What would Lorelai and Luke do?

Guilty pleasure, or life lessons?

Don’t know how, don’t know why, but for the last couple of weeks we’ve been bingeing on the Gilmore Girls. Judge not, lest ye be judged….

In many ways it fits. Stars Hollow is about the same size as Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and aside from some significantly superior shopping options is populated with people who could be our neighbours.

The program centers on the stories of a single mother, her teen-aged daughter, boyfriends, and has a willingness to acknowledge and even celebrate both having sex.

(EDIT: In all seriousness, the whole depiction of sex stands out because we’re living in a time when large chunks of the population (at least in the US) seem determined to drag us all back to the days when Men were Men and Women were subservient. That includes making sex a secret and dirty thing.)

All of this makes the show entertaining and make it feel like real life. Up to a point….

Actually Gilmore Girls is full to the brim with classic American stereotypes, and gleefully steals plot devices and characters from all manner of classic American movies. And although I’m certain more than a few university term papers and theses have been written about it, it’s just fun entertainment when you’re overwhelmed with bigger and more pressing challenges.

Still, at the same time that we were enjoying the trials and tribulations of the Gilmore Girls, a fellow named Vincent Lee did something wonderful over on Twitter. (Just before Elon Musk turned it into X.)

Yes, he tweeted out the whole of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” One chapter in each tweet.

I’m a fan of that book, and as I immediately fell back into the tale, I found something new: suddenly I understand what it is that draws Ishmael to the sea, and more importantly what draws him to the sea that I look out to every morning when I rise.

We live on the edge of the Atlantic ocean. In fact, we can look out of windows on three sides of our house and see the Atlantic in three different directions.

People in Vancouver like to think that they’re living on the edge of the sea, but that’s really a stretch. Until you get to the west side of Vancouver Island you aren’t really looking at the Pacific Ocean. And even when you’re sitting in Tofino you’re seeing a much different body of water - the name “Pacific” tells you something about it.

The Atlantic is different. It is alive. It changes by the minute, as does its colour. Even now, in August, the sense is that it is cold. It’s not really a fun body of water. You don’t see dozens of small sailboats each weekend, and it doesn’t invite you play.

Instead you ask, as did Ishmael, “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?”

If you live here you are inevitably drawn to the sea, you are in awe of the sea, and you very quickly find that the sea becomes part of you.

The fictional Stars Hollow is located somewhere between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harvard University, and New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University. It’s about a two hour drive between the two schools, so an easy jump home for every crisis that emerges. Stars Hollow though is not on the sea, and you can feel that something is lacking. There is a gravitas to sea towns that is lacking once you get inland.

Life is, for lack of better word, thinner when you can’t hear the waves, and can’t feel the wind change direction from hour to hour.

And that, I think, is why we live here.