No, I’m not writing about cattle parts again.
Living in Rehoboth is a trip. Not a road trip, like I used to take every weekend before I moved here, but a 1960s vernacular “what a trip, man” kind of trip. As a three-year local, I feel like I’ve never lived anywhere else. Okay, natives, I hear you sneering.
But much as I love my adopted hometown, there’s weird stuff here—like last night’s lead story on the 11 p.m. news: “Firefighters work together to save a horse caught in a chicken-house fire in Pittstown.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the horse. But they never got to the hard-hitting facts, like what the horse was doing in the chicken coop in the first place, or why it was news that the Pittsville firefighters worked together. Oh yeah, the second story of the night was “Israel responds to suicide bombing with historic vote and movement of troops….” Priorities????
Of course, I’ve come to love the Farm Animal of the Day segment on Good Morning Delmarva. Yesterday it was a hog named Helen, who I think got a pizza for the honor.
Then there’s the weather. It’s spooky to see the crawl at the bottom of the TV screen warning of an impending twister. Last week they actually told folks in Ocean City to head for a basement or interior room. While O.C. and R.B. are miles apart culturally, we’re really not all that far away as the cows fly. Come to think of it, I’d like the weather a lot better if Helen Hunt came here to track tornadoes.
As often as our weathercasters are wrong, every time there’s a tornado warning anywhere on Delmarva I head for the closet, if you’ll excuse the expression. But on the up side, last Wednesday meteorologist Tammy warned of thick fog and torrential downpours, advising us to allow extra time to get to work.
I added a minute. For twenty years I commuted an hour each way. Now, when there’s traffic, it takes 11 minutes. Off-peak, it’s five. So I just don’t get our friends in the neighboring town of Lewes saying “you’re going all the way into Rehoboth for dinner?” That would be a five to seven minute ride.
And it works both ways. People look at me like I’ve got two heads if I announce I’m off to Lewes for a 5 p.m. art opening. “But you’ll never get back,” they say. What am I, Ernest Shackleton leaving for Antarctica? Not to worry. I have lead dogs.
There are other weirdities. One day at my office I heard a rhythmic screeching sound, like somebody sawing through a metal dumpster. It got louder and louder and I finally looked up to see a pair of seagulls having sex on the roof of the Convention Center. When it quieted down I expected to see one of them smoking a cigarette.
The weird thing is working in a town quiet enough for this kind of behavior to be audible. I’m sure big city pigeons are just as busy propagating the species, but their love-making is drowned out by screeching taxi cabs. Around here, the honks are just short beeps by people waving at every third car or pedestrian because it’s somebody they know.
And I devour the local papers—especially the published lists of marriage licenses, building permits, and divorces. From my personal experience with home improvement, I think the three lists are correlated. People get married, they try to renovate a bathroom and, if they are not skilled in communication and first aid, pfffft, they move to the divorce column.
Along with all the weird things I love about Rehoboth life, I still occasionally find a need for consciousness-raising.
I joined Weight Watchers after Christmas, along with tons (literally) of other folks stuffed with excess yams. The program works; I’m a big fan. But that’s the problem, I want to be a smaller fan.
But let’s face it. Weight Watcher meetings are not our kind of girls’ nights out. We venture out of cloistered Rehoboth into a world of Sussex County moms, grand-moms, young marrieds and singles—heterosexual almost one and all. It’s culture shock.
The half-dozen lesbians in the room huddle in one row, each of us experiencing the oddity of minority status again. At the first few meetings, the instructor punctuated her discussion with phrases like “now girls, when you go home to your husbands…,”
or “ladies, your husbands will love this recipe, too,” or, my personal favorite, the question “Who’s husband lets her….”
Hell hath no fury like a lesbian hungry. I took the instructor aside and gently asked her to remember that our meeting was within chewing distance of Rehoboth and husbands weren’t the only kind of spouses at home. Actually, I thought the few men in the program should have spoken out, too.
“You could just refer to our ‘partners or mates,’” I encouraged. “That would suit everyone.”
Our instructor responded well, although she insisted on using the tongue-twisting phrase “husband, wife or significant other” some twelve or thirteen times a session. The class went from a half hour to forty-five minutes. But we were represented.
But far and away the most perfect example of why I love this town, more than anywhere else I’ve been, happened last night. A group of us locals (natives, stop sneering…) were dining at the new Thai Restaurant downtown.
We’d lingered over cocktails at one couple’s home and gotten to the restaurant later than expected. We were just finishing up our Pad Thai and Curry when I looked at my watch and realized it was seven minutes to the season finale on The West Wing and none of us had set a VCR. Crisis!
Let me tell you, we stuck one person with the check (thanks, bunky) and five of us leapt from our seats, ran out to the street, hopped in our cars and raced off in three different directions.
We all got home in time to see “previously on The West Wing….”
And after the episode, we stayed riveted to “Golf cart vandalized, bench seat stolen, details at 11.”
You can take the girl out of the city AND you can take the city out of the girl.