Marco? Polo?

When the exciting part of this narrative left off, my ability to make reservations was in question and the general geography of Connecticut was a beautiful new dark landscape to be explored in both directions as we drove - effortlessly - up and down I-95 looking for a highway exit that both of us were certain, just plain dead-certain, didn’t exist.
It did.
So does Trumbull. They take hockey, both field and ice, very seriously in Trumbull, even more so in the Marriott we finally located. Hundreds of tie-or-skirt clad young people milled around the hotel bar with awards and bright red stadium blankets under their arms. I’ve seen people take a lot of different things to a bar before - laptops, children, ice cream cones, rollerblades - but never a blanket. They all had them, each with their names stitched in a corner: Tommy Perkins, Ice Hockey. Jenny Farnster, Field Hockey.
The morning took us back to Stamford where we commuted into NYC and wandered the Met in the morning and Central Park in the afternoon. New York during the first weeks of a late spring is utterly consumable. The breeze feels a crisp sixty-five or seventy and women are sprawled out on towels in their first new bikini of the year, legs and arms the color of the three clouds in the sky, sunglasses on, smiling and rummaging through bags from D’Agostino. It’s charming.
A "friend of the family", Chris Hayes from thus known only as Hayes, and I had been exchanging calls and text messages all morning and a loose plan of jumping the Hudson into Hoboken had taken shape. I’d not seen Hayes since flopping about on Lake Keuka with him several summers earlier. The line on him, from Brians True&Slavin is: You can’t oversell Hayes. They were as right that summer as they would be today if one of them emerged from the New Jersey PATH station and saw that smiling manchild waving a half-block away.
I realize that I’ve very loosely used the term "friend of the family" in the above description of Christopher Hayes. Here is how that works. My mother may never meet Hayes. This is unfortunate for both. When you are a little human, your "family" are the people that sit with you in the car on the way to church. They are the people who eat all your favorite cereal on purpose or tie you up around the knees and ankles with fishing line and throw you in the bushes when it’s snowing outside and you’re still wearing your polyester blue shorts and white polo-catholic-school shirt because you just got home from Great Books where your school friends and you, all twelve or thirteen years old, are forced to discuss the subtle nuances of character development in Little Women and Silas Marner or the anguish of isolationism in Robinson Crusoe. That’s your family when you’re little.
When you get to be a grown up (a shadowy term that never quite happens if your mother still worries about you ingesting yellow snow, you know, on accident) your FAMILY are the people who love and care about you, have different last names, eat all your favorite cereal on purpose, drink beer with you and (importantly) have met and/or are approved by one of your other family members. Until this time they are "friends of the family." Since Hayes is cousin-in-law to Brian True, a prominent member of my adult family, he could be compiled into an inventive third category - - but that’s not what we’re doing. This is a road trip not an inebriated genealogy symposium.
Ahem. Turns out - hah - that Hayes and his adorable counterpart Lauren are headed off to the Dominican Republic for a week and offer their tree-fort-style loft to us for that week. The exchange went a little something like this.
"Do you need another beer too?"
"Yes I do."
"Hey we’re going to the Dominican Republic for a week, you two should stay at our apartment. You want to do that?"
"Yes I do."
"Good."
"Good."
So we drank all night. Just after midnight when the bartender cleared away the mind-eraser glasses, it dawned on me. Hoboken is in New Jersey which is separated from New York City by a river and a state border. New York City is in New York and is separated from Stamford, Connecticut by another state line, the Bronx, on that particular night several angry Yankee fans, and a two-mile stretch of asphalt between the Stamford commuter train station and the hotel bed which I felt ready to enjoy if it and the city buildings would stop wobbling. Sobriety would be the fourth state in the mix. It was not on the map I had.
The joy of the East Coast, a joy that isn’t known by people west of, say, Tennessee, is that you do things in different states sometimes. Whole other states! Different Governors! Different license plates! Same oddly violent and hurried disposition, however.
For a long-haired former Maui resident that wasn’t used to leaving the two square miles of his tiny island town, getting home from a bar and walking around in three different states to do so feels a little like playing Marco Polo in a Gulfstream jet.
"Oh, Hayes."
"What’s up there Snapp?"
"We gotta go I think."
"Why? You want another shot, different bar? We can switch bars if you want."
"We have to sleep in Connecticut and this is New Jersey. I’m not used to that kind of thing."
And the next day when we awoke in Connecticut, we decided to drive to Massachusetts - - because that’s the kind of thing we are used to doing. Wake up one place, head out to some other place. We snagged the keys from Lauren, wished her well in D.R., took a quick nap in a Greenwich CT park under a pink flowering tree somewhere between Stepford and Old Greenwich... aloha for now, mahalo for reading.