Home by Another Way (15 page)

Reading the papers in St. Cecilia gives this curious combination of international perspective, American celebrity culture as viewed from afar, and small-town life that is both charming and curious. And it is endlessly fascinating if you are a newspaper person.

One day while in the market picking up supplies, I went to pick up the papers, and I stumbled on
The Golden Book of St. Cecilia
. It has become one of my most treasured possessions.

The Golden Book
is published every two years or so here. Or at least it is supposed to be. The new edition, being worked on by people who are on island time, is about eighteen months late right now. It is okay with me; I am still working my way through the two hundred odd pages of the last edition.

It is a book published by the part of the government that is trying to encourage investment from the West. The book has things about history and culture and government and all manner of things, but it is really about helping to develop the economy.

I can tell what kind of book it is, because I used to write corporate communications and advertising for a living. I never wrote a book for a country before, but I
have written them for corporations, colleges, and hospitals with larger populations and, in one case, a higher GNP. I have been around such books and the people who write them to know enough to have my salt shaker with me when I read them.

If you know how to read them, the books will tell you the things that really matter. You can discover the things about which the government is really proud. You find those things hidden between the lines about overseas investments and GNP and the information economy and all the rest.

And if you know how to read between the lines in the newspapers—something we newspaper people have spent a lifetime doing—you discover the things the people of the island care about the most.

If you read them together, the papers and the government information book, you begin to see other things as well.

One will tell you that economies in the developing world spend a higher percentage of their GNP on healthcare than do the industrialized nations. Another will
tell you that the island is especially proud they added a baby warmer at the hospital last year. One points out they have a branch campus of a West Indian medical school here to train doctors to serve throughout the Caribbean and to provide help for the local health clinic. The other celebrates the donation of a dozen chairs to the same clinic so that people who come in now have a place to sit while they wait for one of the ten doctors who work their way through the islands throughout the year.

The official word is that the island’s leaders believe that music and sports are the two greatest influences on youth, and they are committed to using those two vehicles to be involved with and to help shape the lives of the children of St. Cecilia. The other news is that the government runs summer and Easter camps for children where sports and music are taught. And that the new netball complex on Government Road is up and running.

Officially the government proclaims a responsibility to continue to preserve and to nurture the traditional
culture and folklore of the island. Which is how you get the newspaper photos of the annual kite-making workshop and the annual calypso workshop and why both things matter. A major festival is held each year as well, at Christmas and sponsored by the government, which virtually shuts down the island for a week—a week of clowns and masquerades and parades and music.

When you read the official line about the ongoing quality of life for the people of St. Cecilia, there is a great deal of talk about civility and harmony and gentleness and hospitality. And the talk and the reality bear a striking resemblance to each other.

We started to notice it at the first meal we ever ate in St. Cecilia.

The first night we were here, we went to Domingo’s to eat supper.

Domingo’s is off the main road two or three hundred yards, tucked in the trees along the beach. It has a raised
plywood dance floor and several thatched-roofed huts with lights in the top that hang down over the picnic tables. The music is good—Western rock’n’roll mostly with some calypso mixed in. At Domingo’s we eat ribs and lobster and grilled chicken and salad. They serve it all on big platters you keep passing back and forth.

Domingo was actually born and raised on a nearby island. He was a caddy at the golf course there and cooked sometimes in the clubhouse grill. When he was twenty, he came across the straits to take a job cooking lunch on the beach for some of the workers who were building the big resort on St. Cecilia. When the resort was finished, the other workers left. Domingo simply moved his grill about fifty yards down the beach and opened a restaurant.

When we arrived at the beach and at our table, Domingo himself—a beautiful man in a white golf shirt and crisp linen shorts and dreadlocks—greeted us and came and sat at our table for a while to say hello and to make us feel welcome.

The time came to pay the bill, and we pulled out our
credit cards. The young man who was waiting on our table told us they do not take credit cards at Domingo’s. Who knew?

