How I Spent My Summer (2025)

Bridal Falls, Goat Island, NY

Three months. Summer has been ending earlier and earlier, this year it began earlier, too.

To celebrate our eldest’s graduation from college, we planned an international journey, a vacation in Spain. We hadn’t taken our children on a transatlantic expedition since they were very, very young, not since I brought I Hate This to the UK. They don’t even remember that trip, only in photos.

First, however, a snag. I thought I had a valid passport, and I did, but it was due to expire. We noted this days before our departure. Renewal necessitated an urgent drive to Buffalo, which was in its way a not unpleasant prelude to the season, which included a fine cocktail in the hotel bar, and a rainy day stroll in Niagara Falls State Park, waiting for my ID to be processed.

Fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes in the presence of Bridal Falls. I live for moments like this.

Bilbao, Spain

When folks ask what my favorite part of our Spanish vacation was, you will forgive me for saying it was the opportunity to spend ten, responsibility-free days in the company of the three people I love most in the world. Social anxiety issues aside, our kids are excellent travelers. They are not only open to interesting, sometimes unplanned experiences, unusual spaces and food, they are also very good communicators and check in when they need a break. I am also better at this than I was as a young person, and that is thanks to them.

Our eldest’s achievements inspired this excursion, so the emphasis was on art. We saw the Prado, and the Reina Sophia. We attended the Guggenheim Bilbao, and finally the Segrada Familia. However, we also took in a little jazz with the boy, happening upon a barside trio outside the Guggenheim, and the David Pastor Quintet in Barcelona. I tagged the bandleader on my socials; a brief interaction revealed the connection between him and the head of the boy’s department at UC. Small world, indeed.

Great Lakes Theater Camp

I am always seeking new and better ways to lead, instruct and create. This is as true at our annual summer arts camp as in any other arena, and not only did the team put on some pretty amazing performances, I was developing new ideas as how to best curate an all too brief playwriting workshop, and how best to showcase the work.

We had about a half hour, every day (which is to say, for only six or seven days) for a small cohort of middle school aged campers to write short plays, which then received staged readings by high school aged campers. Everyone agreed the work was good, and I have some powerful thoughts about how to make the experience more exciting for all involved next year.

Peter Voinovich
"Churchill at War"
Actors Summit Productions

The eldest and I turned out for the No Kings protest where I spotted Fred Armisen casually walking past om his way to the opening of the SNL exhibit at the Rock Hall. By his gaze he seemed either impressed or bewildered by the Free Stamp.

We’ve also been attending a lot of Guardians games. It’s been a season of ups and downs, for the time being I’m withholding judgment. I have also had the chance to meet up with old college friends (emphasis on old) including seeing my roommate Peter onstage for the first time since, well, college, playing Churchill in a solo performance in Akron.

Much of my mental energy has been focused on The Right Room, of course, and my physical energy as well. While rehearsals were taking place I was acting as de facto sound designer and also curating and even creating props for the production.

Zach Palumbo, Nicole Coury
"The Right Room"
In Rehearsal

The BorderLight Festival was remarkable. I posted about our performances last month, it was all up and over on the same day. The next day, a Saturday, I saw a half dozen shows. 

Highlights include Impact Award Winner Sincerely, (The Diary Play) by Bryanna Lee, She Was a Conquistawhore by Rachel O'Hanlon-Rodriguez, performed in The Snug at Parnell’s (where Give Me Your Keys produced my play Step Nine two years ago) and Eric Coble’s The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus, masterfully performed by Tia Shearer Bassett.

Then we got the heck out of town.

Zach Palumbo, Nicole Coury
"The Right Room"
BorderLight Theater Festival
Photo: Daren Stahl

I try not to look forward to our annual journey to Maine. It will come, as it (almost) always does, but once it’s gone, so is the summer. This year, however, we were joined not only by the children but also their partners. It was a joyful and relaxing celebration of family and fellowship, replete with day trips and afternoons on the rock just reading, great food and drink and conversation.

Our last night on the road, stopping in Little Falls, New York, I had another chance to indulge in falling waters, writ small.

Now we’re back and home and at work and August has barely begun. But this weekend we’re going to Cedar Point.

How I Spent My Summer (2024)

Puffball

What have I been doing this summer? I’ll tell you what I have not been doing, writing blog posts.

You may have noticed a considerable decline in posts since I received my degree well over a year ago. There is a very good reason for this, I have been writing other things. I’ve just changed; when I think of an idea for a post, I am suddenly struck with an urge to do something, anything else.

