Grandparents

A woman I work with became a grandparent this week and two of my dearest friends, Jeff and Margaret Ann already are grandparents.  Gosh, that makes me feel old!  (For the record, they are young and fabulous looking grandparents.)  It got me thinking this week about how much I loved my grandparents and how important they were to me. 

I started picking through my pile of items for this blog and came across a yellow envelope packed with things that my Mom must have gathered from my grandmother's house after her death.  Its full of cards and letters I'd written to them, my wedding invitation, a small bible, a handkerchief (?), and a tiny A&P encyclopedia from 1901. 

My Pop Pop died in 1976 when I was in third grade and it was devastating.  He was my buddy.  Michelle and I slept over my grandparents house just about every Friday night so we spent alot of time with them.  He taught me letters and how to read.  I can still remember spelling C-A-T on his lap and having him smile and clap for me.  He was a farmer and he taught me to love to grow things in dirt I dug with my own two hands.  He took me crabbing and generally made me feel safe and very special.

Even when he was older, I remember how strong his shoulders and arms were.  He was fit and gardened all the time without a shirt on (typical New Jersey!) and I remember being fascinated by a big scar he had on his back from a liquid burn he got as a child.   Typically, this gave him an opportunity to remind me 100 times to stay away from the stove.

These poems were in the envelope and that's my grandmother's writing on the bottom.  Jennie is my cousin.  You can't see it in this image, but she's also written just my name next to the "Look, Grandma" poem.   I particularly love the Grandpa poem because we did spend so much time at the beach.

Here's a picture of them....with me peeking out from behind the chair.  I remember my mom didn't want me in the picture and I kept jumping out--that's why my grandmother is laughing.

And here's one with my Nana when I was just a little baby.That's my cousin Roy on the left, me, and my cousin Jennifer.  Look at me....wow.....that looks JUST LIKE my Palmer.  Tate genes might be strong but I'm seeing what I'm seeing here.

My Grandmother was very firm but nurturing.  She didn't put up with misbehavior and she was kind of serious.  She was an absolute master at finding things to keep us busy and she let us sit and go through her jewelry boxes and scarves for hours, trying all of it on and making a total mess.  I remember making those octagonal loom yarn trivets over and over with her.  She was a good, solid, plain cook who always let me help her bake.  Her spaghetti and meatballs in the big yellow Correlle bowl was the best to come out of a non-Italian kitchen in South Jersey.  Every summer I try to make time to cook her boiled peach dumplings.  They taste like love and summer in a bowl.

Grandparents are awesome.  Mine certainly were!

Hurricane Lenny

Great opener for a post about the most devastated vacation of our lives, huh?    I've told this story aloud so many times I guess its time to get it down here for posterity.

We hadn't been on a real vacation in several years.  We'd been saving money for our first house which we purchased in 1996 and then, of course, we'd been spending money on the house to fill it up.  Three years later, it was time to get out of town.

I had always wanted to go to this particular hotel.  I was originally a Hyatt when I first saw pictures of it in high-school but somewhere along the way it had become a Westin.  We began planning the trip in the spring and decided to wait until mid-November so that we could avoid the risk of a hurricane.  Its largely unchanged and you can see photos of the resort here.   Here's a great one looking down onto the property. 

We arrived on Saturday, November 13 to blue skies but it was late in the day so we got settled and went out to dinner.  On Sunday, we did an island tour with a group of people.   We'll never forget our tour guide, Jimmy, who was the former Chief of Police in Cruz Bay, the main town on the island.  He knew everyone and even took us to his cousin's still (as in "moonshine") where he cooked up some hideous alcohol that they like to call "Liquid Viagra".  With random local stops like that, the tour was fun and so were the people on it, but it drizzled most of the day.

On Monday the weather was spectacular.  Bob and I spent the day on Hawksnest Beach totally alone.  Never another soul to be seen.  It was fantastic.  We should have known it couldn't last.

That night we went into town for dinner.  During our meal, the server casually mentioned/questioned if we were hearing about "the hurricane".   Of course we hadn't.  We'd been on a deserted beach all day.  I remember they turned on the TV on in the bar and we watched with horror as the fact slowly sunk in that we were about to have our trip ruined by Hurricane Lenny.

Lenny was historical and unique.  You can read about the storm in depth, here, but these are the short facts:

1.  Lenny was the strongest Category 4 hurricane EVER in the month of November.
2.  Lenny was one of the latest ever hurricanes to threaten the Virgin Islands, and most remarkably,
3.  Lenny was bizzrre.  It formed in the Carribbean Sea, not in the Atlantic Ocean, and moved on almost an flat, true WEST to EAST track.   This meant that it threatened the generally less storm ready leeward sides of the islands.

We assessed our options, but there really was no escape.  Flights out were already limited unless you were a millionaire and we were assured by many people that our hotel was very safe.   It had been devastated by Hurricane Gloria and totally rebuilt using cinder block and re-bar AND it had its own power plant.   We also came to find out that the hotel was moving all guests from the lower beachfront buildings to the buildings that were higher up on the hill (where our room was) and that they had opened all available space to the families of their employees knowing that their buildings were likely much more safe than the homes of their workers.   This all made us feel confident.  


By the next day the island was in full on storm preparation mode.  The letter above is only one of many.  The most alarming one was the first which basically said...go get supplies today (Tuesday) because we don't know what's going to happen.  We heeded this advice and went to the small grocers in Cruz Bay and stocked up on....well....not the right stuff.   Basically, snacks and alcohol.  If we'd be thinking, we might have purchased more useful things such as toilet paper, which we eventually ran out of.

By late Tuesday night the island was on total curfew.  This means that legally, no one is to be outside unless they are emergency personnel, etc.  Wednesday the storm hit and we watched our little bay rise up and over take the beach and the lower buildings of the hotel.   The boats that were moored in the bay washed onto the beach and the sky was black.  Of course, being idiots, we did wander out in the courtyard area once or twice, but certainly not at the height of the storm.

Trapped in the room for two days we were left to our own devices.  Luckily, we never lost power, so there was plenty of TV and movies to watch...and we watched them all.  I also read the entire first Harry Potter novel.  One funny thing was that the hotel sent someone to deliver sandwiches at the top of the storm and he was wearing a yellow slicker and pants (a la the Gorton's fisherman) with a motorcycle helmet to protect him from flying debris.  It was surreal.   This is the only good picture I have of the skies as the storm approached.

By Thursday at noon, it was over.   That's when things got crazy.   You take a resort island and trap people inside for two days and ruin their vacations, you should expect the pendulum to swing the other way.   Of course, anxious to get out just like everyone else, we headed into town but as the evening wore on and people got drunker it became obvious that it wasn't safe.  The main street in Cruz Bay was packed with tourists and locals and I distinctly remember seeing a few guys wearing brass knuckles and thought we'd better get the hell out of there.

Friday was still overcast and drizzly.  The beaches were destroyed.  The cleanup was massive.  We spent the day roaming around and checking out the damage.

On Saturday, we left for St. Thomas on our ferry headed to the airport to go home.   As you'd expect, the weather was beautiful, the water calm and blue, and we waved goodbye having had quite an adventure but feeling cheated.

We've been back to St. John twice since this ill-fated trip.  It is one of my absolute favorite places on the earth.  If I had my way, I'd go there every year.  But alas, there is no golf course so its a marital compromise I have to make.  I highly recommend it.  Two thirds of the island are a US National Park and all of the beaches, if you can get to them, are open to the public.  The British Virgin Islands are a short boat ride away and the whole place is just a playground.  Just don't go during hurricane season.