You Say Plimoth, I Say Plymouth, Lets Call the Whole Thing Off

You might think that in a college town with two colleges and one large public university, the public schools and colleges would get together and align holidays so that all the professors in town would have vacation at the same time as their children. This seems like it would be great for everyone. Kids and their parents could enjoy vacations together. However, due to some completely inexplicable oversight UMass’s holidays turn out not to be coordinated at all with those of Amherst public schools. We happen not to have any school aged children yet—we like to think of Beckett as a prodigy, but he is not that advanced—so this shouldn’t really affect us, but it also turns out that all of the day care providers in town must take care of their own kids during the public school holidays, so we day care consumers also suffer from the lack of cooperation between the colleges and the public schools. Add to this the simple fact that Jeanne and I managed to schedule our teaching times to exactly overlap with each other, and we realized that we had a problem on our hands. After much casting around, we realized that the cheapest (and most fun) option for ensuring that Beckett didn’t run the streets and hang out smoking cigarettes behind the gym with reprobates during his week-long holiday from daycare was to fly his grandmother out to tend him. So we got to have a special visit from Grandma Diana for week. [Plimoth Plantation Cannon]

She arrived on Monday evening and she and Beckett hit it off like old buddies. By the time it came for Papa to head off to work Tuesday AM, Beckett hardly acted like he cared at all. Diana is the ultimate baby-sitter and extrovert, so she planned up a week’s worth of activities and was soon better acquainted with all of the parents of Beckett’s friends (who were all on the same circuit of kid’s activities it seems) than we are. She took Beckett to the library singing time, and to the crafts time at the kids’ museum, and to the park. We also got some free housecleaning and dinners out of Grandma. So she did double duty for us.

For the weekend, we headed off to Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth Rock (yes the spelling is different for these two Plimoth/Plymouth’s just three miles apart) and the Mayflower. Plimoth Plantation is one of those places were actors dress up and act like the original pilgrims. This is both fun and not fun. First the not fun: If you were really a pilgrim in Plimoth Plantation in 1629 and a bunch of weirdly dressed wildly impractical people butted into your affairs all day every day to ask you questions about what you were eating and why you were stacking firewood and the like and wanted to stand by you and have their friends point little black boxes and you, it would probably take about three days before you would get annoyed with them and want to hide. So the problem here is that rather than act like Plimoth pilgrims, but ones that happened to have an infinite amount of leisure time and no pressing tasks to tend to and an innate love for answering the questions, many of these actors acted like genuine pilgrims who were bothered by all the interruptions in their overly busy lives. [Native Person House-Great Architecture]

The fun part: some of the pilgrims did indeed act the way you would want them to. One fellow seemed to have nothing better to do than regale us strange passersby with all sorts of stories about town politics and wove a skillful monologue which taught us quite a bit about life and attitudes in 1629 Plimoth. It was also fun to answer one of their questions naively and have them express amazed wonderment at something we said. A different fellow asked Jeanne how old Beckett was and when she told him that he was 18 months old, he replied that he had never heard of such an odd way of reckoning age, and wondered what she would say when he was 12 years old. A woman didn’t know what Jeanne was talking about when Jeanne asked if she wore make-up and no amount of explanation could get across to her why someone would want to put extra color on their body and why anyone else would think that doing such a thing would increase ones allure. Somehow the conversation wound around to bathing and the she wondered why anyone would want to bath more than once a fortnight or so, and expressed deep concern that we were washing essential oils off our bodies by cleaning ourselves so often. It is always good to be reminded that one’s own practices are near arbitrary and just because that is the way we have always done it and the way that everybody around us does it, it doesn’t mean it's the right or best way to do it.

After Plimoth Plantation, we went to Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II. Beckett napped while Diana and Jeanne went to the Mayflower II, and then Beckett and I watched motorcycles cruise main street. Our Beckett loves motorcycles. Then it was my turn to had Beckett off to mama and grandma and visit the Mayflower II and Plymouth Rock myself. Oddly both were much smaller than one imagines, but while the rock was smaller in the disappointing kind of what’s-all-the-fuss way, the Mayflower II was smaller in an Now-I-understand-what-all-the-fuss-was way. Imagining all those people and sailors packed into that tiny ship getting sick and growing tired of the same provisions every day—it really must have been miserable. But they stuck it out for a glimmer of a different better life, and while its hard from this remove to condone the condescending way that they treated the native population when they got here, its not hard to empathize with people who were feeling their own kind of oppression or marginalization and wanted to go somewhere else and establish a different society.

All in all it was a good day. And all too soon, we had to take Grandma Diana back to the airport and send her back home again. But we had a real New England experience with her, and Beckett enjoyed becoming good friends with Grandma.