The cops are on to us. They’re waiting just around a bend in the road, hoping to catch us if we’re speeding, which of course we are. We have a boat to catch. We left the house at 6:47 a.m. for a 7 a.m. ferry, and it takes 12 1/2 minutes to get to the boat if we’re not speeding. That leaves 30 seconds for the mad scramble from curb to freight deck, which isn’t quite enough time when you’re a 13-year-old loaded down with a lunch box, a heavy backpack, and maybe a violin or a lacrosse stick.
So: we’re speeding.
Fortunately, we’re onto the cops too. We know where they lurk, and we slow down just before we reach them, cruising past at exactly the speed limit with innocent looks on our faces. It’s just a routine part of the morning madness that happens every day of the school year for Islanders with kids who go to Falmouth Academy.
Nearly twenty Island families send kids to Falmouth Academy, and every school-day morning, there’s high drama in every one of those households. In kitchens across the Vineyard, sleep-deprived parents are whizzing about their kitchens in high gear at 6 a.m., making breakfast, packing lunch boxes, exhorting bleary-eyed children to hurry up, and engaging in some form of the minute-by-minute countdown: “Take your vitamins – we have to leave in three minutes!” Or, “Is your backpack packed? We’re leaving in a minute and a half!”
We all have our routines down. At the Baumhofers’, for example, Kim (the mom) rises at 5:45 to make breakfasts and lunches for daughters Clea and Signe. At roughly 6:15, both girls’ alarm clocks sound, and both girls turn them off and go back to sleep. A few minutes later, Kim makes a pass by their rooms to wake them up for real. The girls come downstairs when they hear their mother honking the car horn, and grab their backpacks, lunch boxes, and breakfasts, which they eat on the way to the boat after they’ve leaped into the car.
“I like to take them myself,” says Kim. “If their father is driving them, my anxiety is much worse, so I’d rather just do the whole thing myself.”
Just as every family has its routine, we all have our favorite horror stories. In the case of the Baumhofers, there was the time that Kim neglected to set her alarm, and no one woke up until ten minutes after the boat had sailed. My own worst horror story occurred last year, on my daughter Truda’s second day as a new student.
We hadn’t yet worked out our routine, and so the morning was especially hectic. I was half-asleep through most of it, dressed in my bulky white bathrobe and fuzzy red slippers. I hadn’t even combed my hair. Nonetheless, Truda and her dad, who does the driving in our family, managed to get out the door at 6:35 – leaving plenty of time to make the boat. At 6:46, just as I was about to go back to bed, the phone rang.
I was seized with a sense of dread and foreboding. It could only be my husband at that hour, and if he was calling when he knew that I was heading back to sleep, it couldn’t be good.
“Truda left her backpack at home,” he said.
“She left her backpack?” I said. Absolutely everything she needs for school is in that thing, which weighs about forty pounds. All her books, her pens and pencils, her homework, and her Steamship commuter book are in there, along with the cell phone she needs for calling to tell us what boat she’s taking home. “How could she forget her backpack?”
“Do you think you could bring it down?” my husband asked.
I looked at my watch. It was now 6:47.
“I’ll never make it,” I said. I was about to launch into a tirade about how she needs to be responsible for her things, how this is her education at stake here, yada yada, but already my maternal instincts were gnawing away at my indignation. This was, after all, only her second day at a new school; it would be humiliating for her to arrive empty-handed. She’d be embarrassed having to ask classmates to borrow supplies. I took one last, longing look at my bed, and said, “Okay. I’m coming.”
I ran down the stairs, grabbed the backpack, and leapt into my Subaru. I did 65 through my development, sweeping past the quaint, hand-painted sign that reads, “Speed Limit 14 1/2 mph.” On State Road, I slowed to 60, until I came up behind a pickup doing the speed limit. “Come on!” I exhorted him, but he didn’t take the hint. When we reached a passing zone, the coast was clear, and I veered into the oncoming traffic lane and gunned it. As I passed him, I studiously avoided looking at him, and even covered my face with my hand as best I could. I was, after all, wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy red slippers, and my hair was poking out in every direction. I must have looked like something out of the Diary of a Mad Housewife.
It suddenly occurred to me that I was going to drive into the ferry terminal parking lot, and there were going to be several hundred feet – and many people and cars – between me and my daughter, who was waiting by the boat. I called my husband’s cell phone.
“I draw the line at running across the Steamship parking lot in my bathrobe and red fuzzy slippers,” I said.
When I pulled into the terminal area at 6:59 and 30 seconds, I could see my husband and daughter still standing near the boat. I tried to drive closer but was stopped by a policeman. I held up the red backpack and pointed to it. He looked alarmed, and I realized that, given my appearance, he might think I was an insane person indicating that I had a bomb. Fortunately, my daughter spotted me and ran over to get the pack.
“Thanks, Mom!” she yelled over her shoulder as she sprinted to the freight deck, hopping onto it just seconds before they closed it off.
I gave an embarrassed grin and a little wave to the policeman and left the lot. Driving home, I came up with our first Morning Ritual Rule: The backpack gets packed up the night before and left at the garage door.
On the boat, the kids quickly recover from the morning frenzy. They hang out in clusters, some playing cards, others doing homework. At one table, they might be talking. At another, one of them might break out a guitar and play a few songs. All very relaxed. Of course they’re relaxed. They’re on the boat. And I am at home examining a gray hair that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there an hour ago.