So?

This weekend, Labor Day Weekend, the official close of the season, we are lounging in A-Town with the out-laws, staying cool, sampling the scorpion pepper roasted garlic sauce the younger whipped up just before we drove him back to school a few weeks ago (it’s really hot and it’s really good).

After a year away, it was really nice having him home for the summer, getting to spend time with him and with his boyfriend. In late July we all went to Maine where I think I have finally embraced my destiny as the Old Man on the Porch. We were there for two weeks this year, longer than I have stayed in decades, playing host to my brother and his family from England, our friend Sarah and – oh my – a dog!

We came to home to find that one of our cats was ailing; the cats are both fourteen years old, and Puffball has had a variety of difficulties, with his kidneys, with his thyroid. But now it was much more serious, a blood cancer, and we said goodbye to him last week.

Fifteen years ago I lost a dear pet, the eighteen year old Rosencrantz. We met when I was twenty-three, living in an apartment off Coventry, he died when I was forty, with a house and two living children. Losing him was losing my young adulthood. We got Puffy when the kids were five and seven, now they are both away at school. So it goes.

But these are endings. We began the season with a celebration of our twenty-five years married, and also our thirty years as a couple. The wife surprised me with a couple extra events, tickets to see the Guardians, an excessive dinner at the Marble Room.

We’ve probably attended (and also watched, and listened to) more Guardians games this summer than any time previous. I’ve also seen a couple of films at the Cinematheque. Usually I might see one a year, now I am a member. I saw The People’s Joker in July, last weekend we saw the recently reedited (?) Caligula. I’ve put their calendar on the wall in the kitchen, there’s a lot of funky things to check out this fall.

Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue

I have also spent a lot more time at the Cedar-Lee, our local independent theatre. Two of the several movies I caught this summer were Ghostlight and Sing Sing, which are moving, each in their own way, and they are part of a genre without a name, a story through which someone who has never acted before is drawn into an amateur theatrical and it transforms their life. 

But! Speaking of the kitchen, ever since I bought this place (thirty-one years next month) I have wanted to redo the floor of the kitchen. Something else always came first – including getting new counters and cabinets and ceiling for the kitchen over fifteen years ago. We finally had the floor leveled, guys put in Marmoleum and I finished by painting the baseboards and trim around the doors. Another life goal accomplished!

Meet the floor.

What I’d like to be able to share is some great summer theater news, but there’s nothing to report, not really. Not much. I had the chance to take in a rehearsal of the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear before we left town. We also took in some high-camp hilarity at the Hanna with a performance of Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue.

The Toothpaste Millionaire revival at BorderLight went over well, though I was out of town for the festival this year. I had a reading for a new script I’m working on back in May, and that is something I have plans to rework through the rest of the year.

And that's really the thing, you know? Work. Happy Labor Day. Get back to work.

How I Spent My Summer (2023)

Heights High Graduation

We received an invitation to our friends’ annual Labor Day party and it sent me into an existential spiral. I’ve been doing all right so far, but the empty nest thing is real. We drive our son to university this week, and then, well. It will be the two of us, for the most part, from here on out.

Wow. That’s it? Twenty years, really? Okay, uh. Now what? And the idea of attending the Labor Day party, thrown by friends we only know because of our children, without our children. It kind of brought it all home to me.

Parade the Circle

We’ve been summering like hell in an overcompensation for years of sequestering ourselves, with our children, due to quarantine. Let’s get out and do all the shit. What I have failed to do is have people over very much, not since the end-of-year part of the residency program which sucks because the backyard looks awesome.

Angélique Kidjo

The summer kicked off attending commencement for our youngest, at the Wolstein Center, where I had also received my Master Degree two weeks earlier, followed by a flurry of grad parties, one for himself and more for his friends.

My wife and I have attended three Guardians games (so far) this season, with a variety of friends or on our own. I also had the chance to attend the first Parade the Circle that has been celebrated since 2019. The parade was shorter than usual, which was to be expected, I guess.

Go Guardians!

Theater camp was a big hit, I think we got that one mostly right. I was most delighted that we were able to incorporate a writing component into the camp, and I had several acolytes who were happy to join that rather than do craft.

The Tri-C Jazz Fest was another great public event, where not only did our son perform at one of the outdoor bandstands on East 14th Street, but we also saw Angélique Kidjo, Herbie Hancock and Trombone Shorty. Members of the Jazz Academy went nuts for that last show, almost bringing down the balcony of the Connor Palace.


