Illumination Night

The Grand Illumination, or Illumination Night, lit up the cottages of Oak Bluffs for the 140th time on Wednesday night. Fortunately Mary was on the Vineyard with me for the last time this summer and we enjoyed the festivities together.

This grand house is in Ocean Park, a small hop from the focal point of Illumination Night, but still saw fit to celebrate. I think this is where the Norton Antivirus guy lives.

We arrived in the MV Camp Meeting Association Grounds (the spot with all the gingerbread cottages) fashionably late -- there were somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 people already gathered, filling the Tabernacle and sitting on blankets on the grass, blaring songs like "Amazing Grace" and "I've Been Working on the Railroad" in a community sing.

The Tabernacle on the night of the Grand Illumination.

At 9 p.m., scores of paper lanterns hanging from the eaves and balconies of all the cottages were lit, many with candles, some with electric bulbs. The crowd dispersed from the Tabernacle and began a long, slow swirl of awe around the campground. The lanterns were intricate and beautiful, the atmosphere respectful and joyous, and the evening's numbers boggling -- so many glowsticks being swung and tossed by children, so many Illumination participants meandering along cottage lawns, so many delicate lanterns hanging brightly. I had to wonder how long the cottage owners maintain them for this one night of glory, and how the tiny cottages even have space to store so many fragile objects.


James Sanford really dug into the Illumination and blogged it here; the Vineyard Gazette also published a story. Yes, they somehow managed to fit an Illumination Night story in their Obama edition on Friday, an issue riddled with 11 Obama-centric stories and peppered with many other presidentially-tinged pieces. More to come tomorrow, when the President lands on the island for his weeklong stay and I post an entry about the ruckus that's been steadily building on the Vineyard.

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Coda to yesterday's entry: Mediterranean was the initial focus in a Boston Globe article titled "The action begins on the Vineyard." The premise: Although the President isn't here yet, plenty of big-name visitors are. Mediterranean hosted a gala for the cable channel BET with Erykah Badu performing on a stage in our dining room. My manager, Mike Ritchie, a great guy from Toronto, is the first source quoted in the article.

Nothing gold can stay

There's not much permanence here.

Oak Bluffs was once Cottage City. Vineyard Haven is actually Tisbury, but listed officially as Vineyard Haven in numerous instances. All kinds of restaurants and shops this year just opened, are in new locations, new ownership, new theme. Hearing locals talk about the island's past, almost all the places they're fond of have washed away with the tides and come back in different iterations. Another thing that would drive me crazy here. In a wedding story I did, the couple fondly referenced a post-nuptial brunch at Lola's. It doesn't exist anyone. (It's Mediterranean now, where I work.) I wonder what the actual turnover rate with businesses here is.

Et tu, Edgartown? One name couldn't pull you through three and a half centuries?

This all leads to a lack of community, as well. I'm sure any stalwart Vineyarder would tell you differently, but a place where people summer (using the season as a verb makes me shudder) inevitably is a place with a shifty community. You may live in a house year round, then be happy to have neighbors come June, then be unsettled when you realize, oops, they were weekly rentals, your new neighbors will be arriving shortly. Best of luck forming a true bond and sense of community.

There's certainly something here that draws people to come for a lifetime, as it's happened 20,000 or so times, enough to flesh out a year-round population. But I doubt it's the reliability or permanence of the place. More likely the isolation or eccentricity of island life that calls to some.

Island life from another writer's eyes

Before I get to the point, I have to share that the bartender I bar-backed for last night said Jake Gyllenhaall used to bus tables for him in Edgartown before he went all Donnie Darko and got famous. The bartender, Greg, an islander born and raised, said JG was "a good kid." Greg was also was acquainted with Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was as unattractive in real life as onscreen.

