YACK on: Summer of Love
Grant Sanders
Ihave nothing but love in my heart this summer. Love for my fellow islanders. Love for the summer people. Love for the little bunnies and birdies and white tailed deer.

(And the ticks. Where have they been, the ticks? I miss them. I have not pulled a tick off my dog in five months. I send the ticks my love, wherever they are.)

I feel a deep love for various members of our elected and appointed boards who worked to try to save the Dreamland Theater. And for those people in our government who lovingly and almost constantly worked to keep those who would save the Dreamland from actually doing any saving. Everyone deserves to be loved. Don't you think? Like the people who stood up at the special town meeting and claimed to not understand the Dreamland Article. Like it was written in some obscure Icelandic dialect. Don't you just love the fact that people who can't read and comprehend simple English syntax still feel compelled to vote? I sure do! Those are exactly the kinds of people I want deciding important issues in my life.

I also have copious love for developers who really want to do the right thing but get caught up in their whole silly, profit-focused, bourgeois world and lose their way somehow. I love that about them. They are so frank. So honest. So predictable. There's money to be made and, by gum, if they don't make it, someone else will.

I personally feel a lot of love for the developer who plans to put a 112-space underground parking garage in a spot that two or three inches below the water table ten months out of the year. And I also love the idea of buying stock in an amphibious car company. We're going to need about 112 of them here on Nantucket before 2009.

Can you feel the love? I sure can.

I have love for the 215 citizens who voted to ask the town to purchase a contaminated piece of property downtown this week. And I love the fact that this parcel needs to be sealed with black top (which in itself is a hazardous and dangerous substance full of common carcinogens) or else, according to the MA DEP, children should not be allowed to be on premises for greater than four hours due to the harm the site may cause to their development. Don't you just love that? The MA DEP really cares about children, don't they? Children are our future. I believe that.

You know who else I love? Vacationers. People who tell others that their dogs belong on a leash. People who ask me, "Do you know who I am?" People who throw trash by the roadside for the Clean Team to pick up (The Clean Team loves to pick up trash, by the way, and we meet each Saturday to do just that. Check out the website at ackcleanteam.org. The clean team also loves new members.) I love people who park on sidewalks so others have to walk in the roads. Don't you just love the irony of that? I do. Irony is cool.

I love people in mountain-sized SUVs with multi-wrung step-up ladders driving around the Stop & Shop parking lot without worrying about the direction in which the large, white, painted arrows are pointing. I also love it when they stop and wait in front of the doorway for 20 minutes for their spouse to return with four bags of groceries. It would not occur to them that they might be inconveniencing others. Hubris is love, in a way. A weird way.

This August, my heart is almost overflowing with love. I love the relentless YACKon.com member who didn't like what another member wrote online, so she told him off. Nine times. Then she called his boss and told him too. Even though the subject of the discussion at hand had nothing to do with his boss or his job. You gotta love that kind of tenacity. (Some might call that kind of behavior "idiotic," but not me.) I really love the fact that she's no longer a YACKon.com member. When I'm filled with love, I just want to give back, you know?

That's the way love is, the more you give, the more you get and vise versa.

I love the fact that Cumbies raised their prices on milk by a dollar. Love the traffic situation downtown. Love that I had to pay $227 just to get to the movies in Hyannis last week because the theater here is really small. I love the long and seemingly impenetrable lines at the Juice Bar. Love the signs telling me to keep my dog off the lawn at Children's Beach. The sewer situation on Hulbert Ave is lovely, too. I love that trucks carrying building materials destined to become trophy homes on the Steamship get a price break while cars owned by hard-working islanders on a budget pay over 100% of their actual costs. I love multiple days of 100% humidity. And I love the new rotary especially when the old rotary causes a backup all the way to the new one so that no one goes anywhere and we all have the time to wave at our neighbors and summer friends.

"Hello there, Summer Friends! Can you feel the love, too?"

Happy August First. The Summer of love will be going strong for some time still.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com and he loves everyone and everything. Even feral cats. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.