Video: Jazz ensemble "floor3" at Larchmere PorchFest

Drinks at the Grand Pavilion

We also brought the boy to Cincinnati for orientation – this was all before the end of June.

Last summer I became enamored of the Hotel Breakers at Cedar Point. Not that the place is terribly fancy, it’s not. It’s basic and I like that, and also that it’s right there on the beach. I knew nothing about the Breakers growing up, often my folks would take us to the Point only for the twilight, discount hours. 

Young people in Maine.

When my family first visited the hotel last summer, and as my wife was checking us in, I was looking around, walked straight through the lobby and out the other side to find … the lake! The beach! It’s right there! I had no idea!

Location, location, location.

So we took the boy and his boyfriend for an overnight and while the younger pair of us went off to ride rides, we did something I had never had the chance to, namely: watch the shows. You know, all those shows, performed several times a day, every day, by college students and other young performers. And you know what? They were good!

Four votes against Issue 1

The middle of July, time seemed to slow down a little bit. I had pulled a muscle in my ribs on a ride at the park and my days were full of work business, and other theater-related matters. The last week of July we packed up for Maine, the journey I had missed last year due to retinal detachment surgery. This was also my first time back since we distributed mom’s ashes into the sea. The week was not without strong feelings.

We arrived home in time for the BorderLight Fringe Festival, and this past week the boy played his final gig as a student with School of Rock, the Super Seniors Show at the Mercury Music Lounge in Lakewood. Each of the artists got to choose a song for the ensemble to perform, and he chose Soul Coughing’s “Screenwriter’s Blues.” (see video below)

To round out this list, we attended the opening performance of Fun Home last night at Cain Park.* The production is really, really excellent. The boy said it’s the best production of a musical he’s ever seen. A poignant close to a manic summer, don't you think?

"Fun Home"
(Cain Park, 2023)
Photo: Every Angle Photography

Cain Park presents “Fun Home” directed by Joanna May Cullinan in the Alma Theatre through Sunday, August 27, 2023.

*Did I mention we saw Rufus Wainwright at Cain Park in June? We also saw Rufus Wainwright.

The Maine Videos

Last night I slept for about five hours, set up and watch TV for an hour or so, then slept for another hour and a half.

I have terrible pain in my neck and shoulders, holding my head in the correct position. Also, into a position where I can sleep in my head tilt of the way it supposed to be.

Lots of offers to come by and keep me company, but I’m not really into that. With my head in this position, I feel underwater.

But I’m eating well, dear friend from high school brought me ice cream the other day. Did I blog about that already? I can’t remember.

My dreams, what dreams I have are very strange. In one, the cat got out. Okay, that’s not strange at all. In another, I had to put this blue goo on my shoulders and chest to get home safely.

Other people’s dreams are boring.



Ten years ago I had a new laptop and was playing with various video features. I chose to document our trip to Maine, making one video a day.

It’s hard to describe a place that is so familiar, and yet not really your own. It’s about the setting, of course. It’s perfect. The cabin we stay in, it’s set back from the others, affording more privacy, but it has this excellent view of the water. And it’s best when every room is occupied because it’s full of family and friends.



I’m still not used to my grandparents no longer being there. I’ll never be used to my own parents never being there again. But it’s the vivid memory of them that makes it a joyful place to return to.

How I Am Spending My Summer (2018)

last nite.

And what's it you do again?
Oh I'm a reminder
The hobbled veteran of the disk shop inquisition
Set to parry the cocksure of mem-stick filth
With my own late era middle-aged ramblings
- tonite, LCD Soundsystem

Sitting on the porch of Barnstable (or to some, “The Barnstable”) on the day after my fiftieth birthday, I am weighted with a feeling of loss. Not merely the loss of an old friend, or that sorrow that has followed our family, like a train, as we have lost fathers and heroes and our sense of hope for the future.

It does not help that I am currently reading Lincoln In The Bardo.

Topsail Island

This place is filled with memories, but also doubts. I carry with me the fear that I have failed or continue to fail in my efforts to be an active, engaged parent. As years pass and traditions fall by the wayside, or as I watch the moments tick by in which I am not actively creating or facilitating an activity, like fishing, or a game, like a treasure hunt.

Those moments in which I have intentionally passed on the opportunity to hold my children in a form of stasis, have encouraged them to grow up too soon, to make their own play and not to lean so heavily on mine. It is like a crime. I have such regret.

Seriously, I may need to set this book aside.

