Time & Tide by Frank Conroy Read Free Book Online Page A

sportsmanship
    Eventually, it became a tradition, each year of play marked by its own T-shirt.
    Nothing was ever formalized beyond these rules. No records were kept. Whoever showed up showed up (“Where’s Freddie?” Pause. “Hung over.”), and there were always more than enough players. As time went on, and my sons got through their growth and began to be picked first, there were even spectators on the benches. It was a completely spontaneous happening, and it lasted thirteen years. Thirteen years! But we’d never registered anywhere, or even thought of reserving the field, which we’d taken for granted for so long—and when the island grew and the “First World” league grew also, they took the field away from us. Nantucket was changing, we all knew, but the loss of Third World Softball was particularly painful.

    Third World Softball.
    A very, very rich man who lived on the other side of the island in a sprawling compound of many houses, an artificial lake, a small golf course, and an officially correct, perfectly groomed softball field complete with dugouts, bleachers, etc., built on a whim, heard about our eviction and offered his own “field of dreams.” And it
was
like something out of a dream. A beautiful, virgin field. We started playing again with enthusiasm, which mysteriously and unsettlingly began to wane. Each Sunday a few more people couldn’t make it. The vibe changed. It became something of a duty. No one bothered us, or watched us, and yet it lost its spirit. It became artificial, somehow, which perhaps had something to do with the obscene amount of money poured into the setting. The poshness, the very perfection of the field overwhelmed the games we played on it. More people dropped. When Gene was given a box of legal releases, one to be signed by each player before each game, Third World Softball lost its soul entirely and stopped. It was over. Generosity had killed it and after thirteen years it was gone forever.
    SOME YEARS AGO an eccentric British mathematician, whose name I have forgotten, played around with Einstein’s equations and came up with a model of the universe in which time is accelerating, infinitely. In other words, the reason it seems time is going faster as we get older is because it
is
going faster. (Einstein was polite, but unimpressed.) So one’s perception would be marked by when one got on the train, so to speak. Where you got on is normal, and then things speed up.
    Something like that goes on in people’s thoughts and feelings about Nantucket. What was normal for Mooney’s people was changed by the time my college friends and I showed up in the late fifties. Most of the people who have arrived on the island, or have discovered the island in, say, the past ten years, are convinced that it is something close to perfect. The physical beauty of the moors, the deep beaches, the salt marshes, the splendid harbor, the light, the salt air, the freshness are unique and precious. It is only later that the question of critical mass might come up. How much humanity can the island hold? Is it possible that Nantucket could become a sort of aircraft carrier of expensive homes? A kind of platform out at sea? How real is the danger? Can anything be done? These are truly difficult questions, and I certainly can’t answer them.

How About Manners?
    THE MARKETPLACE IS ALWAYS OF SPECIAL interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and the like. I suppose the idea is that what goes on in the markets reveals the society itself to some extent. That is certainly true for the “Gray Lady of the Sea.”
    The Cumberland Farm store on the east side of town is a convenience store now—cigarettes, Twinkies, canned soup, Wonder bread, and so on—but it started out a long time ago as a sort of cooperative, organized by some local moms who were fed up with the high price of milk at the supermarket and decided to do