Is it Over the Bridge?

I love teaching on an island. I get to cross ocean water every day on the way to school and back! It is so beautiful and powerful: sometimes alluring, sometimes threatening. And how cool is it that I teach on an island (lest you forget my opening point after all that poetry)?!

Anyway, I've started to see little glimpses of the fact that people who live on islands are a little different from us main-landers. For one thing, there's this weird phobia amongst some of them about leaving...

One of my seniors told me that she had to drive her mom to Providence that evening for an appointment, because her mom can't stand doing the drive herself.

Yesterday a fellow teacher needed internet access (which she doesn't have at home) in order to take her on-line exam for a correspondence course. Another teacher offered her the use of her home computer. "Is that over the bridge?" the computer-seeking teacher asked.

The other teachers laughed (most of us commute in from the main land), but the headmaster said, "The bridges are like the borders of the world," or something like that. It was kind of an eye-opening experience. This island really is a world of its own. And you can do pretty much everything there - there's great shopping, good restaurants, entertainment... So why should anyone leave?

It makes me wonder how else the island dwellers' psyches have been shaped by living there. I know things have changed me - things like being a Red Sox fan and growing up on Classical Music and such... How would living on an island make a life-long difference?

Anyway, it was a fascinating thought. And now I think I need to get out of this thinking business, and go start the Donald Duck comic book I found at a second-hand store today (it is HARDCOVER with about 12 different stories in it! Wooooooooo!).