Each summer is marked by moments, those events we have scheduled and look forward to, signposts which I see approaching fast by the side of the road, and then catch in the rear-view as they pass at one thousand miles an hour.

With Joseph Morales (A.Ham)

Theater camp, outdoor Shakespeare, then North Carolina and Virginia. Pre-college, Hamilton, and now Maine. My birthday come, now gone, and we, too, will go, in forty-eight hours time. One million miles an hour.

The women were unavailable to attend Girl Camp this summer, and so for the first time since my son was five we have no opportunity for Boy Camp, which has always been a strange mystery. We will make up for that in other ways, at least I hope we do.

And yesterday I was gifted with tickets to see David Byrne at Jacobs Pavilion in two weeks! Another signpost. I am looking forward to that. And then, more or less, our summer will conclude. We are blessed with love and activity, but not enough time.

How I Spent My Summer (2016)

Son: I was expecting New York City to be a lot less like Cleveland. #nyc #cle #win

— David Hansen (@dhansenx) August 9, 2016

The Cleveland Summer 2016™. This year the wife decided not to over-program the kids. For years it was necessary to book the kids into as many camps as possible.

When I was a boy my mother’s work was the home, and so she was there and so was I and with the exception of a trip to Maine and maybe a couple weeks at day camp, I was mostly left to my own devices, watching TV or playing behind the railroad tracks in the city dump.

We each used to work year round, so our small children had to go somewhere. Sport Camp, Art Camp, Science Camp, Zoo Camp (they hated that one) or even our Theater Camp, Camp Theater!

Now that the wife is a high school teacher, and acclimated to her position, she declared that there would be few if any camps, spontaneity would be the call of the season, and that she planned to “bite the ass of this summer.” (That’s a reference to the movie Big Night, which by the way was released twenty years ago. Twenty years. Jesus.)

And bite the ass of summer we did, with plenty of swimming at the pool and sleeping in. No, I did not get to North Carolina as they did, but it was a fair trade. I went to Valdez, Alaska for the Last Frontier Theater Conference. Not so much like summer camp, more like a very full week at school. After it was all through I made an absurd number of “friend requests” in a single day. For every one I thought, I didn’t talk to you enough. I am glad to at least stay in touch in this way.

While I was away, I watched the Cavs return from a 3-1 deficit, or rather I received real time messages from the wife on their progress during the day and caught bits of it at the Best Western as it was rebroadcast in the Alaska Time Zone.

If it hadn’t gone to Game Seven (go ahead, watch that last minute again) I would not have been able to watch “The Final” with my family in Cleveland. And I cried. God help me, I wept over a sporting event. Not for me, not really, because I’d never been that invested in winning a game or a championship. But I was overwhelmed with happiness for all those who I call my neighbors across the region who feel pathetic or depressed because we have lost so much, so many times, and take it personally, that we as a city have internalized and even accepted this sense that disappointment is just what happens to us.

I was happy for them, for all of them. I am sorry Dad missed it.

The wife and I went downtown that Wednesday for the parade, not without a little trepidation but now we can say we were there, two among a reported 1.3 million. Can’t say I expect to experience anything like that again.

While they were in Topsail Beach, I labored every day to stain the deck and in the evenings rehearsed Twelfth Night (As Told By Malvolio). Trucking our mini-tour from east side to west, the set (one school desk) all packed up in my tiny car in celebration of a very old booking sitting in the main public library downtown. We were just concluding our final performance right there in that library, in the center of town, as the maelstrom that was the Republican National Convention and a whole lot of kooks moved into our city.

In spite of weeks of dread and concern that there would be violence in our streets the likes which have not been seen since Chicago ‘68, the police and activists and media kept it cool. There were an non-traditional number of essays of congratulations in the paper and websites across the nation, thanking Cleveland for being so darn polite, remarkably hip, and a great place to visit.

And as Sunday is to the weekend, August is to the summer, beginning lethargic and slow, excitement peaking early and then just kind of stretching on interminably until it’s time to go to bed.

(Yes, Douglas Adams put it much better, but we have no American equivalent for “tea time.”)

In brief, we left town. Visiting Maine for the first time without father surprised me in many ways, in fact I surprised myself by become overwhelmed by emotion heading out by car before we had even left Cleveland Heights.

Schlepping our bags into Barnstable that first night in, the sun already set followed by a heavy rain, his absence was larger. Everywhere I looked in this most familiar of places, he was not.

But my brother was and his family, and later cousins and more friends and our time was full and active. We returned by way of Lexington, MA and some friends who used to live in the Heights, and then to see Harris and Liz in Westport, CT.