We did not have enough cash between us to settle the bill and pay for the taxi back to Windbreak. It was clearly too far to walk and too late for me to do so had it been close enough to walk.

“Let me see if I can find Domingo,” I said, not knowing exactly what I was going to say to Domingo when I did find him.

I reintroduced myself to Domingo and explained to him we had had a fine time and had enjoyed the food and the hospitality but we did not have enough cash to pay the bill. I could have it tomorrow when the banks were open, but right now I was out of cash and out of luck.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

I told him.

“Ah,” he said with a smile, “then you will be back. And you can pay me then.” He shook my hand and asked if we needed for him to arrange a ride.

The next day we went into town to get the money for Domingo and to visit the market for fresh fruits and vegetables to take back to the cottage. After buying a few things from a lady named Linda, we tried to buy a few mangoes from a lady in the next stall.

We found ourselves without enough small change. We were having trouble communicating as well. We might have had enough change and did not know it.

Linda stepped in. When she realized the problem, she handed the lady two coins out of her own pocket. “You can pay it back to me when you are here again sometime,” she said. Which we did, of course.

I know it may sound like it, but I do not kid myself that everything on St. Cecilia is open and aboveboard or that all people are treating all other people with civility at all times.

Some of our friends here on the island had their dogs poisoned in a dispute over whose cows could
wander over whose property line. I have received a blank stare or two while in certain stores and shops, the kind of stare reserved for people who are perceived to be intruding on someone else’s turf. There is one clerk at the market who fails to grin back at me every time I am in her line at the counter, no matter how charming I happen to have been that day. I will get her to grin back yet, though.

I think I got hustled pretty good by the car-hire company one time when I was here. And the exchange rate has some flexibility in it, depending on who is behind the counter at the Heptagon and which bank you go to and which taxi driver you call. In Princetown there are already enough boom boxes and large-car stereos in use that I have learned to avoid certain corners at certain times of the day.

“Is this heaven?” asked one of the ballplayers in the film
Field of Dreams
.

“No, it’s Iowa,” was the reply.

This sweet island in the Caribbean is not heaven
either; it is only St. Cecilia. But one does get the sense that the people who live here still believe they are to be about the business of replicating heaven if they can.

I do not claim to know all the politics or all the social and cultural mores in St. Cecilia. I do not understand all those things in my own country, and I have lived there all my life. I only know what I read in the government book and in the papers and what I have learned in a few visits.

What I sense is that people in St. Cecilia still believe their government should get up in the morning and be about the business of trying to make people’s lives better. A belief that seems to be shared by the people in the government. What I sense is that people are expected to live out their lives with something resembling civility and grace.

In St. Cecilia there is an earnestness, an idealism,
an authentic sense of concern expressed in the public discourse that is largely missing in the country in which I was born.

Some of the civility here may simply be akin to the kind of civility found in small-town life in our country long ago and may still be found there for all I know. I have been a city boy all my life. Sara says the whole island reminds her of the small town in which she grew up. I have seen her hometown, and it has only about six hundred souls in it. The island has almost ten thousand, not counting those of us who come to visit.

Of course, it seems to me that it is far easier to be civil when the pace is slow and the air is clean and there are no freeways to be stuck on and no malls to work around. And on this island, even with all the people who have moved here over the years, a healthy percentage of the population is either related or grew up with each other. Which does not necessarily lead to civility, but folks here know that they are going to run into everybody again sometime, maybe even a half-dozen times a day.

But it seems to me that something else must be at work here, though I cannot say for certain what it is. It is a place that is filled with small kindnesses and gestures and signs that seem to give evidence of some larger conspiracy, a conspiracy to commit civil society perhaps. Whatever one calls it, I am jealous of it, and I wonder what it would be like to live in the middle of it.

Sometimes I feel as though the people of this island either know something that the rest of us do not or we have forgotten something that they always have remembered. Sometimes, just to remind myself of what they may know and what I am looking for, I take up my corner at the Heptagon and read the newspapers and watch this new world go by.