my thoughts quick random flashes of images and vague desires. That’s why I’m a poet instead of the heavy-duty insurance executive my ex-wife thought I should have been. Worse, I’m not a precious academic poet, writing poems for other poets to read and snap their fingers over. She could have dealt with that. I struggle for poems people will enjoy reading. I believe poetry should make people laugh and recognize the ugly and beautiful truths of their daily lives. It doesn’t have to be self consciously clever and obscure. I’ve always been partial to Bob Dylan’s line about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower. My poems struggle below deck where I’m cleaning up the muck while Charles Bukowski stokes the engines.
JUST A FEW YEARS before I’d been making a good living selling business insurance policies in the western Massachusetts, southern Vermont/New Hampshire area. My commissions along with my wife’s substantial salary as a Smith College administrator provided us with a comfortable life.
Melinda and I lived on a three hundred acre farm in Ashfield. Our two hundred year old house, a drafty slate shingled fifteen-room monster, was constantly in need of paint, impossible to heat, and haunted. Fortunately we had our own well-managed woodlot and the ghost was friendly. Even so, the place demanded constant painting, carpentry, pointing, landscaping.
One Thursday in May I was out in the woods with the chainsaw felling the next winter’s cordwood supply. Covered with sweat, bar and chain oil, sawdust and woodchips, I sat on the stump of a freshly felled oak, swatting black flies and sharpening saw teeth. I heard the winding of gears, the roar of an engine and looked up to see Lin driving her Land Rover across the fields and up the logging road where I was working.
She stopped four feet away, turned off the motor, leaned out the window and spoke without smiling. “Thought you were closing a big policy deal.” She was clipping sentences like her old Yankee father.
A bad sign.
“Fell through. Found out this morning.” I out-clipped her.
Shaking her head she switched from Yankee to the condescending psycho-talk common in nearby Northampton with its plethora of shrinks, social workers, academics and their clients, students and hangers-on. “On one level I can really appreciate how hard you work around here, but it seems to me you should be out working another deal instead of wearing bib overalls and playing in the woods.”
“It relaxes me.” I smiled.
She didn’t return it. “That’s your trouble. You relax too much. You didn’t relax so much you’d be a vice-president of the company with a suite of offices in Hartford. Not just a field rep.” Yankee again. In spades.
Melinda had just been offered the presidency of a small, very exclusive woman’s college in Upstate New York. She saw it as a stepping-stone to the headwaters of Smith, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke or Radcliff. She didn’t need a husband who wasn’t a boardroom hot shot, suave and well connected.
Hell, she didn’t need any kind of husband for a trek toward stardom among the Seven Sister Colleges, as evidenced by her setting up housekeeping within weeks of our divorce with a lovely and wealthy blonde Smith senior. With a little work and a lot of drinking, I convinced myself that it was an easier situation to deal with than if she’d run off with another man.
We got divorced. Sold the farm. Fought over custody of the dog, Rumble. I got Rumble. She got rid of me.
Our sons were grown and no problem. Tim, the youngest, was a third year law student at Penn. The older two, Frank and Chris, were partners in a successful New Orleans real estate firm. They inherited Lin’s drive, but got just about as far from her Yankee ways as the country allows.
Financially, after the divorce, I was all set, with my half of the proceeds on the farm, plus our savings and stock portfolio. But I was at loose ends. With no idea of what to do, I rented an apartment in Springfield and played around at selling insurance for another six months, hating every minute of it. Then Tim quit law school to play with a Red Sox farm team.
That was the final straw for me. My marriage was over. Frank and Chris were doing well, making lots of money and enjoying their lives. Tim had become a boy of summer. And I was living in an apartment in Springfield, Massachusetts, not exactly one of the world’s garden spots, selling insurance, writing poetry that no one wanted to publish, and occasionally playing my guitar at open mikes and folk clubs. My life was on hold.
One November Wednesday, more than usually disgruntled, I looked at my life in Springfield. Everything was out of control. I was lonely, depressed and overwhelmed by world and personal events, when I remembered what a friend had told me about his vacation on St. Ursula.
“It’s the most manageable place I’ve ever been,” he said. “It’s got a government pattered after the British system, but it’s only thirty-two square miles and there are less than twelve thousand people in the whole country.”
After a week of thinking about his descriptions of the small island nation, I decided to change my life. Packing a few clothes and my 1950 Martin guitar, I flew from Bradley International Airport to San Juan where I caught an Ursula Air hop to St. Ursula. After three weeks of looking around I bought an old stone West Indian house on an acre and a half plot of ground and spent the next year fixing it up. Buying the house and its repairs took a big bite out of my savings, but with care and a little work on the side, the interest on the balance keeps me in beer and food.
Paradise. At least it might look that way to most outsiders, but the island isn’t an easy place for an American expatriate to live. Aside from the economic opportunities they present, Ursulines don’t care much for people who were not born there. Statesiders and Brits are especially suspect; the Brits because of the legacy of colonialism, statesiders because of how we have despoiled the American islands. As a result I have to watch myself, being careful to keep my place, which requires a maintaining very low profile. For me it’s worth such care to live in a micro world. One where there are a lot of givens and few unknowns.
And here I am. In my fifties, bald, in good health, both physically, mentally and sexually, I’m retired and living alone on an island in a corner of the Caribbean where drunks, drifters, and assorted losers exist on the periphery of an economy geared to providing several weeks of rest and recreation to affluent Canadians, Americans and Brits.
IT WAS DARK when The Yellow Bird pulled into the West End of St. Ursula. The dock was empty, with the exception of a few taxi drivers, the kids who handle the boat’s lines, and my friend Chance, parked outside the customs building, waving as I gathered my bags of mail, the few purchases I had made in St. Thomas, and headed for the ladder to the lower deck.
The woman in the batik sundress was there first. She didn’t have any luggage, just a large cotton purse slung over her shoulder and a small duffle bag.
“Do me a favor,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. Some people can say ‘do me a favor’ making it sound like they’re doing you one by asking. She made it look like a favor too.
Too many of the men I know go nuts over young women and girls. Most single men my age on St. Ursula act like hopeless jerks, grinning at bikinis as they run around wearing earrings with gold medallions or vasectomy symbols hanging from gold chains nestling in the graying hair on their chests, their arms and calves adorned with tattoos.
Me, I like women. I enjoy their company. I like sitting for long hours swapping life stories. If it leads to sexual comfort that’s just dandy with me, but if it doesn’t there’s no big deal. The talking, laughing, and exchanging opinions are what are important. For those exchanges to mean much I
