Can We Just Tolerate Other People?

Civility Happens While You Wait in Line

Aug 07, 2026

On the first weekend in August, the rains came. They came with a heavy fog, a driving wind, and Nintendo. On those days, Nobadeer held only seagulls and seals, the landscapers sat in the garage. And town metastasized.

On this cancerous afternoon, I made the mistake of passing close to town and getting caught in the eddy of Range Rovers and wet Jeeps at the Monument. I paused, waved, and waited for one of Connecticut’s largest taxpayers to squeak by. As he passed, he shouted into my window “Rotary!” Had it not been for the traffic, I would have turned around, followed the Nutmeg, and shouted “Monument!” Then we could have had a good old set-to about the traffic laws on Nantucket streets. It would have looked great in the Court Report.

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Alas, I let the moment pass. Instead, I hammered the steering wheel once or twice in Mary Starbuck’s honor. Then, I took Sonic and Knuckles down to look at the comic books, then to search for the seals out in Sconset, before I burrowed them back in their buzzing and beeping house.

It has been a summer of hammering the steering wheel. It started stuck behind a Yahoo with under-lighting letting loose the boom on Main Street. Except, as he was creeping by at five miles an hour over cobblestones, his music reverberated off the walls, caromed off my dashboard and into my jaw. Later, I nearly doored a midnight bicyclist whose cone of righteousness licensed him to ride down the center of Broad Street and through intersections. In my favorite collision of the summer, a beautiful woman, in a luminous white beach cover up,texted and led three children up the middle of India Street and into my stationary front bumper.

She’s not the only one lost in the fog. We have created and reinforced the boundaries around us. Our electronics bubbles us in; we listen to what we want to listen to and read the mutterings of our friends. If you are an islander, you can go from work to the Maddequet Admiralty to home to back to work and have little reason to talk to anyone else, other than to ask “Do you want me to trim the hedge?” Our Plutocrat guests fly to the island, slip into their houses and then drive past the gatehouse on the way to their clubs. We don’t have to talk to anyone outside of our income tax bracket.

From one side of that economic divide, some of our visitors come to Nantucket as if they are flying into Galt’s Gulch. Their credit rating gives them license to be rude and arrogant. They “paid good money” to get here. Their vacation on island isn’t to get away from the heat and humidity of the mainland, but from civility as well. They can call the their sandwich maker a “retard”, husk their corn in the middle of Bartlett’s, and then hustle through the stop signs with a wave. The hedges are trimmed, the tennis court is rolled and it looks good from where they sit.

Islanders have their own cedar and tin seat of superiority. We, after all, “live here.” They will leave in a few weeks and the island will return to “us.” So, we feel entitled to overcharge for brownies and beer, give wrong directions, and just park ourselves for cup of coffee at the Downyflake tables, no matter how long the line is. After all, we have coffee their every day. We deserve it.

It’s easy to see two islands on this one sandbar, and it’s just an excuse to be both rude and right. We are stuck in our own myths and preconceptions; we are right and they are wrong; it only matters who “We” are. So, we stroll towards absolute truths, convinced of our divine goodness. On one island, money conveys righteousness. On the other, bloodlines do.

The rain washes those myths away. The sandbar is too small and too crowded on a weekend in August for the two islands to remain separate. As the scriptures say, On my father’s island, there are many houses. And when the rain comes blowing in, those houses eventually empty into downtown and they form lines. They line up at the Whaling Museum, they line up for the Lily Pulitzer sale, and they line up for ice cream.

It is difficult to love your neighbor at the Juice Bar on a rainy afternoon in August. Even Jesus would have a hard time with the Cos Cob businesswoman who needed three quarts of vanilla “right now.” No doubt, He would want us to love our Connecticut neighbor. But loving our neighbor is easy when you are sitting with them for coffee at the Downyflake or having Mojitos with them at the club. Neighborly love fades when you stand in line; it is too taxing and evanescent an emotion. It darts around like a greenhead, just out of range. Her sunglasses, her tennis bracelet, and her nasty sniping at the scoopers don’t cry out for love, but tolerance.

Tolerance is not the sexiest emotion in the world. It won’t open your heart or screw your courage to the sticking place. It doesn’t carry the heady whiff of righteousness or the physical bear hug of tradition. Tolerance backs up a step, folds its arms, and waits patiently. It put on comfortable shoes, has exact change, and holds its tongue.

Unlike love, tolerance is creative. To tolerate the unsmiling waitress, we need to stand in her shoes. We need to feel the floor of the Stop and Shop where she stocked shelves last night. We need to hear the island quiet that she is used to. We need see ourselves from her sore and sleepless eyes. And, she needs to look up from our eyes, feel herself standing in line with three kids, and listen to their complaining.

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On this small island, we need the creativity and the empathy to step into someone else’s skull and see their world. We have over-filled the island for this first two weeks in August. We back up in the intersections, fill up the waves, and clog up the Juice Bar. It is maddening, but natives and visitors alike stay out here for something other than lines and traffic. Perhaps we stay for the beaches or the moors or the cobblestoned streets or the friends we have made. But we put up with the annoyance in order to get something back.

Eventually, the rain ends. The tees fill up with golfers, the painters get back to work, and we can all take our kids back from Mario and plunk them in the surf. Standing on the dune, looking at the departing clouds, and hearing the rolling surf, it’s good to remember February. August only comes once.

(From 2011)