Okay. The point. Um...um....oh, yeah. Another intern at This Week on MV, James Sanford, has been blogging profusely since he trekked from Michigan to the island for the summer. He is a former film writer from Michigan's Kalamazoo Gazette and had a column/blog called At The Movies. He's interviewed Stephen Spielberg, Leo DiCaprio, Chris Walken and, most recently, McG, director of "Terminator: Salvation" and a Kalamazoo native. Wow. [That last link is James's' McG profile]

James blogs at http://jamesislandlife.blogspot.com much more regularly and often longer than me, but the real clincher is that if you browse his blog, you'll be getting a totally different perspective from a guy who has a car, more money to spend, an insane passion for dining out -- he's tried a ton of lobster dishes already -- and an earnest approach to exploring the Vineyard. He also got a jumpstart on me with just-for-blog reporting with this awesome article about a Bulgarian bartender flippin' bottles around. Read him, follow him, enjoy. Just don't completely defect to his blog and forget to check back here.

Quick snapshot of my bookstore, the Book Den East, as I head in for a day of book organizing, selling and reading. I'll acquaint you with my store more thoroughly in a future post.

Internationality Pt. 2

When I came back from Wales, I changed my residence on Myspace (it was still cool then) to Citizen of the World. I'd had my first taste of internationality -- meeting dozens of friends from around the world, talking about differences in our cultures from the big (politics) to the small (what noise a rooster makes in German, French, Spanish, Italian) and saying goodnight to flatmates in three or four different languages. It was incredible, and I learned what an astonishing amount you can discover about the world and about your own culture from conversation alone.

When I moved into my apartment in Oak Bluffs, I knew there were five Bulgarians and 11 total roommates. I was hoping we might be able to have a watered-down duplicate of the experience I had in Wales, but no dice. Everyone ended up staying in their own rooms and doing their own things. It's rare to see anyone else in this house, even if I cook a meal and spend an hour and a half in the kitchen. A few of my Bulgarian roommates are pleasant and we smile and wave when we pass each other in the street, but they're here to make money, not friends. They've told me.

But all hope for internationality was not lost. Martha's Vineyard is a huge hotbed of Brazilians -- some summer workers and many year-round residents. The restaurant where I work, Mediterranean, is no exception -- at least five Brazilians work there, meaning their mother tongue is Portuguese, meaning I get to use some of my kinda-similar-but-not-that-similar Español with them. On Sunday morning last weekend, I had most of a conversation with one of the dishwashers in Spanish, peppering the rest with Portuguese from her and English from me. (Favorite parts: Her asking if I had a girlfriend -- "Tienes una amorada? Tienes una novia?" and learning she has a son my age in Brazil).

One of the only real friends I've made thus far is Marcio, also de Brasil, from Rio de Janiero. He'd been living in Orlando for the last seven years working for Disney. He's a surfer and tennis fiend. He has some great stories to tell. I like Brazilians if they dream to go to Portugal, since it is to Brazil what France is to Quebec or England is to America (sort of). Marcio wants to. Danubia, a server at Med, does not. [That link is a cool story about her in the Vineyard Gazette]

There's a crowd of five or so Serbians my age who work at Mediterranean. Haven't learned too much about them yet although they're wicked nice. Drago's eyes absolutely lit up when I told him I like football/soccer and he said, "Soccer is my life," and told me how he's played his entire life, semi-professionally most recently. The Red Sox are always playing on our bar's TV, so a few of these Serbian gents have afforded me my first opportunities to explain baseball from point A to point Z. Thanks, Oggy and Zell.

Mediterranean's secret weapon is Gilbert (pronounced Jill-bear) from beautiful Nice, France (I saw the city last March and was enamored beyond belief). He has the authentic French half-mustache, with the top half carefully shaved, and sees serving and restauranting in general as an art. If you dine at Mediterranean, I'm going to stringently suggest you request Gilbert. He's lived in America since the '60s, first moving to New York, and talking with him about The Beatles and New York in the '60s is out of this world. He saw the Rolling Stones on 14th Street right after "Satisfaction" dropped and the show began with an hour of nonstop screaming from excited girls -- screaming so loud he couldn't hear anything but the band's bass. He also saw The Doors before they had an album out. He can be a little snooty about some things, but he calls the Canadian variants of French "a treasure." He said he felt at home the first time he visited Quebec. This Frenchman also reminded me how cool it feels to walk or ride your bike with a piece of long grass jutting from your mouth like a cowboy.

