Over the Hills and Far Away

I am very into Led Zeppelin right now. I know, I know. I’m about twenty years past prime Led Zeppelin phase age, but I’ve always been a late bloomer…

This music – and anything by Pink Floyd – takes me back to the summer I lived on Cape Cod. I’d just turned eighteen and had been going to college in Vermont when I met a slightly insane girl at work. She'd moved to Vermont to go to college, too, and had grown up on the Cape.

Blonde and willowy, with a thick Boston accent and an almost offensive matter-of-factness about her, our eyes met over the checker who ran the register between us at the Grand Union at the base of Killington. She became one of many August babies in my life. I don’t know what it is about Leos, but they somehow see right through my well-constructed façade of detachment to the cream puff I keep hidden and locked away. They just dig me. I guess I like them, too, judging from the long line of Leos in my life. Anyway, she and I quickly became inseparable.

While at college she was living with her father and stepmother and younger half-siblings. Her family became a second family to me, and I kept in touch with them for years after my friend, we'll call her Leona, and I lost touch. Leona's mother had married very well into an old money family on the Cape, but her father was just a regular guy. Leona moved back and forth between both worlds. I attribute her craziness to this dichotomy of having these regular folks who loved her for who she was and these privileged, old money people who expected her to always act and talk and dress a certain way and gave their love on a conditional basis. That’d screw any kid up.

So when the semester was coming to a close, she'd asked me to come live with her on the Cape for the summer. We rented a tiny apartment on Main Street in Hyannis, packed up our cars, and left the mountains of Vermont for the beaches of Cape Cod.

I worked three jobs that summer. I waitressed at Friendly’s during the day, cocktailed at Guido Murphy’s at night, and on my days off from Friendly’s, I worked at a bathing suit store on Main Street convincing tourists that color really flattered their body type.

Leona and I lived together for about a month-and-a-half before I moved in with a guy, Cullee, who I’d met through some friends I’d known when they were ski instructors back in Vermont. He was a prep school roommate of Ken (August 5th!) this guy who worked on Killington for the winter having taken "a break" before he started law school and who I’d dated briefly. Gosh! Dating was so incestuous when we were teenagers, wasn’t it?

Cullee's family had a ton of money, but he was spoiled mostly by his looks. He was just beautiful. Seriously gorgeous. The first time we met, he presented me with a rose some other girl had given him. Girls just threw themselves at him. They would literally follow him to our home. And he didn’t quite know what to make of me because I treated him like he was nothing special. Somehow, that made me a keeper.

Anyway, the reason Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd remind me of Cape Cod is because of yet another group of guys I met one night while I was out with Leona. We were bored and out looking for a party we’d heard about. We eventually came across a bunch of guys standing out on the lawn of this big yellow house. Leona yelled out the car window to them, the window with the big "Cape Cod Resident" sticker, asking them for directions, and we just ended up hanging out with them that night.

The guys all went U Mass Amherst. Mostly regular guys, a lot of them were in the military part time to pay for college. They were very cool people, and that big yellow house became our second home for a while. Long story short, they listened to a lot of classic rock.

And so I spent the summer going back and forth between two worlds myself. Cullee's world of - slightly - overprivileged excess and this other world of regular guys with regular lives. And though I was completely comfortable in both worlds, I saw there was a difference. I knew that I was different depending upon which world I was in that day.

And that's my Led Zeppelin story.