The Cape

I’ve been digitizing old photos over the past few weeks. I have a ton of them. There’s no way I could save all of them in the event of a fire. I wouldn’t even want to. There are too many.   Walt Whitman’s lines “I am large, I contain multitudes” keep popping into my head. I’ve gone through so many phases in my nearly 60 years. I contain multitudes. We all do.   One theme I’m finding is that we (like everyone) mostly took photos on vacations and holidays. And there’s one vacation destination in Massachusetts that everyone knows: Cape Cod. It’s known simply as “the Cape.” (There’s another popular cape in Massachusetts, but that one gets referred to by its full name: Cape Ann.)   Cape Cod is where the Kennedys summered and it’s just one of those places that everyone in Massachusetts has memories of. If you didn’t have a friend with a house “down the Cape,” then you probably rented one or stayed in a Cape hotel at least a few times in your life.   My earliest memories of the Cape include barfing after eating scallops at Thompson’s Clam Bar, having my grandmother tell me that they thought I’d drowned when I went missing at the beach one day, and waiting for the sun to come out.   I’ve been lucky to visits “The Islands” many times too. (If you’re from Massachusetts, you know that The Islands are Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.) But the Cape is where my earliest vacation memories happened.   I’m realizing that the places where our memories were made—where our lives have played out—are quite meaningful. They’re the settings for our stories.   The Cape, August 1970   At the beach on Cape Cod, 1970, with my Italian grandmother in a bathing suit (a rare occurrence). I don’t remember how I hurt my knee, but I do remember wearing that huge bandage.