I work with Ben, from Israel, where military service is requisite. I said something like, "Yikes...not like it's exactly a peaceful place to serve." He replied matter-of-factly, "Yeah. I had friends get killed." Yowch...

Our floor manager is Mike from Toronto. I went a whole shift without noticing his Canadian accent, and now I pick it up in every sentence. It's awesome. He chimed in on a Beatles conversation Gilbert and I were having, adding that Montreal seems to still be in Beatlemania -- it's all he hears on the radio the entire time he visits the city. Mike also says cheers for thanks, something I sorely miss from living in the UK.

Piret, the woman who trained me at the bookstore, is from Estonia. She and the owner, Ivo, run a resort in Estonia. They're going there for the summer. They invited another Estonian to be the caretaker of their home for the summer and to work in the bookshop. The day Piret and Ivo trained Anna, with Anna's miniature Estonian son prancing around the shop, it felt like I worked in a used bookstore in Estonia. The four of them spoke the language the entire day.

These are some little tastes and stories of internationality from everyday life here. I'll spin some of these threads out more in later entries, especially the Brazilianness of Martha's Vineyard, but even just at the tip of the iceberg, it's an eye-opening blast to be around so many cultures again.

Obrigado [Portuguese for thanks] for reading.

Monday meandering

Rather than give you the substantial blog I've been writing in my head for more than a week, I've got some frenetic Monday morning musings for you. And the more I wait on that bigger blog, the more experiences enrich the final product. So no worries, mate.

I love living on Circuit Avenue. I woke up at 10 this morning for my first day off after a 12-day stretch without a free day (also worked 70 hours in seven days last week -- and people following me on Twitter and Facebook, I promise this is the last time I'll spout this stupid fact). Before eating breakfast or doing anything morning-ly, I tossed on some gym shorts, an old T-shirt and some flip-flops and sauntered down to the bank and the post office.

Leaving my house, I remembered I've wanted to note on here that we don't lock our front door. Ever. And we live on a very hopping street. Um? Not sure if this is the norm around here -- probably not since no one in our 12-person house is an actual islander, but it feels like it goes hand-in-hand with the let's-be-casual-we're-livin'-on-an-island-ooh-yeah-we-jammin' attitude. Oh well, I'm not freaking out about it -- just hoping you've forgotten where I live and you don't have the ambition to hunt back through this blog and find out and come rob whatever riches you can discover in our house's common areas; i.e. the kitchen and weird living room.

Stepping onto Circuit Ave., I saw a guy that looked nothing like John Krasinski but nonetheless made me think of John Krasinski walking down my street. If someone did one of those little charts of a brain for me, there would certainly be a small piece of the pie dedicated to celebrity sightings, a field I am severely unversed in. Anyway, I pictured it being John Krasinski (Jim of "The Office" if you've stubbornly refused the above-offered link) and imagined my reaction being a casual, gun-shaped finger point, the gesture saying without words and with ultimate slickness, "Ayyy, you're John Krasinski!" and continuing my walk down the street, smilin' and whistlin'.

Hopefully I can keep my cool to this degree when I actually do see some stars here. If I see some stars? No, when. Stay optimistic.

The bank where I opened a savings account (your bank is probably not on this island -- accept it) is directly next door to the post office. Makes for a nice one-two, bing-bang-boom experience. The post office was actually a great experience this morning. There's usually a brief wait to check your mail (I have general delivery -- the post office doesn't deliver to my house) and up ahead in the line, the postal employees congratulated some old fella on his birthday. I was thinking, wow, that's local service. Pretty cool they knew his birthday.

I got to the window, slapped my MaineCard down on the counter after a nice "Hi, how ahh ya?" from the lady and asked her for general delivery for Zach Dionne. The woman started rifling through some cubbies and a guy deeper in the mail room goes, "Is that Zach?" I said yeah, and he held up a package he'd just found for me, saying, "Hi Zach, how ya doin? Good timing!"

If you don't get how cool that is, never mind. I love New England.

Going to play tennis with Marcio de Brasil. First time on an island court!