We took a day trip with their family to Coney Island, and the following day just the four us us went into the city, for shopping on Fifth Avenue, a trip to the Met, Pokemon Go everywhere, and to see Hamilton.

Yes. We made it happen. Months ago the wife and I decided to just bite it and get tickets, and for a time when we knew we would be in the area, anyway, with friends to provide housing and no additional transportation costs.

We also knew that by August most of the cast would probably have moved on, and so they have, but the new company members are remarkable and have become new favorites of the girl, who follows them all obsessively on Snapchat.

Some day I am sure I will have more to say about the performance, but I am myself dealing with the disconnect that comes with looking forward to something for an extended period of time, experiencing it … then having it pass. And it shouldn’t be like that, because it’s a play and the play continues and the album remains and who knows, perhaps we will see it in Chicago next year, or Cleveland.

And here I am sounding like one of those lunatics who catch Les Miz every time they have the opportunity, I mean, what is wrong with those people?

That night, a storm struck Cleveland Heights, what they called a microburst, downing numerous large trees and bringing down power lines with them. Fortunately our tree was not affected, though we did need to pitch everything in the fridge … which was an excellent opportunity to clean the fridge. See? Lemonade.

Returning home meant returning to work and to school, and to soccer games and music lessons and normalcy. And here we are.

Going back over my notebook, one which has taken most of the year to fill, one observation I made on the puddle-jumper to Anchorage, reflecting upon my week:

“Just realized I’m from the big city.”

Time of Marvel

My Great-Grandfather Johnson first brought his family to Flood’s Cove in Friendship, Maine in the early 20th Century, sometime around 1910. My mother vacationed here as a girl. My children are the fifth generation to summer here.

The cabin in which we stay is named Barnstable. It was, once upon a time, an actual barn. Timbers bear gnaw marks from livestock that were housed here more than a century ago. Around 1900 when the land changed hands it was converted from a farm into this summer destination.

Until I was almost seventeen I visited every year with my family. The cabin is still quite rustic, though not nearly as much as it was when I was a child. The plumbing was updated around 1990, prior to that you needed to fill jugs at the spring for drinking water, the shower was also installed about that time. Before that you needed to sponge bath with the help of an electric kettle.

Plus ça change. I take my son in the motorboat to fish for mackerel, so my Grandfather Baker did for me. We sit on the porch and look out at the cover through a trio of birch trees my Grandfather Henrik painted some decades ago, a painting which hangs in my parents home in Lakewood.

Twenty years ago the woman I would marry and start a family with, we made our first journey here together and she just fell in love with the place. Since then we would visit every couple of years, and once the kids were a certain age made it an annual thing. Spending a week or two in Flood’s Cove with members on my side of the family has become their annual tradition, too.

My relationship with this place is a bit complicated, however. In spite of the simplicity, the calm, the quiet, my associations, my memories are tied up a great deal in the interior of my thoughts as a pre-adolescent, and early teenager. I cannot walk these paths or roam these unpainted rooms without being struck by strong reminders of pop culture from the late 70s and early 80s.

A great part of the inner world I created here had to do with the fact that I was often alone. My brothers are older than me, by several years. One stopped visiting entirely when he began high school, beginning in 1978. My eldest brother began visiting with his college-age friends, and I was not invited to be part of their events. Who could blame them.

There were other kids here, to be sure, and we played our games from time to time. But I never felt as though I fit into the special, summer cliques which formed here. I could go into the details, suffice to say I usually found myself creating my own, private play. This included creating artwork out of seashells, or using carbon paper to create a daily newspaper to distribute to each of the cabins.

Summer 1980, I was searching for a new comic book. Two years earlier my brother had gotten me interested in comics, but I only had the change for and interest in one single title, Howard the Duck. This is because even at the age of ten I was already a complete smart ass. However, HTD was discontinued in 1979, and so I needed a new storyline to follow.

That summer I collected every Marvel comic I could get my hands on. I did try reading DC comics, the kids in the Bungalow (an adjacent cabin) had a number of Batman and Superman comics, but those were terrible at that time, everyone knows that.

Funny, even my memory of DC comics is associated with this place, and not from home.

There was a newsstand in Waldoboro that was well-stocked in comics, and in my search for a regular thing I purchased plenty of them, auditioning the Marvel universe.

While several titles piqued my interest, like most kids at that time I became obsessed by X-Men. It helped that Marvel was currently peddling a series of reprints, so I was able to read the title from its origins in 1964.

