“Ever heard of Jimi Hendrix?”

Vinalhaven’s theme for its 4th of July parade this year was “Carnival” – a fitting metaphor for our island life in the summertime. The grocery store looks ransacked, or perhaps featured in a game show where contestants run through the aisles throwing groceries into their carts. The town parking lot is a maze of creative parking; horizontal, vertical, parallel and packed in. The single gas station, even at $2.50 a gallon, has a line snaking down Main Street. The over-stimulus is such that I tapped a friend on the shoulder in the post office the other day and thought she was going to fly apart like an over-wound watch. It is a carnival all right. The best one can do is put on a string of beads, try to groove with the flow, and limit your trips downstreet.

Being the mother to four no-longer-children, ages 15 to 23, I get a lot of experience in the summer groove mode. Among them they import and attract lots of youthful energy that, if it could be harnessed, could probably do away with the nuclear power industry in this country. We islanders can gripe about summer with the ferries loaded like cattle cars, the fog, the frenzy, but, there is one thing we have to admit: the young summer crowd, mixed with our own island youth, sure are pretty to look at and fun to be with.

Well, okay, about 72 percent of the time they are.

That other 28 percent is good for you too, better than cod liver oil. There is a Buddhist saying (forgive my loose translation) to the effect that “if you stub your toe on a rock, give thanks for the opportunity to be mindful…” That is what it is like being surrounded by young people.

I’ll give you an example. My second son, due home from college in New York State, left a message at two a.m. that they were “headed out and would make the last boat.” I checked boats for two days and a lot of college kids came to the island, but none I recognized as my own. On the third day, I checked the ferry again. Yes indeed, there was my son with a couple of other young men, and it looked as if they had recruited half of the occupants of the ferry into carrying their gear off the boat. The scene in the parking lot was suddenly like 101 Dalmatians; a burgeoning box of puppies. Siblings came pouring forth on skateboard, bike, and brakes-squealing Volvo. Old friends came in a swarm of hurtling car bumpers and other passengers to join in the melee. There was chest thumping and whoops, “hey, hey, heys!” and bedlam. In my new middle-aged self-assuredness I yelled above the crowd, “Ummm, I was just on my way to a yoga class. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Darrell, the generous provider of my son’s ride, pops up with, “Cool! Yoga? I’m coming too!” A little dazed, I head off not with my prodigal son, but with a deeply tanned, long-haired, slightly sweaty and disheveled young man.

It is not like I go to yoga three days a week. It is more like three days a year in a good year. It is one of the many cultural bennies of summer that some tanned, gorgeous, lithe beauty will arrive from California and offer us islanders a three-day yoga class. After a sedentary winter eating bon-bons and whoopee pies it is a ‘hope-springs-eternal’ stab at some flexibility. Fortunately, most of the other women are in the same shape I am and we are very encouraging of one another. The class thus far had been, “if you can’t touch your toes, then grab your shins, and if you can’t grab your shins, just rest your hands on your knee caps.”

So, in I walk with the young bohemian. After a few warm up breaths, things aren’t quite vigorous enough for Darrell, so he moves into some contortions of his own. The rest of us are still trying to focus on the inhalation and exhalation. Pretty soon Darrell is doing a one-handed handstand with his legs perfectly straight out to the side, breathing like a python trying to swallow a small deer. Our teacher is impressed, and she, too, performs the same trick and attempts to take Darrell a “little further in his practice.” The rest of us are still reaching for our knees. Then, suddenly, in a moment of sheer exuberance, Darrell hears the now familiar squeal of Volvo brake pads, jumps up, pries open the window of the third floor studio, and yodels out to his compadres. That was the first day of summer.

It is not as if we don’t try to harness their energy, believe me, we do. I think it must be a little like lion training. My neighbor advises; “feed them and see them as labor.” That is a great idea except they eat like locusts. And they are goofballs. We have been building a house for god knows how many years, and there is plenty of lugging and hauling to do. I asked my youngest son if he and his four friends could carry chimney stones up to the house site; then I would feed them lunch. Thinking that five friends could haul a dozen stones pretty quickly, I started opening cans of tuna and laying out the bread. Watching out the kitchen window I see one boy sitting on a litter with a stone in his lap being carried by the four others up the hill. The five of them are making up a rap song, “oh Lawd, yo big, bad mama make me work so hawd,” and they are cracking up laughing. When they were finally done, they woofed the sandwiches, a whole watermelon, a bag of chips, asked if they could go to town for an ice cream, and maybe a swim at the quarry… “Go! Go! Go!” I say.

My daughter has outgrown her role as Wendy, the caregiver of the Little Lost Boys, in our Peter Pan lifestyle. This year she rented in town with three other painfully beautiful young women. Her generation could teach us old dogs a lot of new tricks. At her house the young men stop by to make them dinner. We’re not talking spaghetti either. These kids have potlucks that include seared swordfish sushi and a very nice white wine. Three of the four young women are headed off to college in a month and each is working two or three jobs trying to squirrel away money. Their household is an intense yet delicate reality show with a deep caring and acceptance of one another. I am honored to be privy to their lives and so admire their courage, mingled with uncertainty, as they head out into today’s world.

My 15-year-old recently had half a dozen kids over for a campout in which they were still up to greet the dawn. I asked this bleary-eyed son the next day, “What did you do all night???” His answer, “We talked about old times…” This same child recently asked me if I had “ever heard of Jimi Hendrix?” and my oldest included me in a solemn ceremony involving the right sequence of salt, Tequila, and lime. By some evolutionary magic, these kids were born “in the moment” and we adults were “born yesterday.”

The young people in our lives are exhausting and exhilarating, but where would we be without them? We can’t really maintain, lug and haul, control and create our island existence without their energy. I am never sure how they get the things done, but they do. The dock gets fixed, they patch together boats (at about the same rate as they break them), and they make us laugh at ourselves. They help us aged hippies navigate this increasingly crazy world. They study their politics, read great books, listen to thought provoking music, and educate each other. They have been out in the world. They are passionate about everything they do. They make us sentimental for our own young lives and our early dreams of life on an island.