Provincetown 11

We arrived in Provincetown on June 2 after driving almost straight through. We decided to spend the night in Hyannis and arrive fresh and Rested to P-Town the next morning. This is the first time I've had access to e-mail. I don't have a connection at all in my apartment; I have to walk across the courtyard to the FAWC lounge to use one of their computers for Internet. Frankly, there has been too much to see and do to think about the Internet! But, alas, today I reallized I had not printed out any of my Internet research on the Homestead Strike, which I plan to mention in my novel, so the Internet became a must today.

The town is on the tip of Cape Cod. I have a cozy upstairs apartment on the FAWC (Fine Arts Work Center) grounds. It's an attic apartment in an old Cape Cod house, so the ceiling has an uncountable number of angles. FAWC is a stone's throw from the shore. I'd like to post some photographs, but the computers here don't seem to be set up for disks or memory keys. I'll investigate later and if there's any way to post photos, I certainly will.

The price of rentals and real estate here is astounding. I'm so amazed, just amazed, that I will have the opportunity to stay here for 3 months.

So far the temperatures have been very cool, in the 60's during the day and 50's at night. For two days, it rained.

Provincetown is a dog-friendly town. Everywhere people are walking their four-legged friends and everywhere it is clean because P-Towners are very responsible when it comes to cleaning after their dogs. Buddha and Sweet Pea love the beach. They are just getting wise to the fact that the water is salty (so used are they to drinking out of Ohio rivers and lakes).

On my second day here, Dorothy, who is in charge of the Summer Program here at FAWC gave three of us a tour. She took the other OAC Provincetown resident (the artist), another artist on residency from Maryland, and myself in her car to point out some of the sites. She showed us Norman Mailer's house, and we asked if she'd known him. Yes, she said, she'd known him well, and he'd done a lot for FAWC in the way of giving readings and such. She also showed us Stanley Kunitz's house. Did she know him? Yes, of course, she said. She had helped him in his garden and had been his driver for a number of years.

Imagine.