Cool column about MV in the Globe

A UMass professor and author wrote a guest column Monday in the Boston Globe under the guise of advice for the Obamas if they are truly vacationing here later this summer, in the tradition of the Clintons in years past. What it really served as was a nicely nuanced piece from a writer who is clearly intimately familiar with the Vineyard -- leagues moreso than my been-here-two-and-a-half-weeks self. I'm very grateful to the kind old fella who dropped this article off at the bookstore for my boss but recommended I read it first. I won't post the whole text below, but here are some bits I liked:

"Like all islands, Martha's Vineyard is a head case, mysterious, a unique coinage, cut off, stuck-up, a loner, a bit of a drama queen. Newcomers often experience the island as snobby, and not just in the obvious terms of how much property you own and its value. The island sometimes feels like a club for which there are secret rules that no one appears all that eager to share."

A few genius grafs about island's etymology include:

"The names play games with your head, teasing fake definitions from the sounds themselves. Edgartown could be a scary theme park based on stories by Poe. . . Oak Bluffs a strategy in poker . . . Tisbury a quaint way to describe the inside of a pie."

Although none of my jobs are listed, I can relate:

"Memories of having held certain summer jobs are a badge, whether the work was backbreaking, such as picking any of their 10 different kinds of lettuce at Morning Glory Farms, especially if you biked to work in the predawn hours, or mundane, such as bagging at Stop & Shop, or high-toned, such as being a hostess at Atria in Edgartown, or classic, such as scooping ice cream at Mad Martha's."

Check it out if you like what you see. Great way to get a better sense of this island I'm calling home for another three months.

Boat shoes

I've been wearing a pair of boat shoes with socks for two years. Today, in trying to be more of a true islander, I'm leaving the socks at home. I'll probably be on my feet all day at the bookstore -- I hope my feet don't pay me back for this with bruises and blisters.



Side note: Can't believe I couldn't find a Jimmy Buffet lyric about boat shoes to go with this entry.

Sider note: EELS fan or no, I think this soft, wonderful new tune may make your day.

Sidest note: How to know when you're a man: When your feet are as big or bigger than your dad's, even though he's still taller.

Swindlers' Vineyard

I feel like everyone here is trying to rip everyone off. I'm paying at least $5 to do my laundry as I write this. It's $9 for a six-pack of craft beer brewed a block away from me.

Worst of all, my landlords want $30 per night for visitors. Oh, hey, scratch that whole, "Come visit me in this beautiful place!" thing unless you're rich. Scratch the whole idea of having a smooth summer with my girlfriend despite being 6 hours apart and each of us having to spend more money than we can afford just to get to the other. How the hell does $30 per night stack up to "defray the costs of cleaning"? Delusional. Things are going to get real miserable real quick between my landlords and I if there's no room for compromise.

I've been trying to put together a post about my initial impression of the people who populate this island and I just can't get past this overwhelming sense of people trying to make a quick buck at the cost of decency and sense. It seems like a lot of folks here are trying to get away with the laid-back, cool islander image when they're really scheming as many ways as they can to gouge tourists and probably their own year-round kind.

Take my bike repair, for example. The shop was manned by a bleach-blond, surfer kind of dude and an all-smiles Brazilian guy. The place was empty on Sunday morning and they were all about fixing my bike and helping me out. New tape on the handlebars (which they conveniently omitted was $18 and I had to spy for myself), air in the tires, new dinky reflectors and not much else came up to $45. They charged $25 for labor to work on it for 20 minutes. Prime example of people here acting laid back until the check rolls around, when you find out you've been screwed. Landlords were the same way. No mention in the lease of $30 per night, no mention of it being a "rooming house, not an apartment," as I was bluntly told this morning. But, oh yeah, there were plenty of smiles when I first viewed the apartment -- oops, rooming house, sorry! -- plenty of faux, laid-back vibes emitted from the landlords, and the promise of a new patio on the roof which, shucks, turns out that on move-in day, that whole shebang didn't quite happen. Sorry if the roof thing was a big selling point for you, along with the allure of such a beautiful place for your family and friends to come visit! Oh well, enjoy your stay, thanks for the ludicrous chunk of change. We'll be laughing all the way to the bank while we devise other ways to rip you off and inflict misery on your otherwise lovely summer.