One single issue, however, one story held me and haunted me and is one I remember to this day. Marvel Two-In-One #69: The Thing Battles the Guardians of the Galaxy was a story about a hero from the 30th Century who returns to our present to persuade his younger self not to become an astronaut and endure the living hell of being trapped in stasis for one thousand years, unable to move but mentally awake. Today a storyline like that one would no doubt be spread out over at least a half dozen issues.

Space Panic

Then there was my quest for video games. My son plays Pokemon Go right here in the cove, I had no such release. Every day-trip to Camden, Rockland or Damariscotta I would seek out those venues which would most likely feature Space Panic, Moon Cresta, or best of all, Crazy Climber.

The next year I turned thirteen. I had met girls. I had a Walkman. For hours I would sit in a hammock at the Birchview (yet another cabin) listening to cassettes. When we would drive I would commandeer the radio. Fortunately my father was totally cool with that, also in his mid-forties, he was at that time the most interested in popular music as he ever would be.

What was popular at that exact moment in time? Jessie’s Girl, Everlasting Love, and Sukiyaki, a cover version of a Japanese love song from 1961 that made my father wistful his time in the service. It was a time of interesting transition for popular music, just then beginning to swing away from introspective Baby Boomer brooding (Games People Play) to teenage Gen X angst and weirdness (Bette Davis Eyes).

I was shocked and surprised to receive a letter - an actual, physical letter - from a girl who I had been flirting with during Bay Days. She was not subtle, she was really looking forward to my returning to Ohio. I can’t remember if I had written her first or if she had gotten the address to this resort place from my brother. For the first time I desperately wanted to not be here, suddenly going away from home seemed a punishment and not an adventure.

My daughter is the same age this year as I was in 1981 (actually a half-year older) and upon arriving was distressed to realize that she wouldn’t be able to text message her friends from the cove, though she can still Snapchat. She was like, I dunno … like some astronaut trapped in stasis for one thousand years, unable to move but mentally awake.

My daughter has another thing I never had, for many years now she has had a friend here. They are almost the same age, they don’t communicate throughout the year (we have taken to negotiating with the girl’s parents to make sure we are in the cove at the same time) but spend all their time together when they’re in this place.

Nineteen eighty-two is lost to me. I can’t remember anything except feeling entirely alone. This is where my troubles began. My big birthday gift was an Apple II+ so that was cool, but it was also when I began to become peevish about having to visit.

Last year, when my son was ten, he taught the eight year-old staying here how to play a first-person sniper assassination video game. That’s nothing. When I was fourteen I taught a five year-old I was babysitting how to turn a can of bug spray into a flamethrower.

Can you see the bird?

The following year, 1983, was the end of the innocence and wonder. Only fifteen but my mind was older, I had a girlfriend in Cleveland to get back toand a desperate need to watch absolutely anything they broadcast on MTV. Making matters worse, there was an entire team of young adults here that summer, my eldest brother and visitors from Europe (former exchange program “family” members) and others from Bay Village who were just that much older than me to make my life miserable.

True, I was a complete dick that summer. But I was no longer the least bit interested in the bucolic setting, the sea, the trees, the quiet. I wanted music and dancing and fooling around. My solace was in trips to the towns where I could shop for records - records I wouldn’t even be able to play until I got home - and to immerse myself in cabinet video games.

Even then I accompanied my family to Maine for two more summers before graduating high school and breaking with tradition. Returning after a five-year break in 1990, I recall heading out to the great rock which faces Muscongus Bay. Even then I wasn’t ready to take in the landscape as it exists. I was wearing headphones and listening to Michael Penn.

Tonight.

My daughter loves it here. I have always wondered how long that would last, when the pull of home, of teenage interests would overwhelm the simple wonders of this corner of the world. My wife reminds me that she's not me.

The girl may have technological tethers to her life at home, devices which were not available to me, and a friend to look forward to seeing here. But she also finds beautiful places to sit and read, she loves to play the violin out-of-doors, to sit on a rock and sketch.

Tonight, our second-to-last night in the cove for the year, we had an extended social evening her at Barnstable. Wine hour with friends in the cove, a long dinner with family, a dozen sitting around the table, four generations represented (the youngest at ten months, the eldest eighty-one) my wife and I took a walk into the darkness, each step away from the light of the cabin the sky grew starker, the sky turning black, the most visible stars soon subsumed by an array of billions, the Milky Way evident and elegant, streaming across the heavens.

'S wonderful. 'S marvelous.