Sarah and I tried to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory at the IMAX theatre on the way back from Gloucester last weekend. We had gone to Gloucester to see Matt and Kate in their natural summer habitat after having missed their annual party the week before. I am batting .000 with regards to the Gate House party due to a trip last year to Japan and a wedding in Long Island this year.

The Swift house in Gloucester is on the waterfront and is a shell of the former glory of the house that once was on the property. The first main house was demolished in 1972 after about fifty years of fighting with New England storms. There was another small house that once was on the property that was destroyed during The Perfect Storm. So Matt and Kate are staying in the remaining house, the Gate House that used to be the little one at the entrance to the property. When we arrived we couldn’t find people at first but it turned out that folks were at a table by the ocean at the end of a winding grass walkway defined among the grass and sea rubble by a series of stones.

One of Matt’s friends, who is a poet was there with his girlfriend. We got into a nice long debate by the water about whether bicycles are a better mode of city transportation than automobiles for city transportation. The poet was good at presidential impersonations and had a long list of opinions about politics including that George Bush was smart enough to pronounce the word nuclear properly but that he pronounced it newcular to appeal to voters in blue collar jobs despite his very rich boy background. The poet also thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only possible candidate that the DNC would bring as a presidential candidate in 2008.

Kate was worried about her art homework project due Monday where she needed to interpret a story written by a fellow classmate. The story was about a child’s blanket/blanky and the poet gave a full red pen mark-up. He wasn’t fond of it and thought that deceptively anthropomorphizing objects and then later trying to appear clever by revealing that the person is really a beloved object was something that should be beaten out in seventh grade. He gave it a name like fools deception.

The only drawback of the ocean property in the northeast is that it lies near marsh. The mosquitoes are especially fierce and represent a good portion of the variation in the mosquito kingdom. I got a good look at one little mosquito biting my arm and she had yellow racing stripes. Sarah and I slept in a twin bed. In the past this has worked well for us but with the extra half person growing inside of Sarah we kept trying to find a comfortable equilibrium in the bed but were tossing most of the time. At one point of getting bitten we turned on the light and it was like a scene out of a B rated horror movie where worms suddenly come to life after an electric line is left in the swamp or just an epic battle against bugs like Starship Troopers. The bugs were everywhere and the room was filled with a swarm of enemy bugs trying to slowly attack us in our sleep. The mosquitos must have seen us as a welcome treat nicely delivered. I fought them valiantly by swinging a towel at them crushing as many as I could and then went to sleep with Sarah in the bed for 30 minutes before she moved to the other twin bed because I was snoring too loud.

In the morning when we awoke a little after noon we had a Wimbledon breakfast of berries with cream and bacon. It was quite tasty and enjoyable. We thought about flying the kite but there wasn’t any wind. So after a bit Sarah and I took a look at the tide pool that most years had been used as a swimming area but was out of commission because of a combination of low tide and a mysterious fast draining problem. Matt explained that the tide pool is mostly a natural phenomenon where the cold arctic water collects in the rocks to be warmed by the sun. To keep the water in people have plugged the draining points with concrete and rocks. Since every year storms, ice, and the tides batter the pool it develops leaks both in the natural rocks and where the concrete plugs the open holes. This year the leaks are particularly bad and they haven’t had the will to continue plugging them so the pool was empty.

This was fine as Sarah and I were just trying to walk around. We walked down some roads to a lighthouse and a break water and then lay on the break water for a while napping on a flat and wide bed that was comfortable for the two of us. When we returned Kate had been working on her art homework having decided to make a final panel in her interpretation of the blanket story that looked like a child’s drawing.

Sarah and I then tried to attend Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Reading IMAX on the way home. Unfortunately it was sold out but we did manage to get to see it on Monday night instead with Lisa and Dave. It struck me that the movie and most other children’s movies in America was very culturally American. Like Robots it professed the importance and high status results of being an entrepreneur. The best example of this was when Charlie had his Golden ticket in his hand and he decided he didn’t need to visit the factory since someone would pay him money for it. His grandfather’s response to it was that you should never trade a once in a lifetime opportunity for something as ordinary as money. Translation – In America you will be rewarded for being a risk taker and an entrepreneur but people who just work for money live plain and boring lives.