The family that cruises together…

Summer 2025 has been really busy. Among other many things, I stayed a few weeks at the Opus Dei conference center called Arnold Hall, preaching and doing a lot of catch-up administrative work. Arnold Hall is about a half-hour south of Boston, but If you go opposite to Boston, south on Route 3, you’ll get to Cape Cod, and then Hyannis, from which you can take a ferry to Nantucket Island. Perhaps you have been to Nantucket, or maybe not. All I can say is that it is a very special place, yea verily, an exotic place. It has the Melville-whaling mystique, of course, as well as a kind of hip vibe that one either gets or not (or can afford or not) but I found Nantucket to be a kind of welcoming time capsule where, for a few hours, I renewed the basic joys of my youth, a simpler time, and a sense of adventure. I didn’t really expect this…

A friend of mine invited me to join him there for a couple of hours; I looked forward to catching up, and he said he would meet me at the docks. I was surprised, however, when I walked down the ferry gangplank (I think it is still called that) that his whole family was there, waving and smiling, as if I had just come from the old country, ready to start a new life in the New World. That made me think by the way (and nothing against Uber) that we really need to get back to picking up our family and friends at airports and train/bus terminals; there is nothing like recognizing a familiar face in a crowd of interesting, but uninterested people. Humbled by the royal treatment, his family just started showing me around this most interesting place, walking on cobblestone, visiting the beautiful local Catholic church (Our Lady of the Isle) the local library (called the Atheneum, where Frederick Douglass would sometimes speak) and stopping by a local brewery for libations and raw oysters (awesome). We then headed to Siasconset to look at the farthest eastern part of the USA, and on to a quick dinner at their homestead, after which we all went back to the ferry, where I departed (and where my guitar and I gently wept as salt water gently sprayed us) and then arrived home (well, for three weeks).

If you have made it this far in the article, and think this account doesn’t sound very exciting, that is the point. No ghost-watching (against the faith anyway) or zip-lining (against common sense anyway) or even live-history actor encounters (well, you might like those guys, but I find them kind of bizarre; I mean, I like actors and musicians on stage, and everyone else in the audience, and one side doesn’t pass to the other…except when a rock or NFL star can’t help jumping into the crowd; but I digress…).

As a child for entertainment, my parents would load us kids in the car and just drive locally for a little while, maybe an hour. My mother called it “going for a ride”. We were all just together, moving pretty slowly down farm roads of northern Illinois, and maybe stopping for a snack at a local drug store. We couldn’t afford many other forms of entertainment at the time, but I didn’t know that or really care. We would just be together, and comment on things around us: corn, cows, trees, road-kill (particularly interesting) and lots of barns; or sometimes we’d wave at neighbors, who would then sometimes invite us to visit a while, and just basically just have fun. Of course, when I got older, I thought simply driving around was kind of boring and I wanted to be with peers as is natural (especially when they wanted to drive around, aka “cruise around”). Over the years, and now spending much of my time driving alone (which I enjoy generally) I was so happy to revisit that simple family-social experience again, and it turned out to be the greatest, though least exotic, aspect of my first visit to one of the most exotic places that can be visited. By way of important closure to this exciting adventure log: as we cruised by the historic Nantucket Prospect Cemetery, one of the kids couldn’t help blurting out, “Everybody’s dying to get in there!” A perfect, albeit innocently irreverent (though in nearly all ways accurate) commentary that, of course, I wanted to blurt out, but hey, I’m a responsible elder now, and blah, blah, blah…. God bless the families that cruise together, as they most certainly fuse together.