Twelve years ago we were living in New York, where I was working as an advertising copywriter but growing more and more impatient with corporate politics. I was looking for a chance to break away and perhaps work as a free-lancer. Coincidentally, our son was about to start school, and, we couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to raise a child on the Vineyard, where we had been summering for years.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that if you’re going to venture out on your own, you might want to live somewhere close to the action. But conventional wisdom is nothing if not conventional, and at the time everyone was preaching “Think outside the box.”

There was actually some convoluted logic to moving to the Vineyard. Over the years, I’d established a lot of contacts in New England, so with any luck at all, I’d be drawing on them as well. Suddenly the Vineyard was beginning to make sense. It was more or less equal striking distance (equally inconvenient) from both Boston and New York. And besides, with the advent of the Internet, and the dawn of the cyber-revolution, who would really care where I was? At least that was the theory.

So we made the move, enrolled Spike in school, added on to our summer home, and built a small office out in the woods. I had actually tried my hand at free-lance copywriting some years before, but had made the mistake of setting up an office inside my house. There were two problems. One was that when the kids came home from school, they’d see me sitting at my desk staring at the wall, so they’d try to get me to go out and toss a ball around. I’d explain to them that I was working, but they’d say, “No you’re not,” so I’d go out and play ball, and that was it for the day.

The other problem was purely psychological. You need a little distance between your work life and your personal life. I had to be able to get away from the gravitational pull of my computer. So that’s why the office was a necessity.

I love my office. It’s a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot, post-and-beam affair with a couple of skylights and a zebra head on the wall. His name is Zippy, and he’s very old, dating back to a time when people went on safaris and shot and mounted zebras. Zippy’s right lip is falling off because he used to hang over the fireplace and every time I’d go to stoke the coals, I’d hit my head on his chin when I straightened up, and gray dust would sprinkle into my hair like a taxidermist’s dandruff.

When Zippy was first presented to me many years ago I had mixed feelings about having a zebra head on the wall. Not that I’m against hunting – it’s just that, well, it’s almost like having a cow up there. But then I thought, Roy Rogers supposedly had Trigger stuffed and mounted. Not only that, one of my best friends had a stuffed chicken in his living room, and it was a sure-fire conversation starter, so what the hell, I figured. I’m all for conversation.

Of course, there is one problem with my office: I have no one to talk to. Free-lance writing is a solitary vocation, and over the years only a handful of people have ventured out to see me; I can’t say that it’s always gone that well.

A few years back, Joyce and I were both at that stage of life where we needed reading glasses but were in denial. We figured that some morning we’d just wake up and our blurry vision would be gone, like a head cold or a rash. So rather than go to an optometrist, we bought those cheap, off-the-rack glasses instead. It got to be kind of a joke, seeing who could buy the most outrageous pair. Joyce retired the trophy, however, when she came back from Ocean State Job Lot with a box full of beauties, one pair more hideous than the next. I selected a particularly stylish pair to be my office glasses: narrow Ben Franklins with bright red-and-green-speckled metallic frames. The only one ever to see me out there was an eighty-year-old zebra with glass eyes and taxidermy dust, so what difference did it make what I looked like? Of course, as it turned out, that wasn’t entirely true.

Several months later I actually did have a client come to visit, but by then wearing my Job Lot glasses had become second nature. All in all I thought the meeting went well. I took him through my thinking, told him about my background in Boston and New York, and of course made a big point about how, just because I was out in the woods, it didn’t mean I wasn’t deadly serious about being totally professional. It wasn’t until after he left that I caught my reflection in the window, saw Elton John looking back at me, and realized that perhaps I was sending off mixed signals.

But aside from looking stupid and the occasional deer eating my Internet-access cable line, everything has worked out reasonably well. I periodically travel to Boston or New York for meetings, and for the most part people are understanding about, and in some cases quite receptive to, the idea of me living and working on the Vineyard. In fact, as I was to find out shortly after moving here, it’s not all that uncommon.

I got a call one day from an old friend in Boston who said there was someone coming in from out of town who was going to need a writer, and would I like to meet with him? I said I’d be glad to and suggested a mutually convenient spot in the Back Bay. The meeting went off as planned and I’ll never forget our first exchange:

“Glad to meet you, Ed. I’m Geoff – how was your trip into town?”

“Great, just great – what a beautiful morning – I took the seven o’clock ferry over from the Vineyard. Where’d you come in from, Geoff?”