.

Last night, our second night back home, both my wife and I at points during the night awoke thinking we were still in a hotel room. I couldn't even identify what hotel it might have been as I tried to remember which way it was to the bathroom. I think it's over there. And it wasn't until I passed through its door that I realized I was back home.
    "We weren't confused the first night," my wife said, "because we let Siegfried sleep on the bed. We slept more soundly last night."
    We actually started out last night with Siegfried on the bed, but he was on the "love seat" (his usual bed) this morning.
    I think I sleep just as soundly with Siegfried on the bed as off, but perhaps he doesn't?
    Did he awake on the love seat last night imagining he was still at the kennel?