Triggers

I love how the tiniest thing--a comment, an object--can trigger a fully formed forgotten memory or even spark a big idea. This happened to me this afternoon, and I managed to get in a few hours of writing after the girls went to sleep, but it is still too new to post here. But I did check my email after writing and received a note from my cousin, who was just back from Martha's Vineyard, repository of so many of my summer memories, in which she mentioned the words "Illumination Night."

Illumination Night is an annual event on the island. The residents of a particular part of the town of Oak Bluffs in which the houses were all built in the style of gingerbread cottages around an enormous tabernacle, festoon their homes with thousands of lit Chinese lanterns, creating a magical world for just one night: a little island in and of itself, a glowing center surrounded by darkness, and water. There is music, and laughter, and singing, and a band in the tabernacle, and people sitting on their porches, two or three generations on most, smiling and waving at the passersby, choosing their favorite lanterns and admiring the lacy trim on the roofs and window boxes. There are teenagers unhinged on summer, and small children cut loose and ringed with green neon necklaces and bracelets, the lightstick version of which featured prominently in the night my cousin reminded me about.

We must have been in our early-twenties. We were not children, not teenagers, but not quite fully formed adults yet either, in the way our lives were still so centered on our families of origin--there were no families, yet, of our own making, no husbands, no houses, and I was staying with my parents, and she had come to visit. I had not been to Illumination Night in years, not since I was a child, and I don't remember who suggested we go, but nobody else had any interest, and so we found ourselves alone, together, driving down the winding street in the dark, brights on all the way to the main drag, which took us into Oak Bluffs.

We couldn't find a parking spot. It was packed, more crowded than I remembered from past years, and the cars were parked all the way back to the Main Street and the dock in every direction. Finally, we settled for a spot way out and began the walk toward the tabernacle, with a surprising number of other people who had been forced out to these outer rings. The crowd thickened as we neared, and although we didn't discuss it, there was a palpable level of excitement, a lift in mood. We both noticed all the lightsticks: jewelry on the smaller children, and just the sticks themselves, in people's hands, casting an ethereal glow on faces already lit by candlelight.

We wanted some. For some reason, although we were way too old, too old perhaps to be on vacation with my parents, too old to be at Illumination Night for the actual sight of it, not for any social purpose, too old to covet lightsticks, we wanted them desperately, both of us, in that funny way a need occasionally hits you and a companion at exactly the same moment, and of course we could not find them.

Every stand was sold out, every purveyor exhausted. As we walked, our desire grew, and suddenly we were on a mission: we had to find lightsticks. It was essential we find them; we needed them, somehow, to complete the evening, to make our evening's drive, our parking fiasco, worth our troubles.

I almost called my cousin just now because the truth is, I can't remember if we found them. I remember the intensity of wanting them, the shared focus on finding them, a conversation that struck us both as hilarious about various illicit ways we could obtain them from the multitudes of small children in possession, but I don't remember ever getting one, snapping it firmly across the middle, watching it take on that underwater greenish yellow glow. What I do remember is that we lost the car. When it was time to go home, we walked back in the general direction of our parking spot, but it was so far from the center of events that we got disoriented, lost our way, found ourselves in a sea of people lit by lightsticks, walking in circles for what seemed like a very long time.

When we finally located the car, the glow had lifted. It was leaving the party too late. We drove home through the black night, brights on, windows down, the sound of the ocean in our ears. When I think of this night now, I think of us as on a cusp of something else, wordlessly agreeing to partake in a childhood tradition, by which I mean going at all, and then channeling our energy into this odd, purposeless mission. And failing, and getting lost, and then--at last--in the darkness, surrounded by the sea, near the light and laughter but not quite of it anymore--finding our way home.