In a foul mood. Out on the bike with my eyes peeled for a better blog to write.

Life before job

I don't start working at the restaurant until Friday. Here's a typical day for me so far (which doesn't say much as I've been here since Saturday, but c'mon. Lists rule):

9 a.m. – Alarm goes off. Fall back asleep.
10 a.m. – Wake up.

10 to 11 a.m. – Breakfast, shower, get ready to go out.
11 to 11:30 a.m. – Find out laundry will cost at least $5 per load. Comb Circuit Avenue for sunglasses; too bright to read outside without them. Find a pair for $6. Rock and roll.

11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. – Read Stephen King’s “Desperation” in Ocean Park, on the grass. Pretty chilly actually. Also strange to be reading something gruesome outdoors on a beautiful, sunny day.

Ocean Park reading vantage point. Not the best picture of the nice spot, but this kid was absolutely terrorizing the geese. Running at them, screaming, nonstop. Probably something I did at age whatever.

12:30 to 1 p.m. – Skype with Mary.
1 to 2 p.m. – Write for blog.
2 to 4 p.m. – Nap way longer than I mean to. Mum will later justify this to me by saying, "You've worked hard for four years in college. You deserve to rest." Nice. No more guilt.
6:30 to 7:15 p.m. – Bike a little more than two miles to Vineyard Haven to buy sesame tahini from Stop & Shop. They don’t have it at the grocery store directly across the street from me. I need it to make hummus. Think of some stuff for the blog and jot it down.
7:15 to 8 p.m. – Stop at a beach on the ride bike and watch the sunset. Write some more.
8 p.m. – Reset my trip meter on my GPS so I can have a vague idea how much I bike this summer. Unfortunately I only bring the GPS with me if I don’t know where I’m going. I need a bike mount for it. Anyway, get up to 26 mph. Cruisin'.
8:15 – 9:30 p.m. – Make hummus. Eat hummus, red peppers, cheese, pita bread. This will not help me become less skinny. Talk to mum and sister on phone.
10:30 p.m. – Reinforcements arrive: Rhiannon and Andrew from UMaine show up to live in MV for the summer. We grab a beer at Offshore Ale, an island brewery and pub where you can throw peanuts all over the floor. I have a delicious coffee porter.
12 a.m. – G’night to Mary, doze off with a movie.

If you're interested, I guess I'm Twittering -- twitter.com/ZachDionne.

The Beginning of the Beginning

I joined the Dharma Initiative and moved to The Island yesterday.


I graduated college. I came to Martha's Vineyard for an internship at a weekly newspaper. I'll spend the next four months writing arts and entertainment, features, and stuff-to-do stories for This Week on Martha's Vineyard [Web site isn't up yet] and working -- see: hopefully getting crazy mad insane wicked good tips -- at Mediterranean Restaurant.

My new pad is at 37 Circuit Avenue -- a main street in the island's most hoppin' town, Oak Bluffs. I live above a Black Dog store, the LL Bean of Martha's Vineyard, where all the schwag with the black pooch is sold. Incidentally, I've seen a bunch of real-life, tongue-waggin' dags that resemble the MV icon already.

I'm living with -- wait for it -- 9 girls and two guys. My friend Kiwi asked if Hillary Duff will be my roommate and Steve Martin will be my dad. Ha. Ha. Ha. Here's hoping it's more like my living situation in Wales than a sorority -- or a homeless shelter. Regardless, I don't plan to waste much time stagnating indoors, although I do have a desk in a little corner nook of my bedroom (like, ahem, my main man Stephen King) that I'm looking forward to writing at.

I'll keep this blog as fast, furious and as far as possible from my everything-I-write-has-to-be-epic-length tendencies, so as to stay encouraged and motivated to update many times a week. I'm titling it Chapter One since this summer on MV is my first step in the REAL real world, after college. I'm not sure what Chapter Two will be yet, but no worries -- I'm just going to chronicle my life, exploration, and writing experiences on this island as thoroughly as possible in this blog. Stick around -- it's going to be fun.