My wild & precious life

On what it 's like being 50, female, single and straight in P'town in the winter.

About eight months ago, I decided to move Back East from L.A. because my daughter was starting boarding school in Western Mass this fall. "Mom, I don't want you to live anywhere within an hour of the school", she told me on no uncertain terms. Too bad, I loved living in Northampton all those years ago, and wouldn't have minded living there again. I could have gone against her wishes, but why create tension? I was here to be her support and she wanted to try out independence. I respect that. Massachusetts was big enough for both of us.

So what did I do? I went back to my roots. Figuring that I had loved (and I mean LOVED) living on the Vineyard year round in my youth, I would look on Cape Cod for a place to settle. In that misguided moment, I thought the Vineyard would be "too isolated". Hah!

One day, several month before I was to leave, I had a thought: I wonder if there is a craigslist for Cape Cod? Now, some of you may have never heard of craigslist, the wildly popular mostly-free online bulletin board that is widely used by city-dwellers worldwide. Over the years on craigslist in LA, I have found: jobs, employees, boyfriends, activity partners, concert tickets at the last moment, affinity groups, things to buy, buyers for things I wanted to sell (including my car!), dates, volunteers, someone to write me a resume, a personal assistant for my dad, roommates, a logo designer, a housekeeper...you get the picture. So why wouldn't I check there first for a place to live and a job? After all, the 450 craigslists portals around the world get a collective average of nine billion page views a month--out of which 25 million are actual "users" in the US alone. [yes, you read that right!]

Craigslist is broken up by US states, Canadian provinces, countries around the world. If a city or metropolitan area or region is big enough, it can break off and spawn it's own list. So when I went to look, sure enough, Cape Cod had recently earned their very own craigslist page, much to my delight. And the very job I was looking for was right there on the top of the 'hospitality' job listings page. I thought it was fate, karma, destiny, kismet. That job is there for me, I thought.

Let me explain: in the big cities like New York, San Francisco (where Craig Newmark started craigslist for a bunch of his friends and colleagues in 1995) and L.A., if you create a post, your listing will stay on the first page, depending on the category, for about 5-20 minutes. On the Cape, because so few people have heard of craigslist, sometimes you can be on the first page for weeks, or even months. This is good and not so good. It was good for me that day.

So now fast forward to one sunny August morning, I come wheeling into Provincetown, possessions (much of them) in the back of my 'new to me' Jeep Liberty, I had a job, but no place to live, and I didn't know a soul. How brave, I hear you thinking. You bet it was. Brave, or maybe crazy, I haven't decided yet. But I was armed that day with the secret weapon of wanderers the world over: the powerful all-consuming delusion that everything was going to work out perfectly, as it had in the past. (what is it that they say when you first sign up with a financial investor? Something like 'past performance is no guarantee of future results.'  I might have thought of that that day, but I was blind. And delusional.)

Stay tuned for Part II (to be continued)