Adjusting (Or Not)

You’ve been there, right? You walk into someone’s house who has a couple of kids -- and enough years have rolled by so this is not a recent experience for you -- and toys are strewn everywhere. So many, in fact, that as you ease your way into a family room you are more frequently stepping on things that squeak and honk than on a flat surface. Some things may even be sharp or large enough to cause a random meeting between your nose and one of those family room walls as you stumble your way to a chair. In a perverse way, this is what Lily and I are feeling these days as our community morphs from its winter ghost town identity to thriving metropolis. Spring has come to Charleston, and so have the tourists. They are everywhere, and they are there all the time. I went to the beach yesterday -- which for months has been more secluded than the Fortress of Solitude -- only to find actual people roaming the beach, making sand castles, burying each other, or just sunbathing. It is so odd that in an expanse that is so wide and deep and with such an infinite horizon that even the most claustrophobic feel at ease, I sensed a claustrophobic-like moment welling up in me. Who are these people and why are they upsetting my personal universe?

At night, when in previous months you would be much more likely to see deer roaming the streets than people, you now see hordes (well, what seems like hordes) of folks walking about like it’s noon. Voices come from everywhere. And the trash! Beer cans, wet towels, pails, and partially buried toy tractors and trucks are all too visible on the beach. When driving, what had once been an environment where the local stop signs were as needed as they would be on the lunar surface, they now must be rigidly obeyed. During the day, behind the wheel, you feel like you’re in an amusement park arcade as you anticipate the constant darting out into the streets by small urchins untethered from their parents. Not that the parents don’t enjoy their jaywalking too. And the traffic! Now, you actually have to plan ahead to wander out to the Piggly Wiggly lest you get caught up in a line of cars so long and serpentine you feel you’re in an ant colony’s conga line.

I was sharing these observations the other day with the nice lady who sells us Mojo’s dog food, and she nodded knowingly, as only a long time resident could. She told me that when she and her husband moved here from Ohio 12 years ago they, too, soon enough came to love the off-season and were quick to take up the spiritual banner against this dreaded species they call tourists. She also told me to lighten up.

So, now I have to deal with the fact that I am on the fast track to curmudgeonhood.