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16 June 2009

eat or be eaten / you eat life or life eat you / our week on Cape Cod / I'll never kiss your lips again / They buried you today

Please click on image.

First of our Cape Cod photos. The ice cream parlor, Sundae School, had a player piano; for 25 cents it would play one or two 1950s rock n roll tunes. One of them was

Teen Angel
(1959) written by Jean Dinning and Red Surrey
sung by Mark Dinning


That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back

Teen Angel can you hear me?
Teen angel can you see me?
Are you somewhere up above
And am I still your own true love?

What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night?
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight

Teen angel can you hear me...

Just sweet sixteen
and now you're gone
they've taken you away
I'll never kiss your lips again
they buried you today

Teen angel can you hear me...
Teen angel teen angel answer me please


There was one sunshiny, hot day; the rest of the week ranged through a gale, thunderstorms, dense fog, rain. S.W.M.B.O. says our cottage rental contract warned that you can't get your money back if the weather sucks.

Actually, I found the weather Interesting, often beautiful -- the weather of the Atlantic Ocean. The beam from Chatham Lighthouse would slash through the fog that blanketed Mill Pond at night every 20 seconds. But on two nights the ocean wind cleared the fog and rain clouds completely, and I saw night skies clear enough to recognize constellations. Shooting stars flamed down.

Our cottage was originally a clam shack, where diggers would bring their haul of oysters, clams and mussels. The tiny two-storey cottage was surrounded with a solid covering of oyster shells.

Two cottages away was a working boatyard with railroad tracks descending into the pond to winch large boats in and out of the pond.

The pond had lots of horseshoe crabs -- to the best of my knowledge, nobody cooks and eats them. On the shore we saw deer and bunnies, and on the sand in the morning in front of the cottage were raccoon tracks; they came with the tides to eat the shellfish. Fish leapt out of the water. There were long-legged wading birds, duck and Canada geese families floating across the pond, and a black bird that dove straight down to fish, maybe a cormorant. Gulls would fly high with a clam or oyster in their mouths and drop them on rocks to smash them and get at the meat inside. Some locals said there were more deer on Cape Cod today than during Colonial times.

I don't know what local marine biologists and ecologists would say, but Mill Pond seemed incredibly clean, healthy, and teaming with life, all trying, around the clock, to eat each other. We were a part of that. We ate lots of seafood, fish and chips, oysters, I had some delicious duck breast smothered in crushed peppercorns, and every restaurant, inexpensive or fancy, served lobster rolls -- lobster salad in a hot dog bun.

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